MOUNTAINS & WATERS PILGRIMAGE

“Mountains and waters right now are the expression of ancient buddhas.” – Eihei Dogen (from the ‘Mountains & Waters Sutra’, 1240)

Following the course of an ancient river, whose primordial gestures have carved a 3,000 foot deep canyon and river 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, passes and majestic river 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 is 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 landscape. Our journey is inspired in name and spirit by 13th-century Zen philosopher Eihei Dogen’s “Mountains & Waters Sutra,” which expresses the ancient wisdom of these primordial beings of the land.

First called Ahwahnee (“the Creator’s Mouth”), Yosemite Valley was sculpted over eons by the births and deaths of glaciers, and tended for millennia by human hands. It is a place shaped by deep time. It has been homeland and habitat for countless generations of human and other-than-human folk. And it is an expressive and expansive place to practice clearing away the dust from our senses, cultivating qualities of peace and presence, and feeling our way back into an embodied awareness of the animacy that surrounds us everywhere in this living, breathing world.

Program Itinerary

This point-to-point journey covers ~30 miles, with overall elevation gains of +6,600 feet and losses of 7,400 feet. We will stay within an elevation range of 4,200-8,700 feet during the journey. The last two hiking days are considered strenuous. Please review the details below as well as our backpacking eligibility criteria. Feel free to email us or schedule a call (see bottom of this page) if you have questions about your ability to participate.

• Day 1| Meet at 3pm in Yosemite National Park to camp one night at a “backpackers campground” to adjust to elevation and begin to connect as a cohort. After setting up camp, we will share a dinner by campfire with orientation and introductions.

  • Planned mileage for the day: 0

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: 0

• Day 2 | Drop some vehicles at our end point (White Wolf) and shuttle back to the trailhead. Begin our hike from Toulumne Meadows, reaching the banks of the Toulumne River and enjoying swimming holes and waterfalls as we descend into the Grand Canyon of the Toulumne.

  • Planned mileage for the day: ~6 miles

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: +0 / -800 ft

• Day 3 | Backpacking and immersing in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, we’ll have abundant waterfall and river time, and space to connect with ourselves, each other and the landscape.

  • Planned mileage for the day: ~6 miles

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: +0 / -2,000 ft

• Day 4 | Backpacking and immersing in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, we’ll have abundant waterfall and river time, and space to connect with ourselves, each other and the landscape.

  • Planned mileage for the day: ~7 miles

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: +400 / -1,200 ft

• Day 5 | Beginning the strenuous ascent out of the Canyon, we will camp in the forest with expansive views of the Canyon and Hetch Hetchy valley.

  • Planned mileage for the day: ~6 miles

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: +2,300 / -700 ft

• Day 6 | Completing the steep, two-day hike up and out of the Canyon, we will conclude our pilgrimage with a closing circle and integration practices. We will hike out at White Wolf Campground, and will retrieve any remaining vehicles at Toulumne Meadows by 5pm. Please note that if you want to enjoy one more night in Yosemite National Park, you are entitled to camp in one of the “backpackers campgrounds” for this night as part of our wilderness permit.

  • Planned mileage for the day: ~5 miles

  • Planned elevation gain/loss: +1,300 / - 0 ft

Meet your guides

COHORT 2: Guiding this journey are three core Wildtender guides: Soto Zen priest Mike Smith will offer grounded, contemplative practice shaped by years of monastic training and wilderness experience; forest therapy guide and breathwork facilitator Ali Goodman will invite us into deeper belonging with the more-than-human world; and wilderness guide and advocate Bryan Goldberger will share naturalist perspectives rooted in the ecology and wild wonder of California.

Mike Smith

Mike is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi. He lived in the Ventana Wilderness as a monk at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery where he was shuso, or head monk, in the fall of 2024. Mike also served as the Director of San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center temple. He’s a devout backpacker and brings to Wildtender pilgrimages a love of the untamed that stretches back to his time as a young waterman growing up in coastal Connecticut. He’s been lucky enough to explore on foot the islands of Hawai’i, the Inca Trail, the Cascades, the Oregon coast, and many National Parks. You can find him walking about Big Sur, the Sierras, and Santa Cruz.

Ali Goodman

Raised among the mountains and waters of Northern California, Ali has always felt profoundly at home in the outdoors. While studying with Wildtender at the Esalen Institute in 2022, she began nurturing reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world and found a deep sense of both inner and outer belonging.

