One year of unleashing your most extraordinary self.
What if you could spend a year learning how to live skillfully, simply, and fully?
How to live in harmony with nature.
How to meditate and achieve peace of mind.
How to develop a new relationship with your body and how it moves through the world.
The ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship shares skills that will help you become a person capable of fully nurturing yourself and the people you love.
This is an opportunity for one or two people to step out of ordinary life and immerse themselves in an extraordinary education. It’s ideal for a couple who wants to learn together.
And importantly, we have an on-site apartment available this year. That means you can take a balanced approach — instead of living outdoors year-round, you can take on the challenges of ReWildU but come home to a bath, internet, and a refrigerator. Our aim is to make this apprenticeship available to people who would have to work during their program. That could mean a job at the local food cooperative, or right next door at our neighbor’s organic farm. If you already have a job where you can work remotely, this might be the perfect opportunity for you to embark on a year of learning and adventure while still being able to keep your job.
With Kenton as your guide, you will learn wilderness skills, train your body, steady your mind, develop practical self-reliance, deepen your relationship with the natural world, and learn how to help others do the same.
Along the way, you may discover that the real thing you’re learning is how to be human.
This is not just a wilderness course
The fields and forests are our classrooms, but the goal is bigger than wilderness skills.
Modern life gives us exceptional conveniences. It also gives us a remarkable dependence on systems we rarely think about.
What happens when the power goes out?
What happens when you don’t know the answer?
What happens when someone needs your help?
What happens when the technology stops working?
What happens when you are simply tired of consuming and want to know how to make, grow, repair, protect, teach, and provide?
What You'll Learn
As you become stronger, healthier, and more capable, peaceful, playful, and resilient, you’ll learn to embrace the gifts of discomfort and find the treasures waiting for you.
The ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship is about developing all of these qualities.
Your year will draw from several different areas of training woven together to give you a holistic education.
Wilderness
Fire, shelter, water, navigation, tracking, foraging, primitive skills, weather awareness, and the many small skills that make the natural world feel less like an obstacle and more like home.
Body
Martial arts, grappling, self-defense, strength, mobility, fitness, movement, physical awareness, and the ability to remain effective when you’re tired, uncomfortable, or under pressure.
Mind
Meditation, mindfulness, attention, emotional regulation, stillness, resilience, and the ability to meet difficult experiences with calm poise.
Connection
Nature observation, awareness, ecology, and the deeper experience of becoming a participant in the living world rather than merely an observer of it.
Self-reliance
Food growing and preservation, practical skills, emergency preparedness, household resilience, problem solving, basic skills for living with fewer conveniences, and ways to help your family or community remain capable when circumstances become difficult.
Community and Teaching
Communication, leadership, cooperation, mentoring, working with youth, facilitating experiences, and learning how to teach the things you have learned.
Fun
While there’s a lot to learn, fun is of utmost importance. Sessions with Kenton will include games, adventures in nearby wilderness areas, and sometimes just sledding down the hills past the horses who will give us quizzical looks as we speed by =)
Upholding the tradition of challenging your new skills that has always been a part of ReWildU, you’ll undertake “gauntlet challenges”, where we put your skills to the test under some of the toughest conditions we can find. Though these challenges are difficult, they often end up being the parts of the program that students look forward to most and remember with fondness. This is the stuff that campfire tales are made of.
Residential Options
The ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship includes the opportunity to rent our on-site apartment. This means you can maintain your normal life, including work, while you live on campus and learn new skills. You’ll also have the yurt and stream-side camp available when you want more nature immersion. We can base your learning time around your work schedule.
There is something powerful about waking up each day in the same place where your education is happening.
You don’t simply attend a class. You live it. You cook, sleep, train, and practice right here at ReWildU.
There is also the possibility of nearby work opportunities, like an organic CSA right next door.
Part of the ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship is Teaching
One of the most important parts of the program is learning how to pass skills on to others.
Throughout the year, apprentices will have opportunities to practice leading activities, working with groups, teaching skills, facilitating nature experiences, and helping others learn.
This program is for people who want to lead, mentor, and create meaningful experiences for youth, families, and communities.
People who can carry what they have learned into their own lives and, eventually, into the lives of others.
Who is this for?
This is for someone who feels that something is missing from the way modern life is usually lived. Someone who feels that too much comfort is stealing something precious from them. Someone who wants to be capable of protecting, nourishing, and inspiring those they care for.
You may be looking for a radical life change.
You may want to become a wilderness educator, or develop practical skills for your family and community. You may want to deepen your meditation practice or become a skilled martial artist.
You may simply have an enduring sense that human beings were meant to be more capable, more connected, and more involved in their own lives.
You don’t need to fit a particular mold, but you do need curiosity, humility, a willingness to learn, and a genuine desire to grow as a human being.
A Small Community of Apprentices
This will never be a program for dozens of people at a time.
The ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship is intentionally small. This year we will take on either a single apprentice, a couple, or two people who want to take the program together.
That means much more personal attention and the opportunity to develop a genuine relationship with the people you are learning alongside.
One year. Many directions.
There is no single version of what a Guardian Apprentice ultimately becomes.
One person may go on to teach wilderness skills. Another may work with children, or simply bring a radically different level of capability and resilience into their family life.
Another may develop their own nature-based practice or educational program.
The point is not to turn everyone into the same kind of person.
The point is to help each apprentice to become more fully themselves.
The Deeper Purpose
There is a stream that runs through the ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship program.
Discovering and becoming your deepest Self.
This is about learning the power of listening, of finding your deepest wells of inner strength, of recognizing that as you free yourself of many of civilization’s shackles, you can embrace a profoundly different way of living in the world.
Interested?
To apply for the ReWildU Guardian Apprenticeship, contact Kenton at rewilduniversity@gmail.com, and he can answer any questions you have and provide additional information.
Tuition for the 2027 program is $32,000 USD, or 55k for a couple. Various tuition payment plans are available. We are taking a maximum of two apprentices this year. If you have children, a family apprenticeship is possible.
If these tuition prices are not feasible for you, contact Kenton about the possibility of financial aid. Our on-site apartment is available for an additional fee.
Get in touch for the learning adventure of a lifetime!
Contact Kenton: rewilduniversity@gmail.com
ReWild University
Learn to live skillfully. Live deeply. Rewild.