A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of instructing a very inspiring student in our local Wilderness Basics class.  Last year I wrote a little blurb about this student, and her battle with breast cancer for the first annual Outdoorzy.com Outdoor Service Preservation Environment and Conservation Award.  Here is the story:

Each winter I volunteer by staffing and leading camping trips for the local Sierra Club’s Wilderness Basics Course. During the 10-week course, we train upwards of 200+ students, to participate in the outdoor experience safely and with a minimal impact on the environment.

This year I had a unique student, and older women who was very tentative about any type of camping experience. As it turns out, she was not new to the outdoors, but she was convinced that hiking and camping were lost to her as she was in the middle of chemotherapy treatment for cancer. I convinced her it would be OK and that she could survive the initial car camping trip. I gave her a ride to the campsite, and carried the huge amount of gear she thought she would need to survive.

She survived the first camp-out, regained a little confidence, and was soon signed up for the first backpacking trip. To make a long story short, she went through the rest of the course, slowly gaining strength and experience, and we celebrated the end of the final trip with high-fives and hugs, an overnight snow camping trip in the Sierra in which several feet of snow fell on us and we hiked in snow shoes multiple miles. The last time I heard from this student, she was full of energy and full of life, working on gaining a little more outdoor experience so that she can begin to lead young cancer survivors into the outdoors. While I can not take responsibility for her recovery or the direction she is taking, I like to think that my service time has provided a vehicle in which this student and the 200+ others can learn and pass on environmentally responsible outdoor adventuring.

Since this time, breast cancer seems to be touching my life all the time, and I was reminded that I am certainly not alone in feeling the effect of breast cancer on friends and loved ones through a series of posts on the Verde Blog which you can read here and here.  These posts focus on one active families battle with cancer, and his call to action through his bicycling blog; Fat Cyclist . As a family my, I can empathize with him, but cannot imaging the pain that cancer has wrought on his family.  I only hope I can do a little part by spreading the word to a few people.

Fat Cyclist Causes:

Lance Armstrong Foundation

Huntsman Cancer Institute