Informed by her own experience living with chronic pain and illness, Ali is dedicated to creating accessible, inclusive spaces. She is a breathwork facilitator and a forest therapy guide, offering gatherings centered on connection, creativity, healing, and play. She calls Big Sur home and can often be found heel-clicking her way toward a nearby body of water.

Ali is a certified Wilderness First Responder.

BRYAN GOLDBERGER

A lifelong wilderness seeker, Bryan has worked as a professional hiking guide in Big Sur since 2018, and with Wildtender since 2021, honing his passion and skills for reconnecting people with the wild. With a background in Biology, Bryan combines scientifically-based thinking with barely-constrained awe at the wonders of the natural world. Believing that the land is our greatest teacher, Bryan is an avid naturalist and student of the ecology and natural history of California. He works within his community to advocate for environmental stewardship, maintain trails, and increase wildfire mitigation awareness. Bryan is an Eagle Scout, a Wilderness First Responder, and an enthusiastic nerd about minimalist backpacking skills and philosophy.

COHORT 1 (This group is full; please register for Cohort 2 or email us to join the waitlist): Guiding this journey are three primary guides: eco-somatic practitioner and Wildtender guide Ariel Johnson will invite us to re-inhabit our animal bodies on the earth; writer and religious scholar Erik Davis will offer earthy, sensate meditations tuned to inner journeys and outer encounters; and Wildtender co-founder Fletcher Tucker will share cross-cultural perspectives to awaken kinship with the living world, ourselves, and each other.

Fletcher Tucker

Wildtender Co-Founder Fletcher was raised by the foggy redwood ravines and fragrant chaparral bluffs of the Esselen tribal territory now known as Big Sur, California. Fletcher is a lifelong student of natural history, an ancestral skills practitioner, devotee of trail-craft and minimalist backpacking, an experienced teacher of adults and children, and a multidisciplinary artist.

Fletcher’s inner work includes ongoing exploration in Zen and Taoist practices/philosophy; over a decade of study in the Gestalt lineage of Esalen Institute co-founder Dick Price; and engagement with the Earth-reverent, spiritual practices of his own Celtic and Nordic ancestors.

Fletcher is a Wilderness First Responder.

Ariel Johnson

Ariel Johnson is an embodiment facilitator specializing in trauma-informed somatic practices. As a guide with Wildtender, Ariel supports participants to meaningfully immerse in the California wild, and to cultivate deeper relationships with the broader web of kinfolk. A practitioner of meditation and mindfulness practices, she is a dedicated student of Gestalt Awareness Practice in the lineage of Christine Price, as well as grief tending with Francis Weller. With extensive training in ballet and modern dance, yoga (E-RYT 500), and Gyrotonic Level 1, she helps students cultivate greater presence and intuition in their connections with self, community, and the earth-body. Ariel is a Wilderness First Responder.

Growing up in Japan, Washington, and California, Ariel inherited from her father a deep love of the natural world through camping and hiking. Now living with her family in Pacific Grove, California, she finds joy in studying natural history, literature, and Japanese tea ceremony.

Erik Davis

Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019). He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times.

He graduated from Yale University in 1988 and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com). In 2022, he co-founded the Alembic, a Berkeley center for meditation, movement, citizen neuroscience, and visionary culture.  

REGISTRATION

Cohort 2: Registration is open

Cohort 1: has filled, but we are still accepting scholar applications through June 15. Email us to join the waitlist for this group.

Sliding-Scale Program Tuition

$1,550 – Supported Rate (covers a portion of the cost of your program)
$1,950 – Sustainer Rate (covers the cost of your program)
$2,350 – Helper Rate (covers the cost of your program and contributes some financial support for another)
$2,750 – Benefactor Rate (covers the cost of your program, contributes generously to the financial support of another, and supports Wildtender’s ongoing organizational capacity and stability)

For more transparency into our pricing, and some guidance for how to decide where you fall on the sliding scale, please see our registration page.

Further scholarship funds are available for Wildtender tuition; if interested, please see more details and apply here.

Payment plans are also available; please email us to inquire.

Other Information

• Essential Eligibility Criteria for Backpacking Programs

• Frequently Asked Questions

• Previous Pilgrimage Testimonials

• Terms & Conditions (including registration and cancellation terms, and program requirements)

Photos from past Pilgrimages

Photos by Brandon Scott Herrell

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