Kallie Kurtz
At The Mountaineers, leadership in the backcountry has always meant more than technical skill. It means understanding people, context, and the full range of factors that influence safety, decision making, and group dynamics in outdoor places.
The Backcountry Behavioral Health Leadership Development Subseries is designed to build that understanding. This three-part series brings behavioral health into the core of outdoor leadership, reframing it as inseparable from overall health, joy, and safety in the backcountry.
Our Understanding the Terrain seminar introduces participants to the Behavioral Health Conditions Model and explores how biology, brain structure, lived experience, social context, and environment interact to shape behavior. Drawing on neuroscience and human evolution, this seminar examines why emotions and behavioral responses like fear, joy, attachment, withdrawal, and cooperation exist, what purpose they serve, and why they remain essential for adventure, survival, and group safety, even if they feel disruptive.
Our Mapping the Mind in the Outdoors seminar builds practical recognition skills around behavioral health conditions as they appear in the field. Participants will develop a foundational understanding of anxiety, depression, trauma, stress related conditions, personality patterns, substance use, different cortexes, psychosis, and acute mental health crises. Our focus during the seminar will be on distinguishing distress, dysfunction, and danger in remote environments while accounting for cognitive load, group dynamics, and collective nervous system regulation.
Our Navigating the Storm seminar centers on response across the full behavioral health continuum. Using the ROOT Framework (Recognize, Observe, Orient, Take Action), participants will build skills in prevention, preparation, incident response, and post-incident support. This session provides leaders with trauma informed, neuroscience-based tools for assessment, stabilization, communication, and decision making. Participants will practice grounding and co-regulation techniques, refine crisis protocols, and explore the full behavioral health continuum from prevention and preparation to intervention and post incident care.
Behavioral health is not an add on – it is a core component of leadership, joy, safety, and care in the backcountry. This subseries equips outdoor leaders and community members with the knowledge, language, and practical tools to respond to behavioral health with the same clarity and competence applied to physical injury or environmental risk.
Registration for the subseries is open. We invite you to register for any and all of these seminars today!
Backcountry Behavioral Health Subseries
Understanding the Terrain: Foundations of Behavioral Health in the Backcountry
Kallie Kurtz | January 13
Mapping the Mind in the Outdoors: Behavioral Health Symptoms and Conditions
Kallie Kurtz | January 20
Navigating the Storm: Response & Intervention, implementing Behavioral Health in the Backcountry
Kallie Kurtz | January 27
