What Makes a Fantastic Outdoor Leader: Resilience through a Rappelling Accident, NOLS Rejections, and Olympic Dreams with Jeannette Stawski
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On day 21 of an instructor course in the Wind River Range, Jeannette’s rope dislodged a 250-pound boulder. It landed on her legs — 15 miles from the nearest trailhead, in a designated wilderness where no helicopter was coming fast.
Since then, Jeannette has identified the ingredients that make a fantastic outdoor leader. Resilience is a top-of-mind skill — and as she defines it, resilience isn’t toughing anything out. It’s going through the uncomfortable. It’s a muscle she’s built through an entire career of setbacks that became pivots: Olympic dreams ended by back surgery, multiple NOLS rejections, and that day under the boulder. If you’re ready to build that muscle on your own bucket-list adventure, we’re hosting a full Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim hike on October 10th, 2026, for women 50 and over!
Jeannette Stawski is the author of The Outdoor Leader and owner of the leadership development company Leading Valiantly. She currently serves as the Senior Assistant Director of Adventure Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, spent eleven years as director of Outdoor Adventures there, and served fourteen years as executive director of the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education. She has worked as a professional outdoor guide, wilderness medicine instructor, and NOLS instructor, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and their two children.
Jeannette and Angie talked about:
Pivoting from pre-Olympic rowing camps to raft guiding in Glacier National Park after back surgery ended her Olympic dreams
Getting rejected by NOLS multiple times — and how their coachable rejections shaped her career
The 2000 rappelling accident in the Wind River Range and the rescue that followed
Balancing expedition leadership with parenthood, including leading a five-week New Zealand expedition when her daughter was 16 months old
The gift she’s giving her kids: a cross-country road trip to climb the Grand Teton together — without their parents
How the outdoor industry has shifted: entry points, public lands advocacy, and articulating the value of the profession
The self-deprecation pattern in women outdoor leaders — and the green room moment where Jeannette called Angie in
Why resilience means going through the uncomfortable, not toughing it out
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