Staff Needs

We are still looking for an Assistant Cook this summer!

We are looking for an individual 18 years or older to come and spend the summer serving in the Basecamp kitchen! Responsibilities include working with the Head Cook to prepare meals for staff and guests, and managing campsite meal preparation for hiking trips. This person should be hard working, detail oriented, and have a passion for serving God by serving others.

Spread the word!

If you know someone who would be a perfect fit for this position, please encourage them to apply. For application materials and a detailed job description, check out our website: http://beyondmalibu.younglife.org.

If you are interested in applying for an unforgettable summer of serving, call our Seattle office at (206) 525-0791. Thank you!

Map and Compass

I just got home to Bend Oregon from map and compass weekend in Seattle with the rest of this year’s Beyond guide staff. I’ll try to describe it in a nutshell… We were privileged to have Dave Taylor instruct us in the ways of the map and compass, with patience and humor . He has been faithfully training Beyond guide staff for many years. We felt particularly honored to receive his instruction this year because he informed us that this would be his last Beyond training. That's right, Dave Taylor is moving on to serve God in other ways and other places. We just want to thank Dave for serving so many generations of Beyond guides. He is one of the highlights of every training season.

We began the weekend with an intro to map reading and a group activity of designing clay landscapes and drawing our own topographic maps of those landscapes to better understand topographic lines on a map. The next day, after spending some time learning and reviewing declination and compass techniques, we headed to Woodland park in Seattle to practice taking compass bearings. We broke up into teams and worked on triangulating known features on the map to determine our exact location.

On Sunday, after working on some Bible study skills, we we headed back outside, this time to Hamlin Park, for a “non-competitive” (yeah right!) orienteering race. Teams of two scoured the park with a map and compass and raced to be the first to find 11 points marked on our maps and return to the starting point. This was a super fun activity that really tested our skills under pressure. I love orienteering!

All in all this was another great weekend of fellowship and learning. Next up is All Staff/Rock Weekend, I can't wait!

Gracie King is a second year mountain guide who never gets lost.

First Training Weekend

Oh-So-Ko-No, Jeff's favorite.

It’s spring here in Seattle and training has officially started for the 2011 Beyond guide staff. We kicked off the season with our first training weekend March 24-27. As usual the returning guide class showed up early Thursday evening for a fun reunion and a few extra sessions on leadership training. They locked themselves in a room, caught up on their adventures from across the country, and went about setting their goals for this upcoming summer. After a day and a half of work, our newly fearless leaders had developed a their own mission statement, “Cultivating encounters with God through worshiping together,” and were ready to greet their partners, Beyond’s newest class of sea kayaking and mountain guides.

By Friday evening the new guide staff had arrived at Concordia Lutheran Elementary school to a warm welcome from the returning staff. We have fourteen new guides this year who traveled from all over North America including New Jersey, Southern California, and even Canada. The excitement from the welcome, with the help of plenty of coffee and animal crackers, carried on throughout the night. After plenty of get-to-know-you games, the great Beyond historian Jim Caldwell graced our presence and filled the guide staff with a sense of eagerness and anticipation for the joys of weather and surprises of the wilderness that the mountains and inlet holds for them this summer.

Jim Caldwell back in the day. Not much has changed.

Saturday, too, was filled with some amazing guest lecturers. Sarah Field, a Young Life leader from Tacoma, shared about the Beyond experience from the leader’s perspective. She spoke about her trip last summer with 14 high school girls and shared some valuable insight on the goals, expectations, and experiences of a trip leader. Dudley and Kathleen Miller returned again this year, too. These wise counselors have given our guide staff instruction the past few years on interpersonal communication. The skills they teach our staff consistently prove to be invaluable tools on almost every trip. We so appreciate their willingness to serve us, plus that egg toss was totally epic.

Of course the weekend was littered throughout with instruction on hard skills and opportunities for physical and spiritual development. We want to send out a huge thank you to all of our trainers. I won’t list them all by name because I’m sure to forget someone but we are so grateful for your continued support of our program. We couldn’t do it without you. Thank you too to the guide staff for your sacrifices and commitment to serving God and serving kids. We’re excited for the ways in which God will work and eagerly anticipate the new Beyond season.

