Jul 8, 2021
Marianne Dawson Alexander started working in outdoor education in 1995 at a YMCA summer camp in Ontario, leading two-week canoe trips in Temagami. From 2000-2005 she worked for Outward Bound Canada in Ontario and on the west coast of Canada, mostly leading hiking and canoeing course with youth at risk.
She came to NOLS in 2004, taking a River Instructors Course. Before the course, she had canoed and kayaked a lot but had never rafted. She quickly fell in love with rafting and enjoyed transferring those skills back to fine-tuning her white water canoe skills. She loved teaching students, especially young women and men, that you did not have to be huge to get a 2 thousand pound boat to go where you want it to go.
As you will learn, she met her husband, Steve, on her NOLS Instructors Course. Shortly after the course, he recruited her to work with him at St Lawrence university’s Adirondack semester. At St Lawrence, they fell in love living and teaching in a yurt village in the Adirondacks. The next several years, they would split their time leading outdoor semesters for St. Lawrence and the other half living in the Tetons working NOLS backcountry ski and snowboard courses between heading over to India to work a few rafting and hiking courses.
Marianne is currently living in
Ottawa and works as the department head of Student Services and
Special Education and a guidance counsellor at Ridgemont High
School.
In this episode:
[3:34] Marianne Alexander shares her most memorable moment in the southwest, where she got into an encounter with a bear along with her camp. Later on, that same bear injured one of the members of another camp on the other side.
[25:38] Marianne tells us about a time when she, along with Jeff, Mark Holloway, and some of the students, got low on food and survival resources. While paddling the Bonnet Plume River, her instructor team started running out of food; another private canoeing group came to them and offered all their leftover food. On their way back, they faced another challenge. A headwind kicked up, causing them to make extremely slow progress downriver. But eventually, they made it all together with safety.