A Human Waste Problem! Probably not the first thought that came to your mind, right? Seriously, we hikers love remote wilderness areas. But our love has an impact. At Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, more than 150,000 visitors make an impact each year. For more than ten years, ConservationVIP® volunteers have been repairing…
What kind of person would spend more than ten years volunteering thousands of hours for an environmental nonprofit, without drawing attention to himself and his contributions? We have such a person in our organization, and I decided this is the right time to call him out. Behind his back some people have called him John…
I had long wanted to hike in Patagonia. But it was a long way from the San Francisco Bay Area, it required two days of travel to reach this iconic hiking destination and my personal journey there was complicated by much more than distance. For many years, I thought that the San Francisco Bay Area…
![A [Volunteer] Day in the Life](https://conservationvip.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/yosemite-960x339-1-300x106.jpg)
It was September, 2009. My wife and I learned about ConservationVIP® from a family member and we were encouraged to check out the trip to Yosemite National Park. Upon learning more details from the ConservationVIP® website and through REI Adventures, we signed up to join them. Having experienced the value of volunteering locally and being…
Some things just “say” Galapagos. Darwin. The blue-footed booby. Marine iguana. Tortoise. Darwin’s finches. I’d heard the words before, but now I was about to see them. Here I was, shoe-horned into a small plane approaching Isla Isabela, the outermost inhabited island on the Galapagos Volunteer Trip, with about a dozen Conservation Volunteers International Program…
Have you ever been camping or hiking and thought – darn, I really should have brought those extra socks, or maybe a hat, or maybe a blanket; perhaps, you needed a rope for your tent or someone to chase away a raccoon in the night. Or, you may have even found yourself as the last…