This Idaho Backpacking Adventure is perfect for 14- and 15-year-olds looking for a fun and challenging summer experience! Spend two weeks alongside other teens backpacking through remote mountain ranges, carrying everything you need on your back.

This course is designed to maximize hands-on learning. From climbing your first peak, learning to bake pizza on a camp stove, or catching your first fish, you’ll have many opportunities to immerse yourself fully in the environment around you.

Your experienced instructors will teach you everything you need to know, starting with the basics like setting up a tent, backcountry cooking, and mastering Leave No Trace principles. You’ll then progress to more advanced topics like off-trail navigation with map and compass, decision-making, and leadership skills. As you practice and build competence, you’ll gradually be given more responsibility—you may even travel in student-led groups without instructors for up to a day.

Mountain weather is unpredictable—courses may experience snow and rain, or long stretches of sun and blue skies. Wildlife sightings may include moose, elk, deer, bears, sheep, mountain goats, and foxes.

A large focus on every NOLS course is building community with fellow students, which makes long days in the mountains that much easier. If you’re ready to develop leadership skills and learn what it takes to lead yourself, your family, and friends in the wilderness, this is the course for you. 

Information for Parents: The NOLS Difference

At 14-15, your teen’s brain is in a critical rewiring phase—where experiences now become traits later. While camps keep teens comfortable, a NOLS course gives them tools to navigate an uncertain world. Hiking through Idaho’s remote mountain ranges, topping alpine ridges, and discovering clear alpine lakes teaches them that the world is big, beautiful, and not revolving around them. We teach through natural consequences: if the tent isn’t set up right, they get wet. No nagging, just feedback that builds responsibility and judgment. Plus, research shows 96% of NOLS grads complete college. You’re investing in the adult you want to send into the world.