Wildtender offers immersive, educational wilderness programs that cultivate kinship with the natural world, embody earth-based wisdom traditions, nurture authenticity & wholeness of self, engender meaningful community, and foster ecological stewardship.

Upcoming Programs

ENCOUNTERING THE ANIMATE WORLD
Hiking and Animism in the Big Sur Wild

Esalen Institute • Big Sur, CA

AUGUST 17–21, 2026

The Big Sur wilderness lives and breathes, listens, and speaks. Beneath ancient redwood trees, a shimmering creek journeys toward the sea. In the oak woodland, a polyphony of birds sings to the rising sun. Fog dances across chaparral bluffs, caressing sagebrush and sandstone cliffs. Every cove, meadow, and forest of this biodiverse landscape is alive with presences embodying agency, awareness, and beinghood.

Join us for five days of immersion in animism’s deeper, more ancient relational reality. Through mindful hiking on Big Sur’s trails — Esselen tribal lands — sustained time in the wild, and playful tuning of awareness, we will cultivate our attention and intuition to begin to see beyond modernity’s myopic view. Rather than approaching animism as belief, we will explore it as practice — a patient, embodied turning toward the living land as companion and teacher.

MOUNTAINS & WATERS PILGRIMAGE
Yosemite Backpacking Journey

YOSEMITE, CA

COHORT 1: AUGUST 31 - SEPTEMBER 5, 2026

COHORT 2: SEPTEMBER 1 - 6, 2026

Following the course of an ancient river, whose primordial gestures have carved a 3,000 foot deep canyon between even more ancient mountains, we will walk with intention to remember our own timeless kinship within the more-than-human-world. Immersed in the fields, forests, ravines, lakes, passes and peaks of the “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne” (ancestral lands of the Miwok Peoples), in the heart of Yosemite, we will backpack in beauty for five days with an intimate group (up to 12 participants + 3 guides). This pilgrimage will be devoted to reweaving our pan-ancestral threads of kinship and belonging to the Earth and our wild relations. Present-centered, spacious, silent hiking will be our primary practice as we journey thirty miles through this sacred and majestic landscape.

EARTH-BODY
An Eco-Somatic Backpacking Journey and Retreat

Big Sur, CA

October 13–18, 2026

Rooted in the Gestalt traditions of Esalen and the emergent field of eco-somatics, our four-day backpacking journey will guide us through the wilds of Big Sur—Esselen tribal territory—in an immersive exploration of belonging, awareness, and interconnection, followed by a weekend of retreat and integration at Esalen Institute. While trekking through awe-inspiring wilderness, we will engage in somatic practices that reawaken our felt kinship with the natural world. Embracing slowness and spaciousness, we will attune to gravity, breath, and the sensuous aliveness of place. Silent hiking, intuitive movement, meditation, and earth-based ritual will dissolve the false boundary between self and landscape. Exploring embodiment as an intimate community, we will move beyond notions of individual self-care to a lived experience of healing as relational and ecological. Through this retreat, we step into a different rhythm—one guided by the living world around and within us. As we listen with our whole bodies, we begin to sense the reciprocity woven into all things. What emerges is not just connection but remembering—a return to a relationship as ancient as our true body: the Earth.

WHILE THE VEIL IS THIN
Autumn Ritual with Land, Ancestry & Spirit

Esalen Institute • Big Sur, CA

October 26 - 30, 2026

For thousands of years, autumnal holidays such as Samhain, Hallowe’en, and Vetrnætr have served as ceremonial foundations — connecting pre-modern peoples to landscape, ancestors, and ritual time. Many cultures believe “the veil thins” during this time, letting enchantment flood back into our world. The time is rife with opportunities to renew sacred relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and beings seen and unseen.

As the deciduous trees draw inward to direct energy into their roots, we too may feel drawn to our deeper inner worlds. The Big Sur wilderness — Esselen Tribal territory — is a fertile habitat for mind and spirit, and a potent domain for ritual to support transformation during this liminal season. Approaching the landscape as our teacher and guide, we will engage with the natural world in an embodied ecological context and explore the mythological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of land connectedness.

THE PLANTS WHO KNOW US
Traditions of Botanical Kinship

Esalen Institute • Big Sur, CA

November 16 - 20, 2026

For hundreds of thousands of years, plants have been humanity’s greatest allies, shaping culture in material and spiritual ways. Across the Northern Hemisphere, a shared cohort of plants has profoundly influenced human existence, providing sustenance, medicine, textiles, and more. Honored as wise relatives, they carry mythic and spiritual significance across diverse cultures, forming a thread of kinship connecting our ancestors across continents and histories. Though modernity has painfully estranged us from the expansive web of relationality that our ancestors shared with the more-than-human-world, we can reclaim our “inalienable belonging to the earth community,” in the words of Joanna Macy. Meeting our botanical kin with curiosity and intention is a gesture toward restoring this enchanted ecological paradigm.

WILD PILGRIMAGE
Backpacking Journey to Esalen

Big Sur, CA • ESALEN

Spring 2027

In the mountains east of Esalen, an enchanting, ecologically diverse, and psycho-spiritually fertile wilderness awaits. Over four nights and five days, we will engage in a contemporary form of pilgrimage, backpacking as reverent seekers through these ancestral lands of the Esselen Tribe, now known as the Big Sur backcountry. Our journey will conclude at the coastal grounds of Esalen Institute with a weekend of reflection and integration.

Since time immemorial, people have taken time away from the patterns and demands of daily life to walk with intention on sacred trails — pursuing embodied spiritual wisdom, expansion, and community. In our modern era of profound ecological degradation and severance from place-based ways of life, wilderness pilgrimage is a powerful practice for restoring relationship with the Earth and the depths of our shared humanity.

WILD DHARMA
Zen Backpacking Pilgrimage to Tassajara

Big Sur, CA • Tassajara

Spring 2027

Join Wildtender on the newest manifestation of our oldest (and most beloved) offering: a wild Zen backpacking pilgrimage through the Big Sur backcountry (ancestral lands of the Esselen People), concluding with a three-night stay at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

Following in the philosophical footsteps of the ancient, hermetic Zen sages, we will turn to the mountains in pursuit of a wild Dharma (timeless Buddhist wisdom) that is embodied and expressed by boulders, grasses, trees, and all aspects of the wild landscape. Until we reach the Tassajara monastery, the wilderness will serve as our zendo (place of practice), where refined Zen rituals will take on feral forms. We will sit in meditation beside creeks and atop high ridges, backpack in mindful silence, forage wild plants for tea ceremonies at camp, and reflect on Buddhist poetry and texts amidst the blooming wildflowers of Spring.