Partner Trips

Organized & Facilitated Trips in Colorado, Utah, and Patagonia

Whether you’re a school looking for a week-long trip for your students, an organization looking for team-building opportunities, or a group of people looking for a unique shared experience, HMI can help design and execute an unforgettable custom trip!

Know you want to do something exciting with your students but not sure what it could look like? Here are some sample trip ideas:

Summer backpacking in the Colorado mountains with a focus on leadership development (8-12 days)

Fall or spring backpacking and rock climbing in the Utah desert with a focus on indigenous history and geology (5-9 days)

Winter backpacking in Chilean Patagonia with a focus on Spanish language and glaciology (10-14 days)

Drawing on 25 years of experience, our signature curriculum, comprehensive gear library, and tested risk-management practices, HMI has the expertise and ability to offer trips across the American West (Colorado, Utah, and Arizona) and Chilean Patagonia throughout the calendar year.

If you are a school seeking an immersive outdoor trip for your students, an organization looking to develop your leadership team, or simply a group of family or friends in search of a private adventure experience, we are excited to partner with you. Our collaborative approach to program design offers flexibility to create an intentional experience that achieves your leadership, community, and adventure goals. For more information on our custom offerings or to plan a custom trip, please contact us.

We can offer a lot of flexibility for what a partnership program might look like - reach out to see if HMI can organize a trip that works for you!

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Schools

When you partner with HMI, your students experience a program grounded in the integration of the inspiration and challenge of outdoor adventure with a deeper intellectual engagement and development of strong leadership and community-building skills. In recent years, we’ve worked with schools to run a place-based wilderness extension of a partner school’s literature/leadership course, as well as student leadership retreats and expeditions. A central value we offer to partner schools is the operational capacity to provide meaningful outdoor experiences and institutional wisdom to facilitate intellectual and personal growth within them.

Schools we've worked with include:

Berkeley Carroll
Riverdale
Colorado Academy
Hockaday

The partnership with HMI allows Berkeley Carroll to take 12 seniors on a backpacking expedition in the spring of their senior year, complementing their at-school study of the West with a study of place. Our mostly inexperienced or novice backpackers learned to navigate with topographical maps, work as a team, and understand their strengths, weaknesses, needs -- and how their peers could support them.

Once they left for college, our students reflected on the trip's meaning to them: "Unforgettable experience. I left with more confidence, a better understanding of myself, and of my place in the natural world...it was pure magic." Another said that it pushed him to reflect on his time in high school in a completely altered light and showed him how much more he could get out of school and life in general. A third student commented, "Truly an experience of a lifetime that I continue to think back on and will carry with me forever. The bliss of having to do nothing more than just survive was incredibly freeing. Be prepared for challenges but expect the highest of highs!" Berkeley Carroll is excited and grateful to continue this partnership!

Jane Moore

Upper School Director, Berkeley Carroll (Trip Chaperone)

Organizations

We know that great teams are more than the sum of their members, but the daily grind makes it hard to see that. Bringing your team on a backcountry trip with HMI is so much more than a few days in the woods: it’s an investment in each person’s self-awareness, confidence, and social capital that will help your team thrive. HMI can work with you to develop a program that builds team camaraderie and common language around:

Decision-making and leadership styles
Creating a culture of feedback
Managing conflict
Goal setting and action plans
Group dynamics

…and of course, we’ll build in a heavy dose of fun along the way!

Private Trips

Have you dreamed of planning a trip with your friends to Chilean Patagonia, but nothing got off the ground because of the logistical challenges? Are you an avid indoor sport climber ready to challenge yourself with an outdoor experience, but don’t know where to start? Did you participate in an HMI trip ten years ago, haven’t backpacked since, but are ready to dust off those skills? We want to help!