Second Nature Cascades

Second Nature Cascades is an excellent program across the board. Their administrative staff is friendly, helpful and available; their therapeutic staff professional, experienced, caring and in the case of my son highly effective. My husband and I both felt that their parent counseling and video education series was highly relevant and useful.
I sent my son to Second Nature after trying various other programs that didn’t work. A wilderness program was my last choice and I was extremely anxious of letting go and entrusting my 16 year old son’s care to complete strangers. And, in the middle of one of the coldest winters 2013 – 2014 on record. He successfully graduated from the program, but required therapeutic boarding school for further work. (Which by the way is quite common.)
To put it in my son’s words, «I was there, because I fu@&ed up. It sucked, but it was necessary and through the process I met a lot of cool people and learned a lot about myself.» (Note: he made this statement about 2^nd Nature after completing one year of therapeutic boarding school.)

I was sent to this program as a 15 year old (I am now 22) and am continually haunted by my experience there. At the expense of oversharing personal details, I will say this to parents considering sending their children here: unless he/​she has a serious drug or alcohol problem, this is not the right place for them. They will experience many teens going through extreme detoxes and learn more about the drug world than any sane teen would ever want to need or want to know. Many therapists who are dealing with youth that suffer from extreme anxiety and/​or depression recommend this type of program, but fail to educate parents on why the majority of kids that are sent to these are there for: drugs and alcohol. I would highly recommend a therapeutic boarding school or therapy-​based program, but this detox based environment only makes things worse.

Jay and the staff at 2N Cascades are about as good as it gets in the wilderness education industry. If you’re set on sending your child to one of these programs, this is the one to use. 2N gets 3 stars (almost all others would get only 1) because this is an extreme step which you should carefully consider, and it might hurt your teenager rather than help them.