Chris Yager ’89 spent thirty-five years in experiential education—a lifetime’s work of daily exploration and discovery.
What drew you to your work? What do you find rewarding, exciting, challenging?
For thirty-five years, I have worked in experiential education and expeditionary learning. I built and ran a student travel program (Where There Be Dragons) and now work with schools, businesses and nonprofits to train leaders, educators, and guides.
I was first drawn to expeditionary learning after participating in a NOLS wilderness course when I was sixteen. During a month in the mountains, entirely off-trail, we saw no other humans and virtually no sign of human touch. The experience left me with a profound love of all things natural. I caught a value-set of wilderness stewardship and resource conversation. Perhaps more significantly, though, I experienced a radical introduction to myself—to a better me than the one I’d walked away from in the front-country. What woke me up and inspired me at sixteen (and continues to inspire me at near-sixty) was the joy of finding an inner self and an inner peace that—once touched—is known to be authentic and at the core of who we are.
In my later years of high school and then at º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ, and in the years that immediately followed, I led wilderness trips. I learned—particularly while instructing mountaineering courses with Colorado Outward Bound—that the most profound and deepest engagement with place and with self occurs when gifted leaders are given the space and resources to manage their coursework autonomously, independent of a pre-formatted schedule or rigid instruction.
Among the most exciting and edifying challenges I’ve consistently dealt with is helping guides to develop trust in their own abilities and in one another. I’ve managed programs in Rwanda with a team of leaders from Rwanda, the UK, and Germany while executing a curriculum devised by US educators, in the service of a student group cobbled together from five continents. To work with all the different communication strategies and realize outcomes that best meet everyone where they are is thrilling.
Every day of my work I learn something new and often profound about the world around me and about myself. I love finding the next thing, something beyond the near ridgeline. My lifetime’s work has allowed for daily exploration and discovery.
How did your career unfold?
Through a consortium of colleges that included º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ, I spent my junior year living and studying in Beijing. At the time, there were very few foreigners living in China. Most of the homes in Beijing lacked indoor plumbing. The country was falling apart faster than it was being built. And vast areas of the country were closed to foreign travel. But we were given residency paperwork that (with some creative interpretation) allowed us to travel freely. And so over the years 1987–1988, I trained, bused, and hiked the expanse of China, from the Mongolian steppe to the coastal villages of the south. The year’s instruction at our Beijing university was pretty poor. When I traveled, it was usually with just a friend or two. Throughout the year I pined for more leadership, facilitation, and interpretation. I returned with a huge year of experiences under my belt but little grounding in what I witnessed and no available resources to help me make sense of it all.
After º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ, I considered graduate programs and took some coursework in anthropology at UC–Berkeley. I also began working more intensively with kids and fell in love with teaching. While working with Outward Bound, I met a Nepalese sherpa and began a conversation about taking kids to Nepal and Tibet. I spent a year coaching and teaching and working crummy side jobs, saving as much as I could.
And then I spent a fall scouting programs in China, Thailand, and Nepal. When I returned, at the age of twenty-five, I threw the rest of my savings into a four-color catalogue and six weeks’ use of a rental car to promote the programs. After a year’s effort, with all my savings blown, I had managed to sell my program to just three students. So, I “scholarshiped” a few additional kids, made a trip work, and then spent the next fall digging ditches to save enough for my second catalogue.
And so it went, year after year: spend what little was made the year before, hold my breath, and hope that the next year would work out better. When I married Ali, a classmate of mine from º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ, we had less than $300 between us. Five years into running my business, I was still mostly living out of my car, when Ali and I had an unexpected pregnancy. The years that followed the birth of our son were a blur. A lot of work. A lot of help from really good people—tons of help from º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ classmates! I took many wrong turns and made so many mistakes. But every year we got better, and every year we got a few more participants. By the time I sold the business, twenty-five years after my first scouting trip, I had thirty full-time employees and over a hundred field-instructors.
Are there ways that your Asian studies scholarly work has come into play in the leadership and cross-cultural training that you do?
