Meet Lauren Bond

Lead Canoe Guide & Founder

After dedicating a career and a master’s degree toward working in outdoor and  environmental education, I found there wasn’t space in my work for stopping, sitting down and becoming lost in conversation with an eagle or a waterfall.

I found myself interacting with the natural world in a way that I couldn’t explain. Deeply connecting with Western Red Cedars, a Brazilian capybara, an Alaskan black bear, porcupines and a very curious Gray Jay eventually helped me realize I needed to create my own path. I had to create space for magic to happen, to form bonds that forever change lives.

Canoeing rivers right outside my back door in Boulder is the perfect way to find that magic. There is profound healing to be found in the gentle pace of the current amidst the towering cottonwoods and the soaring wild birds. The river retreats on the Green River in Utah are the culmination of my journey thus far, beginning with a conversation with a waterfall nearly 20 years ago.

Now in our eleventh official season, The River’s Path has gone beyond my wildest expectations. I’ve spent nearly 35 years of exploring rivers and streams, and nearly twenty guiding them. We have guided thousands of people down the St. Vrain river and taken over 200 down the Green River. The gratitude I feel is indescribable. It is a joy for me to share the sacred havens of the river with you.

~Lauren, Lead Canoe Guide

Environmental Leadership MA (now called Resilient Leadership MA), Naropa

Transformational Wilderness Guide, Earth Based Institute

Our Expert Team

Monika Denise

Utah Guide

Monika Denise comes alive on the Green River in Labyrinth Canyon. She finds great joy in sharing community with the red rocks, green river, sun, moon, and fellow canoe travelers. As a Medicine Woman of the Soul and calm space holder, Monika Denise brings her soulful presence to The River’s Path. With Monika Denise as your co-guide, you might find a companion for a deep conversation while supporting her in the camp kitchen, a stirring of your soul in response to her song and drumming, or a calm support in navigating river life and paddling. An apprentice to the elements, she trusts in the flow of the river as a guide for her own life journey. Monika Denise offers 1:1 soul medicine for the souljourner (a dedicated space to listen to and tend to your soul’s journey) as well as collaborates with other soulful practitioners in unique offerings.  www.monikadenise.com

Cate Burnett

Utah Guide

Cate has a deep and soulful connection to wild places and all those who live there. She is a naturalist, wildlife tracker and wilderness guide, having spent over 25 years leading expeditions in the PNW and Hawaii. Her devotion to honoring the ‘wild and untamed’ stirrings within herself lends enthusiasm and passion to those she guides in the unfolding of deep self-reflection and discovery. She has trained with the School of Lost Borders, Rite of Passage Journeys and Animas Valley Institute and holds certifications in Wildlife Track & Sign, Native Plant Studies and is a Leave No Trace Instructor and Wilderness First Responder.

Kathy Beadle

Utah Guide

Kathy Beadle has guided for The River’s Path since 2017.  Through  guiding with The River’s Path, working in various group homes for at-risk children, and guiding with a white water rafting company, Kathy has used nature and experiential adventures to help others to find transformation in problem solving activities, team building and trust building. This in turn helps with self-esteem, self-reliance and relationship building. Her calling has always been to encourage others to sit quietly enough to find these qualities in nature for their own healing journeys. She does this deep work with a big dose of laughter!

Diane Laughlin

Day Trip Guide

I began canoeing rivers and lakes in Texas in 1972 and continued when I moved to Colorado in 1977. Many adventures followed in the Grand Canyon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Alaska. Being a horticulturalist in my summer job and a birding enthusiast I’ve enjoyed seeing great plants/flowers and birds while boating. Teaching skiing is my winter love and boating is my summer joy. I’m a lucky person!

Guest Guides

Sarah West

Wilderness Vigil Guide

Sarah West is a therapist, nature guide, writer, artist, and naturalist, living in the wild beauty of Moab, Utah. Her work bridges several disciplines, weaving together trauma healing, somatics, mindfulness, nature therapy, soul work, depth psychology, wilderness vigils, ritual and ceremony, and expressive arts healing.
Sarah’s diverse academic background in archaeology and human evolutionary ecology, along with her immersion in indigenous wisdom traditions, contributes to the depth and richness of her work.

