Pathways Newsletter

The 2025 season is my second with MCC. I’m a senior crew leader, so I should have the answers, right? 

Our first Leadership Development Program training hitch in Hells Canyon told me otherwise. Like our project partner advised us, the trail was spotty and hard to find. We sewed a broken backpack at mile one got quite lost at mile two, rattled at by rattlesnakes while taping up blisters, and hurled our packs over giant ponderosa pines in the home stretch. When we finally made it to camp, it was absolutely gorgeous. Basalt layers behind us, and distant elk roaming high alpine prairies in front of us. There was only one problem: no water. The leaders looked to me, where was it? The map showed that water is here, but it wasn’t. I swallow my panic and put my boots back on.

We did the only thing we could do: we kept walking. It was quiet. The air around us was vacant and still. But thirty minutes later, one of the leads said “shhhhhhhhhh, do you hear that?”. Birds were singing. We noticed the bushes were more green instead of brown. We investigated the drainage and we noticed a trickle! Water! A natural spring! It was not big enough to gather water for our filter. We did the only thing we could do. We dug out the trickling spring and widened it into a viable source. After finishing, we jumped and hooray’ed as the birds above us continued to sing. Basking in our success, we set up camp, hoisted up the bear hang, and ate dinner under the April stars.

That first day in Hell’s Canyon, I learned that leadership is not all answers, directions, and plans. When the day bends in a direction you don’t expect (sometimes over and over again), leadership is about courage. It’s the courage to show you don’t have total control of every moving part, but the strength to take redirections in stride. Leading, in my eyes, is a constant stream of making the next right decision. 

What I am gaining from my Senior Crew Leader AmeriCorps term with MCC is a place to live through leadership. In our Leadership Development Program, we get space to not only learn and contemplate leadership, but to practice it. To go through the program a second time, with hindsight from my previous leader season, and with added responsibility of facilitation, my leadership methodology became clear to me. I hold space in the back of my mind for things to go awry, I instill as much trust as I can in the people around me, and I do my best to empower them to speak up about decisions. With this practice, I am grounded in knowing the group has the tools to do the next right thing and keep moving forward.

With MCC, I am continually tested by things going differently than I expected. But through these trials, I have gained perspective on how to show up for the people I support in any unpredictable circumstance I find myself in. To have been given space to hone these skills in practice is invaluable to me. As I move into a professional career, I will take a developed leadership practice and methodology that grounds my decision-making process wherever I go next. For this trust in my leadership practice, I thank MCC and the wilderness for giving me two seasons of being both in awe and challenged by my surroundings and circumstances.