ABOUT US

“Roo” Ruth Wharton

Deeply rooted in earth, body, ceremony and a long lineage of guides from the School of Lost Borders, Roo (they/them) offers an abundance of love and fierce insight to those Roo guides and mentors. Beginning to guide wilderness rites of passage at the age of 21, Roo’s experience spans over two decades, supporting well over 1,000 people of all ages through initiation practices.

As a licensed professional counselor, wilderness therapist and guide, play therapist, and wilderness first responder, Roo has worked in wilderness programs, teen centers, counseling and crisis centers, schools, indigenous communities, and private practice settings supporting a variety of populations in meaningful life passages. Roo also founded and developed both the Women’s Fast and Queer Quest at the School of Lost Borders. Roo is deeply committed to offering BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ guide trainings each year at Wild Mountain.

Being gender expansive and having a strong focus on social justice, Roo is on the path of creating safer, more inclusive, and accessible space for more people. Roo continues to guide, offer training and mentorship in the wild mountains of Colorado and around the world. Traveling to support communities cross culturally, Roo is continually learning from diverse landscapes and people inspired by our differences, earth based common threads, and shared humanity.

Praveen Mantena

A world traveler and cross-cultural nomad since childhood, Praveen (he/him) comes from an upbringing in Asia and the Middle East before calling America home. A life’s passion for guiding wilderness rites of passage was preceded by wide-ranging and eye-opening stints in the military, academia, the corporate/start-up world, and narrative art photography before the ceremony came calling. He currently coaches, advises and mentors the leadership teams of start-up businesses and non-profit organizations in the principles of conscious and inclusive leadership. Praveen’s own journey in wilderness rites of passage first began with guiding programs for the School of Lost Borders, before transitioning to adapting and evolving the ceremony into both broader and more specialized contexts. He is committed to bridging the timeless wisdom of the greater natural world with the sensibilities and challenges of our contemporary times, and finding one’s own courage, passion and guidance through it as a community leader.

Pedro McMillan

Pedro (he/him) is a queer elder with more than 20 years of experience with rites of passage work. A father, grandfather and  environmentalist since childhood, he became an early eco-entrepreneur, founding and running a green business for 26 years before leaving to focus on rites of passage work. Being involved in rites of passage work since 1996, he has trained and assisted on many programs at the School of Lost Borders before stepping into the role of guide for the School in 2010. Pedro was also a founder of the Queer Quest and has offered guide trainings since 2016.

Pedro’s love for the land, ceremony and people helps create a safe and loving space for all who are called to the land. He is dedicated to inclusion, accessibility and safety for all.  Pedro brings his wealth of experience and a poetic and passionate heart to this work.

Katheryne Lewis

Like most beings of African descent, Katheryne’s ancestral journey and healing is an ongoing process. Her family was originally brought to the plantations of  Muscogee/ Creek, Yamassee, and Seminole lands (Georgia and Florida), where many of them still remain. Wanting to honor her family’s legacy of determination, hardwork and resilience, a legacy that has afforded Katheryne an abundance of opportunities and gratitude, she finds herself pouring her energy into the work of protecting and empowering our younger generation. Her experience includes a background in conservation and trail work through Montana and Wyoming where she challenged the idea of who was a part of the movement to protect our nonhuman/ beyond human world. Receiving her master's in mental health counseling, she studied Ecopsychology in efforts to help youth foster a sense of environmental stewardship in efforts to build a sense of belonging and purpose within the communities that are often left out of the outdoors narrative. 

She is currently located on the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Clackamas, Cowlitz and many other tribes, commonly known as Portland, OR. There, she teaches graduate level courses on Ecopsychology and wilderness/adventure therapy and operates her own private practice, Rooted Counseling LLC. Her hope is to offer transformative nature based programs for the minoritized communities she predominantly serves as well as family systems looking to explore and heal their own complexities and harmful patterns that show up in all the systems they may occupy wittingly and unwittingly.

While there always feels like a million things to tend to, Katheryne is committed to the soul care of herself and her communities, recognizing that our work may never feel done, but we deserve rest and care, now and always.

Meiko Xavier

Meiko Xavier (he/him) is dedicated to the Trans and Queer community. Meiko has supported others through education, sharing his personal journey, and offering a communal space where transitions in the Trans community are honored and held as sacred. Meiko is a natural guide with twelve years of experience with rites of passage and field work in therapeutic recovery programs. His wealth of knowledge and compassionate heart supports people in finding their own healing through their relationship with the land.

Inspired by his experience with Queer Quest, Meiko co-founded Quest House, a post-operative healing home for Trans folks moving through surgically assisted rites of passage. Meiko has been involved with the Queer Quest over the last decade and currently serves on the Board at Wild Mountain Retreats where he is a sugar daddy for thousands of migrating hummingbirds.