We Want to Know

Alright everyone. We here at Beyond have an ongoing debate. It's tearing us apart and we need your help to resolve it. For years there has been a strong contingency among us whose knees buckle with joy when the twisting and twirling of the the knotted black meal bag suddenly stops and it's calorific contents empty onto the lap of the eager guide to reveal the ever longed for framboise etched across the otherwise pristine packaging of our most beloved beverage. Others scream with triumph and delight when it is Peche, the most wonderful Peche, that greets their anticipating eyes and their tantalized tongue. Still others despise these supple fruits of Canada's powdered beverage bounty and wait patiently for the otherwise monotonous wasa meal and it's promise of sweet and sour blended so perfectly into the rosy crystals of Pink Lemonade. Our camps are clear and our passion is real. Save us from our own intractable taste buds and cast your vote for your favorite flavor below:

Which is your FAVORITE Ricky flavor?

• Grape
• Lemonade
• Orange
• Pink Lemonade
• Peach
• Raspberry
• Tropical Punch

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Beyond Sea Kayaking: The Depths of Adventure

If you're looking for freedom, flexibility, and depth in your next outdoor adventure, you should check out Beyond's sea kayaking program. Enjoy the freedom of paddling some of Canada's most beautiful inlets and exploring the wilderness that skirts their edges. Sea kayaking trips offer an extreme amount of flexibility in both the length of the trip and the size of the group. Spend the day spotting God in the wildlife around you and in the conversations you share as you paddle. Enjoy streams and waterfalls and water that literally glows at night. End your day cozied around a beach campfire listening to the stories of the lives of your fellow travelers and sharing your own. Sea kayaking is a challenging but low-impact sport, making it an excellent choice for participants of all ages. So get a high school group together and ask a couple of moms or dads (or grandpas) to join you. The best part is, we're still booking trips for this summer. Check out the calendar below and then click here to get your trip planning started.

Life as a Beyonder

It's hiring season here at Beyond. We have a huge summer coming up so we need a large staff for 2011. I've found it difficult to put into words why people should be on staff. Being on Beyond staff was an epic experience for me and it's been hard to convey that epic-ness in small get-the-word-out posts. So I thought I'd get a little more in depth. I learned so much about God, myself, community, and service at Beyond. Here is a snapshot of what Beyond staff was like for me. Maybe it will encourage you to serve with us this summer

I was a mountain guide for three years (that's right, I liked it so much I came back for an extra year), and I have to tell you, there's nothing like it. I loved guiding because it demanded everything of me and more. I loved planning our weeks, setting up our route and then poring over God's word with my guide partner. I loved reading about the group we would spend the next week with, throwing ideas back and forth, thinking outside of the box, and inevitably being drawn back to the outrageous mystery of God contained in the simplicity of Jesus' words. I loved jumping up and down on the dock on Saturdays as the Papoose came in and having to be on my gregarious A-game as we greeted the campers with skits and ice-breakers. I loved sitting around the campfire that first night, our stomachs over full from the delicious juicy hamburgers we just inhaled, listening to each other as we talked honestly about our fears and expectations for the upcoming week. Beyond taught me a lot about listening, about putting my own fears and expectations aside in order to serve and connect with each kid in each group. It was such a privilege to be brought into the story of each of my campers' lives, to be able to ask difficult questions and have them respond with honesty and vulnerability. I learned the real meaning of authenticity when I saw it on the tired faces of fifty-year old men and sixteen-year old girls who trusted me to take them up a mountain.

Beyond was physically challenging in a way that was also mentally challenging. I never knew how many miles I hiked in a week or just how heavy my pack was when I had to carry water up to our first night campsite. But I grew to appreciate the sometimes inexhaustible strength in my legs and the immediate presence of life that greeted me with every heaving breath I took. I loved the puzzle of high school girls and finding the right words to convince them that they will make it, and it will be worth it, even though it's only the first day and they already want to sit down and never move again. I also loved the puzzle of figuring out a route in the thick fog of a white-out. I felt like I was the best I could possibly be when I guided Beyond trips and I was never more aware of how much I was dependent on God. I was my most confident and simultaneously utterly filled with humility.

