Melissa Blake
Secret hideout specialist, 20+ years in nature connection and leadership development
Lead Instructor, Forest Preschool
If someone had told Melissa when she was a teen that she would get to make a living as a camp counselor, she wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s what she has gotten to do for the past 20+ years. She has taught children outdoors in California, Wyoming, Maryland, and New York and led teens and adults on wilderness expeditions all over western North America. She completed a graduate program in Environmental Education at the Teton Science Schools in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and a two-year mentorship with master tracker Jon Young. In 2006 she founded a program called Growing Wild Nature Mentoring in the Catskills, and in 2013 co-founded Ithaca Forest Preschool as a program of Primitive Pursuits. She loves spending time with preschoolers in their natural habitat--nature--and watching the growth of their imaginations, curiosity, and empathy for living things. She agrees with David Sobel that we should "give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.
