If you had told 14-year-old, Salvador, a wide-eyed freshman who had just arrived in the U.S. from a teeny-tiny school in Mexico, that one day he’d be sitting on the board of directors for the same program that helped him conquer his fear of speaking English… he probably would’ve nervously laughed and asked what “board […]
Words of Encouragement from ARC Alum for the New Year
Azteca Valdivia, a freshman at the University of Nevada, Reno and a graduate of the 2022 ARC Summer Course in Tahoe, is on a journey to succeed. While a senior at Sierra High in Truckee last year, Azteca applied for every scholarship she could find to ensure that she would be able to go to […]
Yosemite & ARC Help with the Transition to College
Selena Lopez Ortiz, a 2022 ARC Community Leadership Program graduate, transitioned to college this fall. She moved into a room with three other UC Merced undergraduates and confronted a slate of challenging classes, including biology, chemistry, and calculus. In a recent conversation, Selena shared how her ARC experience has helped her adapt to college life, and how Yosemite […]
Wrestling With A New Challenge After ARC
Virginia Nava, a junior at Firebaugh High School, sees a lot of connections between her ARC summer experience in Yosemite and her new passion: wrestling. She says, “Wrestling is a team sport, but it’s focused on individual effort and it’s a battle within yourself.” For her, hiking to the top of Tuolumne Peak, backpacking 50-plus […]
Teen Vogue Highlights Stories of Four ARC Graduates
Four ARC graduates’ stories were highlighted in a Teen Vogue article in August! ARC graduates, Selena, Alexis, Iran, and Jesus, detail in the piece how their relationships to the outdoors have shifted over time. Teen Vogue is an award-winning publication with millions of online readers. We are so excited that the power of ARC participants’ stories is […]
Power Posing Her Way Through Yosemite
This is a blog post written by Elizabeth Sherer and published by Yosemite Conservancy. It is re-published here with Yosemite Conservancy’s permission. She had seen the Sierra Nevada mountains above the small Central Valley town where she grew up, but she had never hiked them. It was her first time camping, her first visit to Yosemite, and […]