What Happens Outside
When young people get outside, really outside, not for an afternoon but week after week, season after season, something happens. They grow roots. They find a well of resilience within themselves that no one can give them and no one can take away.
It doesn’t come easily. Pushing through hard things, working for weeks to master a fire skill and failing, spending hours collecting data only to realize an error in methodology, spending an entire day outside in cold rain, can lead to a new appreciation for what is possible, and open the door to deeper levels of calm and gratitude.
Spending time outdoors with other humans provides profound opportunities for relationship building, shared experience, and social development. Using teamwork to solve a skills challenge, working in partnership to present research findings, or finally getting a fire started on a snowy day: these things enhance connection among young people in a visceral, heart-opening way that is hard to replicate indoors or through a screen.
Children make wonderful scientists. They may not know much, but sometimes that’s exactly what lets them see the world with fresh eyes and ask questions that an experienced researcher wouldn’t consider. They also make wonderful craftspeople, patient and absorbed in ways that surprise the adults around them. And they make excellent adventurers, if you let them take real risks and trust them with real tools.
We believe in learning by doing: trying first, failing, and then figuring it out. We believe that long-term data collected by hand connects us to reality in a way that no textbook can. That a basket woven from materials you gathered yourself holds more than its shape. That a fire you earned through persistence warms more than your hands. And that returning to the same piece of land, week after week, season after season, builds a relationship that changes both the person and the place.
My role in all of this is smaller than people expect. I think of it as creating a container, a space that’s safe enough for real experiences to unfold, but open enough that I’m not the one deciding what those experiences are. If a kid wants to climb high in a tree, I’ll share my honest assessment of the risks, but the decision is theirs. If someone wears cotton on a cold, wet day, the discomfort that follows is a better teacher than anything I could say. Nature has its own lessons, and they arrive on their own schedule.
Wild Alive Outside exists to create the conditions for these experiences, through forest science, ancestral crafts, and wilderness skills, with nature connection at the center.
Meet Jess
I start each day with bare feet on the earth, and what gets me out is checking the rain gauge in my backyard. This is usually followed by ten quiet minutes under the maple tree for a sit spot with the birds, ants and squirrels. My garden is a tended mess, a backyard habitat, wild and overgrown, a space held for a diversity of living things.
I grew up exploring the woods behind my house. When I had my own kids, I rearranged my entire life around playing with them outside. Then they grew up, but I’m still out here, getting muddy in the forest with the next crew of curious kids. I don’t think that part of me is ever going to change.
My path to this work has been winding. I studied physics and optics, earned an applied master’s degree at the University of Oregon, and spent years as an optical engineer before finding greater fulfillment raising and homeschooling my two children. That led me to managing our family’s 47-acre forest near Cheshire, where I completed the Master Woodland Management program and took graduate courses through OSU’s College of Forestry.
I once thought I might work at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon’s legendary long-term ecological research station. But when that academic path drifted away from what I cared about, I realized I didn’t need to pursue another degree. Part of what I’m doing with Wild Alive Outside is building my own little Andrews, with younger scientists, perhaps less rigorous methods, but real studies, real data, and a deep connection to place.
In 2019, I started a weekly nature program for homeschool families at our family forest. In 2023, I founded Wild Alive Outside to bring these experiences to more people. Years later, the Bear Creek Explorers are collecting long-term ecological data, writing grants, conducting original research, and serving as guardians of the land, and I’m still learning right alongside them.
When I’m not in the forest or weaving another basket, I’m probably attending a natural resource educator workshop, backpacking, attempting to transform discarded hides into buckskin, or studying the natural world. I don’t take myself too seriously, but I take the work seriously. The land, the kids, the data, the craft.
The Bear Creek Wilderness
The Bear Creek Wilderness is 47 acres of forest, meadow, streams, and springs near Cheshire, Oregon. This land sits within the territory of the Chelamela (Long Tom) band of the Kalapuya people.
The forest is primarily replanted Douglas-fir and Ponderosa pine, with a smattering of vine maple, red alder, Oregon white oak, chinkapin, hawthorn, yew, bigleaf maple, osoberry, and willow. Beyond the forest, the land holds wet meadows rich with native camas lily, goldenrod, spirea, swamp lantern, snowberry, trillium, and bleeding heart. A spring-fed pond, a class-1 year-round stream, and many small springs feed the water systems that run through the property.
Because the forest contains an abundance of replanted timber, harvesting wood for shelter building, fire, and other projects is mutually beneficial, supporting outdoor activities while creating gaps and openings within the forest that benefit wildlife and native plants.
This is a wild place. There is no electricity, no running water, and limited shelter: a small shed and a hand-built village of tarps and fire pits that the Bear Creek Explorers have constructed over the years. Parking for three cars during the wet season. A visit here means bringing everything you need, just as if you were heading into the backcountry.
Although the original intent was simply to protect this land from development and maintain native ecosystems, the Bear Creek Wilderness has become something more: a place where conservation and education grow together.
Somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it, the forest stops feeling like a place you’re visiting and starts feeling like somewhere you belong.