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 Stewardship Council at Wild Mountain Retreats where he is a sugar daddy for thousands of migrating hummingbirds.

Brent Harris

Brent Harris is a wilderness guide, artist, educator, and end-of-life doula whose work bridges the inner and outer landscapes of transformation. Deeply rooted and connected to the fresh water and glacial till of Michigan’s Great Lakes region, Brent invites others into deep relationship with nature as a mirror for their own becoming. Through a weaving of creative practice, nature-based reflection, and rites-of-passage mentoring, he supports individuals in crossing life’s thresholds—whether of identity, purpose, or mortality. His guidance cultivates presence, soulful creativity, and a renewed sense of belonging within the living world.

In addition to his doula and guiding work, Brent teaches sculpture and heads the 3D Media Department at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, where his teaching continues to explore the intersection of material, imagination, and transformation.

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.

Kim Moriyama

Kim (she/her) is a Guide, part of Wild Mountain’s Stewardship Council, and brings her experience as a leadership coach and facilitator to nourish and grow diverse, multi-generational communities of personal and collective transformation. She helps others tend to the seeds of inner freedom, self-acceptance, bravery and love so that they flourish into actions of meaningful contributions with ease and authenticity. Kim is deeply inspired by communities that heal and liberate themselves from the inside out and aspires to be an elder who ignites joy and peace in the next generations so that they blossom with confidence and create a brighter, more equitable world. Other communities that she currently supports as a coach and facilitator include: Colorado Collective Leadership Initiative, Women Lift Health, and the Asian Women's Coaching Collective.

Timotéo(Téo) Ikoshy Montoya II

Timotéo(Téo) Ikoshy Montoya II (he/him) is a writer, multimedia artist, and rite of passage guide with Wild Mountain and School of Lost Borders. He is a creative writing MFA candidate at The Institute of American Indian Arts, hosts The Indigenous Futures Podcast, and shares other creations and conversations at ARCHAIC_INTERFACE, a multimedia exploration of post-human, postcolonial, and Indigenous futurisms.

A cultural and racial hybrid, Téo's heritage spans Scottish-French roots through Kentucky and Indigenous ancestry from Southern Texas. An enrolled member of The Lipan Apache Band of Texas, he was raised in the Sierras of Northern California, and studied Cultural Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, with a focus on the impacts of colonization on Indigenous diets. He now resides in O'Ga P’Ogeh, on the lands of the Tewa peoples (currently known as Santa Fe, New Mexico).

With a decade of IT experience, Téo provides operations and media support to organizations. As a board member of Wild Mountain, and the native-led nonprofit The Cultural Conservancy, Téo is committed to upholding Traditional Ecological Knowledge, kin-making with the more-than-human world, and rites of passage as vital cultural technologies needed to meet the crises unfurling from our hyper/dis-connected globalized world.

Selina Leticia Chacon Borquez

Selina Leticia Chacon Borquez (they/them) carries soulful gifts of traditional massage, trauma-informed bodywork, rites of passage and ancestral healing. They also offer their healing medicine through preparing nourishing meals to nurture their community. Selina attended Wild Mountain’s BIPOC Rites of Passage Guide training in 2021, which brought them ever deeper into their devotion of decolonial, liberatory healing, and ancestral work.

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

Sam Balka

Sam is a life-long dancer, a cultural explorer, and an outdoor adventurer. He originated in the creek beds and urban daydreams of Eastern Pennsylvania before moving out West and re-meeting the land. He has been a wilderness guide since 2017, a rites of passage guide a la School of Lost Borders since 2020, and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner with a private practice since 2025.

He is a queer gender expansive gay man, and deepening into the practice of his ancestors through Earth-based Jewish spirituality. His mission as a participant in this life is to serve as a conduit of healing and restoration for human and non-human landscapes to achieve flexibility, sovereignty, liberation, and wild vitality! He wants us to know that we are animals, that we are the same land that we belong to and love.

He comes to this work in service to queerness, liberation, and community, to the unknown, to the land, and to our bodies. Through wholeness in being, authentic expression and embodiment, ceremony, celebration and joy, through wildness and through darkness, through action and through dance… He finds his niche and joy of participation and service in this life. http://www.rootedrites.com

Ciela

Ciela is a Siberian Husky guide and therapy dog in training here at Wild Mountain.

She loves to explore the land, run, and play. She reminds us to be curious about nature and relate with child-like innocence. She loves bunnies, pine trees, and skijouring.

Ciela takes care of her pack and loves receiving people from the land and hearing their stories. She sits in circle with us and often invites cuddles and lots of laughter. She is excited to meet you and welcome you to her home at Wild Mountain.