About Big Wild
Wilderness backpacking is the most rewarding way to experience a bit of the original America. It's simply walking through the wilds while carrying food, tent, sleeping bag and clothing in a modern, comfortable backpack. And because you do it on your own two feet, you'll feel a dramatic sense of accomplishment. It's also the camaraderie of small groups sharing wonders of nature that few others ever experience.
Our trips are planned to allow plenty of leisure time, including opportunities to explore the wild with only a light daypack. Even our strenuous trips have one or two layover days, where we spend two nights in a row at the same camp. Backpacking is suited to anybody who is healthy, reasonably fit, and open to new ways of viewing and experiencing the natural world.
Big Wild Adventures is a licensed guide and outfitter with the U.S Forest Service, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Big Wild Adventures is an Equal Opportunity Service Provider. We have run over 500 multi-day treks since our inception in 1978 and are widely regarded as the leading backpacking company in the United States! We arrange all trip details, secure all required permits, provide transportation from town to and from the trailheads, outfit our guests with quality equipment, and supply three hearty meals daily plus snacks.
All Guides are professionals with many years of wilderness leadership experience. Your guide will not be an inexperienced young adult. Our guides are trained in wilderness medicine and emergency search and rescue procedures. They are also naturalists who enjoy sharing their knowledge of each area's unique flora, fauna and geology. We emphasize safety, the utilization of low-impact hiking and camping techniques, and exploring seldom visited, little-known wilderness haunts. Our guides are also glad to provide any desired instruction in a variety of wilderness skills.
Wildlife: Viewing wildlife - large and small - is an integral part of the wilderness experience. Our guides know how to spot critters, and they know where to look, depending upon the season and conditions. Although we cannot guarantee any particular level of sightings on any given trip, wildlife is important to us, and chances are great that a Big Wild Adventure will provide an opportunity to watch native animals in their unspoiled natural habitats.
Wilderness: All of our trips are in a wilderness environment with no roads, automobiles, houses, telephones, etc. We specialize in exploring truly remote country. Our guides know the secret wild places, off the beaten path, where few other humans are encountered. In other words, we don't simply hike and camp along major trails; we explore and discover the magical hidden wonders of real wilderness!
Our Conservation Philosophy: Many of America's remaining public wild lands are rapidly disappearing. Logging, mining, road building, resort development, livestock grazing, all-terrain vehicles, subdivisions and more are squeezing our wild lands and wildlife into increasingly small enclaves.
Though our trips are generally within protected areas, it is the policy of Big Wild Adventures to support the efforts of those organizations working to save unprotected wild lands and to restore the American Wilderness. Our guides are well versed in wild land conservation, and are happy to share this information with our groups. In fact while many outdoor companies support and contribute to conservation groups, Howie and Marilyn plus our other guides are working conservationists on the front lines of political and educational efforts to protect wild lands and wildlife habitats. For example, Howie and Marilyn run a small non-profit conservation organization called Big Wild Advocates, which promotes wilderness and wildlife habitat protection and restoration, and Howie is now board President of the national conservation group Wilderness Watch, which promotes proper stewardship of existing designated Wilderness. Big Wild Adventures is also a leader in practicing and promoting low-impact wilderness use techniques.
| Howie Wolke
Big Wild Adventures is owned and operated by Howie Wolke and Marilyn Olsen.
Howie Wolke has led over 400 multi-day treks since the mid 1970s. He is the most experienced backpacking guide in the Western U.S. He has been the subject of various magazine articles and is also a well-known advocate for protecting wilderness. He has written two books on wildland conservation, including the Big Outside (co-authored with Dave Foreman), a historic inventory of America's remaining big wilds. So Howie doesn't just know wilderness, he literally wrote the book on it! Also his articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications. As a public speaker, he has addressed college and other groups across the country. Howie is a part-time instructor of Environmental Studies at Montana State University (Billings campus), where he designed and teaches the course "The American Wilderness". He is also President of the national conservation group Wilderness Watch. Howie also has a particular affinity for wolves and grizzly bears, and has a B.S. in Conservation and Wildlife Ecology.
| Marilyn Olsen
Marilyn Olsen has explored wilderness from the Everglades to Alaska, from Africa to the Arizona desert. She is a registered nurse with expertise in wilderness medicine. She is a former trip leader for the University of Montana's "Wilderness and Civilization" program, and in that capacity led canoe trips on Montana's wild and scenic upper Missouri River, as well as various backpack treks. An experienced wilderness advocate, Marilyn's efforts in conservation education for young people are particularly innovative. She also has valuable insights on group dynamics, and her ability to see and explore the often overlooked intimacies of the wilderness environment are unique.
Howie and Marilyn live in southern Montana, in the foothills of the Gallatin Range, just north of Yellowstone National Park.
| Joshua Mahan
Joshua Mahan was immersed in the big wilds at a very early age by his Mom, Marilyn Olsen, and his Step-Dad, Howie Wolke (Big Wild owners). He survived. Josh has a degree in Journalism with a minor in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana. When not in the wilds, he runs the cutting-edge environmental web magazine “Lowbagger.org”. Josh has been a professional whitewater river guide for 8 years, guiding multi-day river trips on Idaho’s Salmon River among other places. He has periodically worked for Big Wild as an assistant guide since he was a teenager, and in more recent years as a guide. Josh is also an avid hunter, fly fisherman and snowboarder. Despite his youth (still under 30), Josh’s vast reservoir of wilderness experience and training compliment his unusual wisdom to create the perfect Big Wild guide.
| Larry Campbell
Larry has guided occasional trips for Big Wild since the mid 1980s. He grew up in rural Colorado and received a degree in geology from Princeton, where he worked hard to survive culture shock. He is a founder of Southwest Outward Bound and he worked for ten years as an instructor and course director for Southwest Outward Bound and Colorado Outward Bound. After years of traveling in mountainous pre-industrial cultures, he hand-built a log cabin in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley in an effort to live in comfortable simplicity that might be sustainable without encouraging the reckless pillaging of resources. When he’s not guiding for Big Wild, Larry occasionally works as a mineral exploration geologist, and he also works as a wildland conservationist to “help save the parts”, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold. Being in Wilderness allows Larry to rest his compulsion to help fix abuse wrought by uncontrolled industrial development.
| Rod Miner
Rod Miner, long-time Big Wild guide, has also worked in the Mountain West as a park ranger (in Yellowstone and other areas), forestry technician, logger, fire fighter, and survival instructor for troubled youths. His outdoor work has also taken him to the North Cascades, Chihuahuan Desert, Canyon Country and the Peruvian Andes. Rod has worked extensively with renewable energy and sustainable energy-efficient building techniques, and lives with his wife and teenage daughter in a round straw-bale house that they built in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Trust him, it is energy-efficient. When not guiding or otherwise getting into outdoor mischief, Rod presides over Lightfoot Cycles, Inc., a manufacturer of human-powered vehicles.
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