Every other week I had to come down out of the mountains and work in base camp. My second and third summers, once I got the hang of guiding, I preferred the mountains to base camp. But my first summer base camp was the best. Even on the summit I would look down at base camp and long to see the smiling faces of my friends and community. Six of my closest friends are the women in my guide class. I have countless more from the base camp and guide staff of the years I served at Beyond. At base camp, we rose early on Saturday mornings to share coffee, laughter, and tears on the dock before we headed up to celebration breakfast. We dragged ourselves out of bed "before" the 7:15 breakfast bell and staggered down to set the table, satisfied despite the sleepiness because we were beautiful and we were together. Every morning we took an hour just to sit with God. I have felt God's presence more distinctly in those hours than in any other time of my life. God dripped from every branch and saturated the air as tangibly as the rain. And we worked. Hard! But that was good too, because at 4:30 everyday I could relax and swim knowing that I had spent my time well, I had served people, and I had worked hard.

Life in the community of base camp was not always easy. We, forty of us each summer, for all intents and purposes lived on an island. We ate together, slept together, and worked together and we did not always get along. The thing about an island though is that you have to figure it out. It would not suffice to let conflicts go unresolved. More often than not those conflicts ended up being the fertilizer to deeply rooted life-long friendships, and in some cases even marriages (wink, wink). Oh, and then there was the singing. Crazy, raucous and hilarious, or quiet, beautiful, and reflective but always a capella at celebration breakfast. Evening dishes usually included an ad hoc band which usually included a dance party. Either way, I learned a lot of Pearl Jam and Canadian folk music and we all pretty well figured out how to harmonize with each other.

These were my experiences as a guide at Beyond. They changed my life. They showed me more of who God created me to be than I had ever seen before. They showed me how great it is to give that me freely in service to others, both campers and fellow staff. Most significantly, through my experiences I knew God, and because of my experiences I know God more. If you want to see what your experience would be you should start by sending in an application. Click here to get started. It's worth it.

40 Years in a Nutshell

Our 40 year reunion gave us a great opportunity to reflect on our exciting history.  Here's a brief look at where Beyond came from and where we are going.

Beyond Malibu began in the early 1970s when Barney Dobson, a Vancouver, B.C. Young Life leader, caught a vision for taking kids into the mountains surrounding Young Life’s Malibu Club in the Princess Louisa Inlet.  Barney wanted to take kids “beyond” the normal camp setting.  In 1970, the Beyond experiment began when three groups each climbed what would eventually become the One Eye Route.  Those first three trips were a great success. So the following summer Beyond kicked off its inaugural season.

That first summer in 1971 Beyond set up a base camp on the Jervis Inlet at the mouth of Potato Creek.  They had a small staff of pioneers, enough to lead just one trip each week during the summer, so some trips had as many as 20 campers.  In 1972, Beyond more than doubled its staff and with it the number of trips into the mountains.  This growth allowed Beyond to shrink the size of the groups and begin to customize trips to the unique dynamics of each group.
That same summer, 1972, Beyond left Potato Creek and transformed an old logging camp in the heart of the Princess Louisa Inlet into its new base camp.  Today, nearly forty years later, that same small strip of land continues to serve as the home base for Beyond’s mountain ministry. But a lot has changed since 1972.  In 1998, after leasing the property for twenty-six years, Young Life purchased that old logging camp.  Since then we have remodeled the barn, torn down and rebuilt the red house and the long house, added five new buildings including the sauna and the luggage shelter, dug too many biffs to count, and completed three of seven campsite structures.

And Beyond continues to grow.  In 1998 Beyond added a sea kayaking program and with it a new base of operations in Egmont.  Today, Beyond has as many as eight mountain trips and two sea kayaking trips exploring the mountains and inlets of British Columbia’s wild coastline each week.  With improvements in the Princess Louisa base camp came the opportunity, beginning in 2008, for some midweek base camp service trips and rustic camp experiences for Capernaum (Young Life’s ministry to special needs populations), college, and adult Young Life groups.  In the next few years we hope to increase the size of our staff and the number of our trips, purchase a new water taxi to better facilitate transportation in and out of the inlet, build four more campsite structures, extend the roof of the barn, and so much more.  The history of Beyond is most easily tracked through these tangible growths and changes.  But the real history exists in the lives that have been moved and utterly transformed by God’s presence in these mountains and on these waters.  Come be a part of Beyond’s history.