Craig Childs

Desert Writing Workshop Guide

Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science, including House of Rain and The Secret Knowledge of Water. His most recent is Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places. He has won the Orion Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, and thrice the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, the latter calling him “a modern-day desert father.” He brings a lifetime of experience field-writing in dry country.  

Daiva Chesonis

Desert Writing Workshop Guide

Daiva Chesonis is a fiercely proud Baltimore-born daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, transplanted to Colorado in 1992 to build Telluride’s gondola transportation system. Although birthing chairlifts was not part of her initial goal after a Cold War-era B.A. in Russian Studies, she decided to bed down in the dead-end box canyon to see what would unfold. She became a snowboard instructor, owner/operator of Vision Design, Art Director at Telluride Magazine, founder and 5-year director of the Telluride AIDS Benefit Fashion Show, and a traveling minstrel for Mountainfilm on Tour. In 2005, she earned an M.A. in Diplomacy and International Conflict Resolution, mostly for fun. Most recently she was co-owner of Between the Covers Bookstore in Telluride for over a decade, during which time she co-founded the Telluride Literary Arts Festival, currently dormant. From 2019 to 2022 she was the San Miguel County Poet Laureate. In her spare time, this mom of one amazing adult can be found writing and performing poetry, floating slow western rivers, wandering local and Lithuanian forests on the hunt for mushrooms, and finding herself wonderfully lost in the deserts and canyons not far from where she and her always-writing husband Craig Childs live off-grid just outside Norwood, Colorado. Her first book is set to publish sometime this century.

Lars Howlett

Discover Labyrinths

He is a member of the Veriditas Faculty and part-time staff member based in the Washington DC Area. After twenty years of living in relationship to the Pacific Ocean he now finds himself living next to Rock Creek and the Potomac River. He is fascinated with sacred geometry and natural patterns through which he discovered labyrinths. He created and walked a labyrinth for healing which led to mentorships by Lauren Artress and Robert Ferré, leaders of the modern Labyrinth Revival. In 2015 he launched Discover Labyrinths LLC to design custom labyrinths he creates by hand for schools, hospitals, public parks, churches, retreat centers, and backyards. Learn more about his work at www.DiscoverLabyrinths.com

Heather Hendrie

Desert Bloom River Trip

Heather’s travels have taken her from her birthplace at the confluence of the Speed and Eramosa Rivers, to the confluence of the Elbow and the Bow, then via Boulder Creek, to the Squamish, the Mamquam, and to her current home now by The River of Golden Dreams. A wilderness therapist, writer, sister, daughter, and aunt, Heather is passionate about de-stigmatizing mental health, and promoting thriving and joy. She can most frequently be found in the forest.

Sami Bierman

Desert Bloom River Trip

Sami is a sister, artist, river guide, and curious listener. She is deeply passionate about fostering meaningful connections between people and the natural world. The river is her favorite place to tune into our own rhythms and pace, and to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Dancing, swimming, singing, and painting beside rivers is where she feels most alive. Sami currently calls the mountains of Fernie, British Columbia her home.

Erin Farrell

Desert Bloom River Trip

Erin is a somatic psychotherapist who supports others in listening to their bodies, intuitions, and the callings of their hearts to grow into their most authentic lives. Though she started as a city girl, Erin’s own journey of authenticity has led her into muddy rivers, through hushed pine forests, and up and down craggy mountain trails. Her first trip on the Green River, in 2011, opened her eyes to the wisdom of wildness and awakened a yearning for more of what she (not so poetically) calls “This” – the sacred, the present moment, the being-not-doing, the connection, the awe.

