In 2018, I was running a tech start-up in San Francisco. It was a full-on pressure cooker. I ended up in the hospital for nine nights with a collapsed lung. This was the second time it happened to me, so I opted for surgery. The day after I got out of the hospital, we got a note from my wife’s uncle, who was an owner of Mountain Trek, a hiking and wellness retreat in British Columbia. He said he was planning to retire and wanted Hannah and me to take over. The only caveat was that we had to go to Canada and experience the program ourselves. It’s intense: For seven nights, guests hike their way to wellness without caffeine, alcohol, or electronics. Through fitness, personalized health, and mindfulness programming, Mountain Trek helps guests achieve their wellness goals. It’s part hardcore boot camp, part holistic health retreat, and part spa oasis — all with a major focus on learning the unique elements of Nordic fitness trekking through some of Canada’s most beautiful natural wilderness. Guests learn how to unplug, relax fully, and sleep deeply. Mountain Trek also offers workshops that dive into the five pillars of health — stress management, nutrition, sleep health, metabolism, and detoxification. It was exactly what we needed. A month and a half later, Hannah and I went. The experience was absolutely transformative. I was recovering from lung surgery, and I healed significantly more in that week at Mountain Trek than I did during the entire month and a half of therapy leading up to it. I saw firsthand that treating yourself correctly and paying attention to yourself and being present with your health does have a profound impact. Hannah had anorexia in high school that almost killed her, and she still deals with it to this day. She had purposely developed an addiction to sugar, because that was the only way she could consume enough calories to function. At Mountain Trek, she was guided through a nutritional plan and was able to eat a wide variety of foods to really help her gut health balance out. When we returned to California, it was a no-brainer for me to shut down my company and for Hannah to quit her job in the marketing division an outdoor apparel company. In December of 2018, we moved to the tiny town of Nelson, British Columbia. We lived just two blocks from the main street. We have 40 staff and six to eight hiking guides working under us. We ate the Mountain Trek meals. We had a beautiful life and were incredibly happy. So we stayed. This year, 2022, is our first season operating in two years due to COVID, and we’ve added many mental health–based sessions for the season. We noticed a dramatic shift in our guests’ primary reason for attending the retreat. “Work stress," “burnout,” and “lack of work-life balance” are fast becoming a primary threat to our physical, mental, and emotional health. Guests’ interest in improving mental health has gone up 137 percent since the pandemic started. Our program has evolved to meet the needs of the rising mental wellness and health landscape. We also developed a new pilot program that will debut in October that’s specifically designed for executives or upper managers who feel their current effort required to keep everything pushing forward is not sustainable; want both a highly successful career and health body and mind; want to invest in their longevity, both professionally and personally; and want to collaborate with like-minded executives or upper-managers. This modified schedule will tackle burnout head-on and specifically help guests establish habits that lead to a highly effective and sustainable work-life balance. The goal is to show them how to resource their brain and body so that they’re more energized, efficient, and resilient. It’s a week of growth; an investment in themselves, their career, and the team that depends on them to show up and perform to the same high level they know they’re capable of, day after day. Our next plan is to open a property in Los Padres National Forest in California’s Santa Ynez Mountains. We’re hoping to prove that you can have a very luxurious experience but do it responsibly and sustainably. It’s one thing to have your own garden and well and solar, but it’s another thing to exist sustainably. Where are people traveling from to get to you? Canada is too remote and it’s only open half a year. The new location should be open in January 2026. My goal is to help people see that they can rebalance and implement a very small amount of what we teach them at the retreat into their life at home. I want people to attain a sense of confidence that they have the ability to lead a long and healthy life — with the understanding that life is not this perfect straight line that you walk, but rather a series of ups and downs. We limit the program to 16 guests. Most come in with these spinning minds that are so fast and jittery and bouncing from one thing to another and constantly having a narrative about what’s good and bad. To be able to quiet that and let it pass, to find that stillness, is the most freeing thing in the whole world.