When I came to º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ, I was interested in studying the social constructs that led people to become better stewards of the natural world. Asian studies was an ideal major because it allowed for cross-cultural comparisons through coursework from most of the humanities. Through my degree, I took fantastic classes in history, anthropology, government, philosophy, language, and comparative religion. And, thirty-five years later, I reference and use every one of those classes daily. Truly.
What brought you to º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ? What was your experience at the College like?
E. B. White brought me to º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ. I grew up in California, and in my junior year of high school I read a collection of White’s essays about the Maine landscape. I made a fall visit (before all the leaves left the trees!), and that sealed the deal. I fell in love with Maine.
What inspires you?
I am inspired by anyone who works to give more than they receive.
I am inspired by the lives and the work-efforts of my past students. I have watched them raise kids of their own who are grounded and centered and kind, and I have seen them take on leadership roles where they are needed most. In government, law, higher education, and civic engagement, I see—every day—kids I once knew as uncertain adolescents stepping into mammoth challenges and taking it on the chin and persevering and realizing positive outcomes that are benefiting us all.
Is there something about the work you have done that others would find surprising?
There is an essentialness in both rest and play. Most likely, everyone reading this is an overachiever. And when we think of paying for any kind of learning experience, we consider the skills we’ll learn. Often, the value we place on an experience is whether or not we receive something that eventually leads us to a higher standard of living. But the best experiences, I’ve found, are the ones that inspire students to realize a higher quality of life—experiences in which they are given the space and tools to see in themselves who they are, and why they matter. The most profound learning moments can come from a long rainy day with a foreign home-stay family, when a student is stuck under a tin roof with no phone and limited conversational skills and then... boredom. And then reflection... and then some little gem of learning that the student finds in the moment. And, with time, that gem leads to profound growth.
I have read program feedback from more than ten thousand students. It’s always the unscripted moments that lead to the most profound epiphany.
Is there something about YOU that others might find surprising?
I was sick when I returned to º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ for my senior year. I had contracted something while living in Asia, and for twenty years I went without a diagnosis. Chronic illness is such a hard thing to communicate to others. Living with it is both painful and shameful. One of the reasons I started my own business was because it afforded me the ability to skip a day of work if I needed to stay in bed. The day I finally resolved my health issues my life changed. The big take-home for me has been that we’re all sick with something and, at some level, we’re all faking it with something.
The best we can do is be kind to ourselves, take the love that others give us, and love others with the knowledge that they’re probably hurting in ways that are unknown to anyone on the outside.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I enjoy doing EVERYTHING in the wild: sitting on a rock by a stream or climbing a mountain. I enjoy hiking, biking, fly-fishing, kayaking—and all the winter sports! I throw clay and have a small in-home pottery studio.
Favorite º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ memory? Or best thing you learned at º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ?
I SO valued the personal relationships I had with my teachers. Extraordinary, all of them. Geoghegan and Dickey and Cheek and Smith. David Kurtzer’s anthro classes were extraordinary—everything about Kurtzer’s teaching opened my mind and informed the way I think about education and social constructs and business and politics.
And I loved the water in Maine. I loved the two-a.m. moments of ecstatic dancing on porches and the field games we once played on mowed alfalfa in Pennellville.
But what I love now about returning to º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ is the extraordinary diversity of students. During a recent reunion I visited the parties for each of the celebrated classes. As the graduating years descended to the most recent graduates, the groups of students got cooler and cooler.
And yet… for all the advancements in diversity and inclusiveness and the ever-more beautiful, rich and full community of intellectual explorrers… and for the ever-expanding and extraordinary learning tools that are available to the students: I hope that today’s Polar Bears experience, as often as possible, the magic of bagging it all for the moment and dancing at 2 AM.
I hope that they too enjoy the boredom of sitting under a tin roof in the rain.
It’s in those moments that we most feel and become ourselves.
This story first appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the º¬Ðß²ÝÑо¿ÊÒ Magazine website.