Sarrah Claman

Desert Bloom River Trip

Sarrah was raised by the wisdom of rivers through a childhood spent exploring rivers and lakes of Temagami by canoe. From the coastal rivers of BC to the currents of the Main Salmon, rivers continue to weave a foundation of profound joy, connection, and curiosity for Sarrah. As a student midwife, artist, and guide, rivers offer her a space to pause and listen, returning to self, reconnecting to the rhythms of the natural world, and basking in the laughter, wisdom, and joy always present in these spaces. Sarrah is currently living in Southern Baja, Mexico and is filled with wonder and excitement as she builds her relationship with the warm waters of the Pacific.

Renee Palmer

River’s Wild Soul

“The kitchen is where my passions for food, nutrition, art, and community harmonize. Dazzled by the many combinations of colors, textures, and flavors that meet on the plate, I draw inspiration from my early years growing up in Western Africa and Eastern Europe, where ritual celebrations, connection and sense of place were forged by mealtime gathering. Today, I am part of the team at Global Kitchen in Mancos where my hands and heart intertwine in service to the land and community. When I’m not in the kitchen, you can find me striding on my rollerblades, making lemon peel earrings, soaking at hot springs, hiking, sharing coffee & walks with close friends, and building my Tiny House.
I so forward to bringing my latest inspirations to the river and share my love of food with you all!

Caroline Lewis

River’s Wild Soul

Caroline is a storyteller, eco-therapist, leadership coach and facilitator of transformation in the wild.
She is the founder of Root Awareness, a community for highly sensitive women an non-binary folks choosing to step into their unique creative power and leadership during these threshold times.She is a humble expert on what it takes to holistically heal, transform, and align with who you truly are instead of what society has taught you to be.
She has worked with people around the world as a holistic and transpersonal psychotherapist, meditation teacher, podcast host, and wilderness guide. Her specialty is to support women and brave souls by connecting more deeply with inner and outer wildness and community in order to embody one’s inner creatrix.
She also believes that when sensitive folx choose to lean into the deep and joyful work of transformation and reciprocity, our Earth and greater collective community also heals and evolves.

Meghan Callaghan

River’s Wild Soul

Meghan is dedicated to restoring song to it’s rightful role in our daily lives – as a vehicle for building community, creative expression, celebration, healing, and remembering our true selves.
As a board-certified music therapist and founder of Mountain Health Music LLC, Meghan has brought music to newborns as well as those crossing over, and everyone in-between. She utilizes voice, percussion, guitar, harp, and piano in her facilitation of interactive music making in various community and healthcare settings. Her professional emphasis is in eldercare and End-of-Life work.
Meghan is the musical director of the Flagstaff Threshold Choir, a song-circle of women who visit the bedsides of those at life’s thresholds. In pre-pandemic times, she led seasonal Community Sings, and most recently, Meghan co-founded Song Hearth – a multi-generational song circle that celebrates and marks the wheel of the year. In addition to earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Therapy from the Florida State University, she has studied with legendary teaching artists Bobby McFerrin and Voicestra, Kate Munger, Melanie DeMore, and Becky Reardon.
In a past life, Meghan had an adventurous streak as a wilderness guide in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Mojave Desert. She now makes her multi-generational home with her husband, son, and mother at the base of the San Francisco Peaks. As a free motion dancer, fledgling Perma culturist, and toddler mom, Meghan can be found simultaneously laughing, crying, and dancing along as she figures out how to keep plants alive and young children thriving every day.

Anne Haven McDonnell

Poetry on the River Guide

Anne Haven McDonnell, MA, MFA is a poet, professor, and nature lover who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When she is not outside exploring wild places, Anne teaches creative writing and literature at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has also taught several eco-poetry workshops with Orion Magazine. A recipient of a 2023 Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Anne is the author of two poetry books: Breath on a Coal (Middle Creek Press) and Living With Wolves (Split Rock Press). Her poems have earned awards from Narrative Magazine, Terrain.org, and the Gingko Ecopoetry Prize. Anne Haven’s work explores the connections between inner worlds and the living more-than-human world, and she is endlessly interested in ways we can deepen our seeing and connection to each other and to other creatures.

Lauren Golten

Poetry on the River Guide

Lauren is a nature-based therapist and a group facilitator who draws on her training and experience with Matrix Leadership Institute, the Work That Reconnects, and the Wild Mind model of Animas Valley Institute. She holds masters degrees in Wilderness Therapy and Field Biology. Her background in ecology and field biology originally led her to develop an ecological view of the world, and studying the natural world has been a place of deep meaning and path of connection with the Earth. Lauren endeavors to bring together her love and connection with nature with her desire to bring a sense of belonging and connection into the lives of her human clients and group participants. Lauren’s life and work are also informed by her 25-year practice and study of meditation and mindfulness. Of all habitats, Lauren loves desert river corridors, and she has a years-long relationship of enchantment with the Green River in Utah. She sees clients and leads nature-based programs at her home-place near Lyons, Colorado, where she is blessed to have deep connection with the land she stewards and shares with others.

Trebbe Johnson

Canoe Journey Guide

Trebbe Johnson is the author of Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self and other books, as well as many articles and essays that explore the human bond with nature. She is also the founder and director of the global community Radical Joy for Hard Times, devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Trebbe speaks four languages; had camped alone in the Arctic wilderness; studied classical Indian dance; and worked as an artist’s model, a street sweeper in an English village, and an award-winning multimedia producer. She has led contemplative journeys in a clear-cut forest, Ground Zero in New York, the Sahara Desert, and for military veterans. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Linda Abrams

Soul Alchemy Guide

I am a Wild Wisdom Seeker and Transformational Soul-Guide with over 35 years of diverse experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, expressive artist, and international retreat facilitator. My greatest joy is working with people who commit to heal, grow, and align with their soul’s deepest truth. An introduction to soul-work might begin with the “unbidden initiation” of trauma, or perhaps with contemplation of the great Sufi question: “What Universe is waiting to be born in your heart?” My work is devoted to creating the invitation and issuing the call to adventure of overcoming and re-becoming so that individuals  facing loss, heartbreak, woundedness can move beyond fear into a more brave, authentic, and joyous way of being in the world. I draw from a broad professional background that includes depth psychology, spirituality, expressive arts, and cross-cultural healing modalities, and love bringing my own curiosity and passion to individual and group processes for co-creative change.

Hannah Lee Jones 

Soul Alchemy Guide

I’m a poet and writer whose soul work is witnessing and guiding others so that they can find and follow a more authentic life. Early in my career, in the midst of starting my own organization and helping to plan and promote retreats for spiritual and social change at the Whidbey Institute, I gained a powerful and essential lesson: growth is not just about transcending and enduring life’s tests and challenges but also about patiently and reverently transforming them into gold for the fulfillment of one’s personal calling. A crisis in my late 30s took me into the harsh beauty of the southwest desert where I embarked on several years of nomadic travel. This changed everything, and my book, WHEN I WAS THE WIND (June Road Press), which explores the contours of pain, grief, descent, and personal transfiguration, was born out of that wild experience. Since then I’ve been blessed to show others that even the longest and most uncertain journey can lead to a life of passion, self-knowledge and immense creative power. As an Asian American I’m also interested in how to re-vision and re-write various forms of difference in ways that enliven and connect us more deeply to the world. I run Primal School, a coaching resource devoted to literature and ideas that promote a life of meaning, and am currently at work on a poetic reimagining of the teachings in the Tao te Ching.

Esther Cohen

Wild Contemplation Guide

Esther Cohen, MS, RD, FNT at The Alchemy of Nourishment is a master herbalist, gifted energy healer, intuitive wisdom keeper, registered dietitian, author, and guide for embodied well-being, supporting humans in becoming more whole and available to their souls’ truest expression. Her uplifting teachings are rooted in the sacred feminine of the wild natural world and her work invites somatic healing through an integration of Eastern and Western traditional medicines, nutritional science, and energetics. Her work delves into the root causes of illness, exploring ancestral and familial trauma, the voice behind the symptom, as well as the organ consciousness that is an expression of our unique essential nature.

Esther loves designing environments that nourish the whole person, creating a sense of coherence and balance within the internal and external landscapes, as well as regulation of the nervous system. She is passionate about holding space for community to participate in sacred ceremony and the expressive arts. As a holistic professional chef, Esther creates recipes for life that deeply nourish, not just the physical, but the emotional and spiritual body, as well; all to encourage remembering, repair and activation for evolutionary healing, growth, and magic.

Esther is the mother of two lively daughters and lives with her husband and dogs on 40 acres backing up to national forest on sacred Ute Indian land in northern Colorado, USA. She is blessed to spend much of her time playing in nature. Learn more about Esther’s cleanses, retreats, nutrition, and energy healing services at www.alchemyofnourishment.com.

David Abram

Cultural Ecologist & Geophilosopher

David Abram is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. He was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a broad reassessment which is now dramatically underway in many disciplines.
In the mid-1990s David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity.
Currently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair of Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. He has received numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson Fellowships, and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. David is co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and a distinguished teaching Fellow of Schumacher College in England. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

John Roedel

Write Like The River Guide

John Roedel is an improv comedic who “stumbled” into writing a few years ago as his life began to fall apart all around him.  During his dark night of the soul, John began to have fake conversations with “God” on Facebook to poke fun at his spiritual and personal crisis.  

What began as a flippant way of making light of his doubts in the Divine turned into something he wasn’t at all prepared for: God wrote back. 

Since creating the popular “Hey God. Hey John.” blog on Facebook three years ago, John has tackled such topics as his journey to mental health wellness, his lack of faith, the joy and pain of raising a child with autism, and grief, all in the form of a simple conversation with “God.”

Eventually, these conversations transformed straight into poetry that has touched people all around the world. 

John has published four books: Hey God. Hey John., Any Given Someday, Untied, and Remedy

Fia

Voice Of The River Guide

Swedish artist and songwriter Fia has with her empowering music inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. She is devoted to Goddess and on a mission to bring her medicine of the heart far and wide. Standing in solidarity with the Sámi people and their indigenous lands in northern Europe, she is a fierce earth guardian. Part of the profit of this journey will be donated to the Ute Indian Tribe whose land we will be traveling through, as a sign of respect and gratitude.


Experience the Magic
of the Natural World.

book a trip now

What We Offer

The River’s Path offers wilderness canoe trips based out of Colorado’s Front Range, leading local canoe trips on the St. Vrain River as well as remote back country trips in Utah’s Canyonlands. We are easily accessible from Boulder, Longmont, Denver, and Fort Collins.

The River’s Path offers several different kinds of guided nature experiences, led by Lauren Bond Kovsky, lead canoe guide and expert naturalist. These include:

  • Full or half day canoe trips on the St. Vrain River
  • Vision Quest canoe retreats on the Green River in Utah
  • Wildlife viewing adventures in the Boulder area

Between the 25 miles of waterways we explore in our region and the expertise of of the canoe guide, we are equipped to offer you a gateway to the river’s diverse gifts. Whether you seek a few contemplative hours in nature, more confidence paddling, a lesson in river ecology, or a week-long vision quest among red-rock canyons, we are here to help you achieve what you desire!

Our canoe day trips on the St. Vrain River are within 30 to 40 minutes from Boulder, Denver, Greeley, and Fort Collins and 15 minutes from Longmont. If you seek a deeper, more personal dive into nature-connection, we facilitate Vision Quests—our signature backcountry guided canoe trips—where we float through the iconic Labyrinth Canyon section of the Green River in Utah.

Philosophy and Mission Statement

As an organization our canoe guides are dedicated to offering holistic river experiences that impart naturalist knowledge, technical skill, the transformative potential of the outdoors, and a greater sense of belonging in our community. Canoes can take us places that are difficult to reach on foot and offer a front-row seat to the secret lives of animals that depend on the river for survival. Naturalists and birders will delight in the ability to be in an ideal position for observation as they float. The river is also a place that abounds in symbols and metaphors, both cultural and personal. Being in the presence of such a vital life source can be healing and thought provoking. We at the River’s Path cherish the emotional connections people have to nature, and believe they are an important part of environmental stewardship