NatureBridge Environmental Science Programs

NatureBridge Environmental Science Programs offers overnight, hands-on environmental science programs that include multi-day, immersive programs, backpacking programs, and summer day camps. These programs take students into outdoor classrooms in world-renowned national parks for week-long adventures and other multi-day experiences. NatureBridge connects over 30,000 students and 700 schools each year through these environmental science programs.

• Ages: 9–18 years old
• Schedule: Multi-day, immersive programs including week-long adventures

For over 50 years, learning has come alive at NatureBridge, which began in 1971 when high school teacher Don Rees led 50 high school students on a week-long adventure that inspired the founding of the organization, then called Yosemite Institute. Don Rees served as the first Executive Director, and Jack Walston served as the first Board Chair. The organization later expanded to additional national park locations and officially became NatureBridge in 2009, with the National Environmental Science Center in Yosemite opening to students in 2024.

NatureBridge’s mission is to connect young people to the wonder and science of the natural world, igniting self-discovery and inspiring stewardship of the planet. NatureBridge is the largest overnight environmental education partner of the National Park Service and takes more than 30,000 students each year into national parks through School & Group Environmental Science Programs for grades 4–12 and summer programs. Its core values include bringing one’s best self, learning, teaching and growing, being inclusive, and building open and honest relationships.

NatureBridge partners with the National Park Service and the Outdoor Education Institute and has created an Educator Development Program that recruits and trains education staff from groups that have faced historical and systemic barriers to outdoor education and environmentalism. NatureBridge acknowledges that its programs take place in the ancestral homelands of Tribes, Bands and First Nations at each of its locations. In Prince William Forest Park, NatureBridge provides nearly 2,000 D.C. youth the opportunity to discover the natural world each year.

NatureBridge was awarded $3.5 million from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to advance the role of social and emotional learning in outdoor environmental education. In a keynote address at a NatureBridge gala, National Park Service Ranger Betty Reid Soskin described the national parks as places where children served by NatureBridge can revisit many eras in history and referred to the shared legacy that the National Park Service and NatureBridge promise to young people.

Last updated May 13, 2026.