Kelly McClelland

Kelly McClelland (she-ish) is a bi-lingual (English & Spanish) rite of passage guide with the School of Lost Borders, a Nature-based Psychotherapist and is on the Board of Wild Mountain Retreats. She has guided outdoor programs for under-served youth, Corporate leadership teams, and higher-education clients for over 8 years. She also serves as a global educator for social and environmental justice programs in Central and South America for Where There Be Dragons. As a guide, she brings realness and an open heart. She shares her continuous reckoning and unlearning of white supremacy culture and re-rooting the earth honoring traditions of her Scottish, Irish, English, and Eastern European heritage.

Kelly is in in the inquiry of how “modern-day” rites of passage can serve as a liberatory practice. How our ceremonies can tend to our lands, our culture, our kin. And help us embody the truth of who we are - divesting from the inherited stories, oppressive systems, and identities prescribed to us by society. To live what we know to be true - that we are not separate from nature. Our bodies and lives go through cycles and seasons, we don’t fit into binaries or boxes, and that the more diverse an ecosystem is - the more it flourishes.

Currently, Kelly is the Creative Director for the Global Biodiversity Narrative Project, and serves as part of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, Decolonization, and Inclusion (JEDDI) Council for the Wilderness Guides Council.

What makes her come alive is feeling the pull of catching that first wave, the sweet song of chickadee-dee-dee, connecting with plants, and side cramps from deep belly laughs. 

Raei Bridges

Raei Bridges (they/them) is a neurodivergent soul on a journey of self-discovery and connection. Raised by the vibrant landscapes of the San Fernando Valley in California, Raei's roots are deeply intertwined with nature. From childhood daysspent playing in the mud, climbing trees, to observing insects with fascination, Raei fostered a profound bond with the natural world in any way that was accessible to them.

The transformative turning point came during the 2016 Queer Quest, an experience that ignited their spiritual connection to nature and set them on a life-altering path. It was here that Raei discovered a calling to become an outdoor guide, driven by the desire to create spaces where others can embark on their own journeys of authenticity and wholeness.

Now, with a mission to guide and inspire, Raei Bridges channels their passion into fostering a sense of belonging in the great outdoors. Through their work, they aspire to empower individuals to embrace their true selves and discover the profound beauty that lies within the intersection of nature and authenticity.

Raei Bridges has taken their passion to new heights by founding Black&Wild, an organization dedicated to creating transformative experiences in nature. At the helm, Raei orchestrates mindful wilderness trips and ancestral skills campouts specifically tailored for Black, Indigenous, & People of Color in the Northeast. Raei is a certified WFR through SOLO schools and a certified Kripalu mindful outdoor guide

Callum “Bear” Bobb

Bear is a trans guide who offers a grounded and fierce tenderness in support of the beautiful process of emergence that we call Rites of Passage. As a queer person descending from Ashkenazi Jewish and Scottish lineages, Bear brings insight from a lifetime of navigating liminal spaces and betweenness, and trusts that embracing the unknown is the first step into the borderlands of becoming.

Bear has come to guiding with the support and training from the guides at Wild Mountain and the School of Lost Borders, human and non-human. Bear has also been trained as a somatic psychotherapist and an Earth scientist. Their wide range of backgrounds has helped them see the interdependent nature of the human experience. While the culture of colonization insists that we should strive for control, predictability, and self-reliance, the Earth will never stop offering reminders that life on this planet is defined by invitations of relationship, change, and interdependence. Bear is honored to guide in a context that offers all participants these embodied reminders as invitations into their unique aliveness.

Selina Leticia Chacon Borquez

Selina Leticia Chacon Borquez (she/her) carries soulful gifts of traditional massage, trauma-informed bodywork, rites of passage and ancestral healing. She also offers her healing medicine through preparing nourishing meals to nurture her community. Selina attended Wild Mountain and the SOLB Rites of Passage Guide training in 2021, which brought her ever deeper into her devotion of decolonial, liberatory healing, and ancestral work.

Selina's love for community, the land, the unseen and her other-than-human family is where she feels most alive and anchored. Her integral animist connection and conversation has been unbroken from the time of her birth in the Sonoran desert, on the lands of the Yaqui people, in Tucson Arizona. Selina has been in a lifelong apprenticeship with her ancestors from both Spanish and Indigenous Mexican roots. These ancestors walk intimately through the rhythms of her life and work, she councils with them as sources of her medicina, and tends her relationship to their ceremonial lifeways reverently.

Partner Organizations

Web Design and Creation: Signe Porteshawver, Kelly McClelland, Rae Abileah

Photos courtesy of: Clement Wilson, Urana Batjargal, Angelo Lazenka, Chloe Jacobson, and John Davis.

Logo and Graphic Design: Voronova Kateryna