(801) 851-5260
(801) 851-5260
night sky in Salt Lake City, Utah, outside of residential substance use disorder treatment center

Incorporating the Outdoors

The | Outside was created with the intention of making an experience in the wilderness fun and meaningful without being contrived, coercive, or unnecessarily difficult. At the end of the day, nature is already a profound teacher. Our job is to extract the meaning, not provide it.

Outings & Adventure Trips

Our proximity to some of the most remarkable mountains in the world allows our clients to have ample opportunities to do remarkable things. In the winter, we ski and snowboard weekly in nearby Big Cottonwood Canyon. In the summer, we swim, fish, and paddle in Utah’s abundant rivers and reservoirs. In the fall, we rock climb in the Wasatch mountains. Every month, we take our Phase 1 clients on a 3-day-long adventure trip designed to explore these activities further in new environments. Our clients go bouldering in Joe’s Valley, rope climbing in Wyoming, fly fishing in the Uintas and more.  

Our weekly outings and adventure trips are designed mostly for the sake of having fun and building relationships. In active addiction or mental illness, it’s easy to lose sight of what makes us feel happy and alive. Skiing and rock climbing not only reconnect us to the earth and each other but also give us the thrill that many of us so desperately crave. We do these activities so regularly that our clients gain the knowledge and the skills to do it themselves long after they’ve left our program.  

Wilderness Trips

The peak Balance House experience for many of our clients is the wilderness trip. These trips last 5 days, at the tail end of a client’s stay at Phase 1. We take a small group of guys that are on the cusp of transitioning (a group that will likely advance through the entire program together) and go backpacking somewhere more remote.  

These trips are designed to be the culmination of a client’s stay, so they can celebrate their progress and further build a camaraderie with the men they will move through the Balance House program with. As it turns out, the “flow state” you enter during a backpacking trip is the perfect place to dig deeper into who we are and who we want to be. We can run clinical interventions, find greater depth in therapy groups, teach guys how to give and receive personal feedback, all while having fun and continuing to build stronger bonds with one another.  

And still, nature itself teaches our clients perhaps the most important skill they can learn is self-care. If they don’t take care of themselves, they’ll end up wet, cold, and not enjoying their experience. Changing your socks at the end of the night, drying out your sleeping bag in the morning, packing your bag so that it sits correctly on your body; there are a multitude of ways to make life easier in the backcountry. Learning how to practice self-care in the wilderness directly translates into guys being able to take care of themselves in their everyday lives.