Mar 4, 2021
Like many outdoor educators’ travel has been a constant theme in the life of our guests today. I'm thrilled to have Heather Hamilton join us on the show. Heather has always had a hard time answering, “where are you from?” – as she has lots of places that feel like home but was born in Wichita, Kansas, and has traveled a fair amount for a Kansas kid. But after finishing University at CU-Boulder, she bounced around the west a fair bit, did some international travels to Costa Rica, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Mexico, etc., and eventually ended up living in New Zealand for a bunch of years. While living in New Zealand, she traveled extensively throughout Australia and Indonesia, as well. And now her base is in Hawaii. She worked in outdoor education roughly 2000-2013. After her time as the Operations Manager for the NOLS NZ Branch, she shifted to Hawaii and chased after more judging work with professional surfing events. Heather was doing that as well in NZ while still working for NOLS but decided to mix things up a bit and go after some surfing dreams. When she first started with NOLS, she was a river instructor - primarily white water kayaking and then migrated into canoeing, hiking, sea-kayaking, etc as most of us do.
In this episode: