Glacier National Park, Montana.
Recal Travel, a company founded in early 2021, has a unique approach to their coach-led, retreat-style trips using a travel model known as “Mindful Adventure Travel.”
MINNEAPOLIS, MN. – Recal, a company specializing in mindful adventure travel, has partnered with Quiet Parks International to facilitate small-group mindfulness retreats in places deemed the quietest in the world. They call this their ‘Quiet Park Trip Series’ and in 2022 are headed to Glacier National Park in Montana (June 2-7) and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota (three trips in total, June 10-25).
Recal Travel, a company founded in early 2021, has a unique approach to their coach-led, retreat-style trips using a travel model known as “Mindful Adventure Travel.” With this approach, they develop mindfulness-based itineraries to ‘recalibrate’ both the mind and body. Recal trips are a way to break free from the noisy, distraction-filled environments that surround many people today, and reconnect with nature in its purest form. Recal’s mission pairs well with Quiet Parks International (QPI), which is the first and only organization worldwide committed to the preservation of quiet, for the benefit of all living beings.
Natural quiet, or the ability to listen to nature without noise pollution, is becoming harder to find. The vast majority of people living in the world today are exposed to unhealthy quantities of noise pollution. There are very few places left on earth where you can listen to the sounds of nature for more than 15 minutes at a time without a human-made noise intrusion, and even those places are vanishing quickly.
“Humans have spent thousands of years in naturally quiet places; it is literally the place that, evolutionarily speaking, we “grew up,” explains Anthony Lorubbio, the founder of Recal. “Today, however, due to the scarcity of natural quiet and our modern, urban, and sedentary lifestyles, we spend very little time in quiet places. And even if we have that rare opportunity to visit one, our minds often create noise that distracts us from being present.”
On each trip in the Quiet Park Series, certified mindfulness coaches will guide attendees in practices to stimulate introspection and inner quiet, while increasing awareness of the surrounding external quiet. These mindfulness practices include meditation, breathwork, journaling, forest bathing, and silent hiking. This sensory experience enables attendees to listen to nature in a way that is rarely available to them; and without the impact of noise pollution, it connects them to the world just as it was many years ago.
QPI and Recal’s mission is to not only help local communities preserve quiet places and mitigate sources of noise pollution, but also draw mindful and sustainable tourism to these areas to experience the quiet.
“Quiet tourism is a truly sustainable form of economic development whereby we do not change the places we visit, we change ourselves,” says QPI founding partner Gordon Hempton. “If we were to study quiet destinations, we find they are also the healthiest places left on the planet -carbon capturing, oxygen producing, characterized by diverse wildlife function in a stable ecosystem- so, saving quiet also save so much more.” Natural quiet is a resource that’s not just important for humans, but also wildlife and their access to acoustic environments that they can communicate in.
Space is limited for the 2022 Quiet Park Trip Series, with only 30 spots available between both the Glacier National Park and Boundary Waters trips. The itinerary options span four to six days and are available online at www.recaltravel.com. The prices range from $1,950 up to $3,450 for the most premium option.
Trip Details
Glacier National Park, Montana
This Quiet Park Trip will be held primarily at ROAM Beyond, one of Recal’s preferred partners and provider of immersive outdoor lodging in Columbia Falls, MT, with one night of tent camping in one of the quietest areas of Glacier National Park. Over the course of six days, trip attendees will dive into the quiet — both inner in the form of guided mindfulness practices, as well as outer quiet from the natural soundscape that embodies Montana. The trip includes an e-bike ride through the heart of the park on a vehicle-free Going-to-the-Sun Road, mindful forest bathing on trails, silent hiking in one of the most remote and quiet parts of the park, and spending a night camping under the dark sky.
Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota
There are three trip dates for the BWCA portion of the Quiet Park Series, with each beginning in Ely, MN, before entering the Boundary Waters. The BWCA is over one million acres of protected land off-limits to military aircraft and other motors, so it presents as an untouched, natural soundscape. The trip will consist of canoeing, portaging, and tent camping through the wilderness area for a more rugged, naturalist experience. When the groups aren’t canoeing or camping, there will be guided hikes, forest bathing, breathwork and other coach-led mindfulness practices.
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