Starting back in 1989, after graduate work in animal behavior and wildlife biology and running the Zoology lab at CMU, Bob began helping people connect with the Earth and the “old ways” through primitive skills and tracking at Tom Brown Jr’s Tracker School. These hands on, experiential and wilderness based programs helped thousands reconnect with the earth and themselves.
It wasn’t long before a call from singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg led to a move to Pagosa Springs, Colorado in 1992 and creating his own retreat business called “Touch the Earth”. He held primitive skills workshops and wilderness retreats all over the country. Work also included; studying and tracking the newly released Druid wolf pack in Yellowstone with Dr Jim Halfpenny, many years of co-teaching a transformational earth-center retreat for women with Brooke Medicine Eagle in Montana as well as numerous years working with Australian author and presenter Brendan Nichols’ “the Mystery Tour” from sharing indigenous ways and adventure into the Pre Puebloan (Anasazi) civilization.
In 2006 he joined the staff of 5x Grammy winner Victor Wooten’s Center for Music and Nature as a full time instructor. It is there that his two deepest passions truly came together. For almost two decades he has helped musicians from all over the world deepen their connection between themselves, music and nature.
In 2015 he co-founded the Inside:Outside Retreat LLC alongside two world renown saxophonists Bob Reynolds (Snarky Puppy, John Mayer) and Bob Franceschini (Chaka Khan, George Benson, Mike Stern, Paul Simon, Jennifer Lopez, etc). They successfully sold out 5 retreats of 50-60 adult saxophone players from all over the world. Covid shut that experience down for a while, however, they rebirthed it in 2024 and sold out again.
