Amy Voytilla ’04 (right) and Carol Wendorff, near the tri-border region between Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, working on a Wilderness Classroom website update.

BY | CHUCK BENDA

As Amy Voytilla ’04 found out, sometimes life gets in the way of a regular career.

Amy Voytilla ’04 enrolled at Macalester with some pretty strong ideas about where she was headed. For starters, she wanted to major in art. When an introductory psychology course intrigued her, she decided to combine her interests and pursue a career in art therapy. After earning her master’s degree in art therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, Voytilla planned to look for a job—right after she enjoyed a little R & R in northern Minnesota. T T w o and a half years, one kayak trip around Lake Superior, and one trek across South America later, Voytilla still hasn’t landed that day job. What’s more, she’s not even looking. In the fall of 2006, she got the chance to kayak around Lake Superior with an organization called the Wilderness Classroom.

After that, says Voytilla, “I got hooked.” Wilderness Classroom—founded in 2001 by Dave Freeman—is a nonprofit organization that uses satellite communications and the Internet to share wilderness adventures with schoolchildren across the United States. During their expeditions, Wilderness Classroom staff members post trip notes on their website, host live chat rooms, and otherwise involve kids in their adventures via the Internet. After each trip, staff members travel to schools around the country and continue to share their experiences through assemblies and other presentations. “It’s amazing to see how excited the kids get,” says Voytilla. “They always have so many questions for us.” What’s also amazing is the scope of the adventures Voytilla has taken part in through the Wilderness Classroom. Her most recent trip was also the most extreme: a 3,000-mile journey across South America by bicycle and canoe. During the first leg, team members pedaled from the Pacific Ocean, across the Andes, and down to the headwaters of the Amazon. From there, they paddled some 2,500 miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

Along the way, Voytilla encountered sights and sounds so fantastic she had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. “I remember biking through the Andes during the first leg of the expedition,” she says. “For two solid days, we did nothing but climb, climb, climb. It was one switchback after another.” As the expedition finally passed into a cloud forest high in the Andes, however, Voytilla forgot about her aching muscles. She was surrounded by dozens of sparkling waterfalls, colorful parrots, and all manner of flowering plants.

It was a scenario that would play out over and over again, throughout the trip: long hours of hard travel interspersed with moments of near euphoria as the group encountered new and wonderful landscapes. Another such experience came not long after the expedition members began canoeing on the headwaters of the Amazon. “We were there during the high-water season, and the river just ran off into the trees in every direction,” says Voytilla. “Sometimes we took short cuts through the forest as the river wound back and forth. The wildlife was incredible. Sloths. Macaws. The howler monkeys woke us up as soon as the sun started to rise.”

The Trans-Amazon expedition—which stretched from April 2007 to November 2008—was completed in three stages, each lasting about 50 days. With the exception of a short section of the lower Amazon, team members completed the entire journey under their own power. “There is a stretch of the Amazon where it breaks up into hundreds of smaller channels,” Voytilla explains. “We were warned by the locals not to travel in that area because it is overrun by pirates and thieves. So on that section of the river, we rode on a small riverboat.”

No matter what challenges they encountered, however, Voytilla remained remarkably calm and even-tempered, according to Freeman. “One night on the lower Amazon, a storm was driving the water up into the trees where we were camped,” says Freeman. “We weren’t sure it would stop before the tents were standing in water. Finally the water stopped about four inches below the tent. Amy slept through it all.”

In the interest of full disclosure, Voytilla and Freeman have become more than just expedition teammates over the last few years. Says Freeman: “My mom told me that, having found a girl who would paddle across the Amazon with me, I should probably marry her.” Freeman hasn’t taken his mom’s advice yet, but the two are definitely a couple. When the Amazon expedition ended in November, they returned to northern Minnesota to spend the winter guiding dogsled trips. They spend summers leading kayaking trips on Lake Superior, and they’re already planning their next Wilderness Classroom expedition: a “big trip across North America,” as Voytilla puts it.

Big might be an understatement. Although the final shape of this expedition could change, the current plan is to start in Seattle and head north to Alaska, possibly in kayaks, before angling down toward northern Minnesota. From there they plan to travel via kayak, bicycle, dogsled, and canoe through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence

Seaway to the East Coast before heading south to Florida. After that, who knows? “I’d like to keep doing this sort of thing for a while,” says Voytilla. “And I’d like to write about our travels, too; maybe a book about the Superior trip and one about the Amazon. But eventually I think I’ll get back to the art therapy stuff.” We’ll see. Judging by her passion for adventure travel, eventually might be a long time coming.