Exotion

In 2018, I was running a tech start-up in San Francisco. It was a full-on pressure cooker. I ended up in the hospital for nine nights with a collapsed lung. This was the second time it happened to me, so I opted for surgery.

The day after I got out of the hospital, we got a note from my wife’s uncle, who was an owner of Mountain Trek, a hiking and wellness retreat in British Columbia. He said he was planning to retire and wanted Hannah and me to take over. The only caveat was that we had to go to Canada and experience the program ourselves.

It’s intense: For seven nights, guests hike their way to wellness without caffeine, alcohol, or electronics. Through fitness, personalized health, and mindfulness programming, Mountain Trek helps guests achieve their wellness goals. It's part hardcore boot camp, part holistic health retreat, and part spa oasis — all with a major focus on learning the unique elements of Nordic fitness trekking through some of Canada's most beautiful natural wilderness.

Guests learn how to unplug, relax fully, and sleep deeply. Mountain Trek also offers workshops that dive into the five pillars of health — stress management, nutrition, sleep health, metabolism, and detoxification.

It was exactly what we needed.

A month and a half later, Hannah and I went. The experience was absolutely transformative. I was recovering from lung surgery, and I healed significantly more in that week at Mountain Trek than I did during the entire month and a half of therapy leading up to it. I saw firsthand that treating yourself correctly and paying attention to yourself and being present with your health does have a profound impact. Hannah had anorexia in high school that almost killed her, and she still deals with it to this day. She had purposely developed an addiction to sugar, because that was the only way she could consume enough calories to function. At Mountain Trek, she was guided through a nutritional plan and was able to eat a wide variety of foods to really help her gut health balance out.

When we returned to California, it was a no-brainer for me to shut down my company and for Hannah to quit her job in the marketing division an outdoor apparel company. In December of 2018, we moved to the tiny town of Nelson, British Columbia. We lived just two blocks from the main street. We have 40 staff and six to eight hiking guides working under us. We ate the Mountain Trek meals. We had a beautiful life and were incredibly happy. So we stayed.