About Kurt

Kurt Hoelting grew up by the shores of Puget Sound, and still enjoys making his home on an island in the Salish Sea. He has lived a migratory lifestyle his entire adult life, heading north every summer to work as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide in Southeast Alaska..

A graduate of the University of Washington and Harvard Divinity School, Kurt is an ordained minister, Zen practitioner and mindfulness teacher, who has sought to blend his passion for spiritual inquiry into his life on the wild edge of Alaska.

From 1994 to 2921 Kurt served as Head Guide with Inside Passages, a sea kayaking outfitter-guide company in Alaska he created as a way to weave mindfulness practice into wilderness exploration. Closing the imagined gap between human nature and wild nature has been a lifelong passion for him.

Kurt’s Inside Passages journeys served as a launching pad also for numerous mindfulness collaborations in the Lower ‘48, bringing his teaching back into the human wilderness of the city, including a decade teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to veterans at Seattle’s VA Hospital, to King County employees in Seattle, and at the Samaritan Center of Puget Sound.

Since concluding his work with Inside Passages in Alaska, Kurt has enjoyed the luxury of more spacious time with family and friends, as well as re-engaging with outdoor adventures for its own sake. In addition to writing and teaching, he continues to enjoy kayaking in the Salish Sea, and climbing and backpacking in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains.

Being a grandpa has been a life giving new vocation for Kurt as well. In an era filled with conflict and cultural polarization, he has found a new refuge in seeing the world freshly through the eyes of his grandchildren Neve and Ethan. With all the losses we are enduring in our collective lives, he is grateful to sit at the feet of these children who remain committed to teaching their grandpa to stay rooted in wonder and curiosity.

Kurt has also found an unexpected freedom, as an elder, to take new kinds of risks, engaging creatively with some of the most challenging issues of our time. This has included a pilgrimage on foot through southern Mexico in 2022, volunteering with Ukrainian refugees in Poland in the summer of 2022, and traveling to Kyiv, Ukraine, to lead a Zen peace vigil in the summer of 2023.

These recent encounters with the “human wild”, along with stories from his life on the wild edge of Alaska, are the subject of his new book Apprentice to the Wild, scheduled for release in early 2025. Kurt is looking forward to a number of readings, workshops and conversations around the Salish Sea with his new book during the coming year. A schedule of current events will be kept updated on this website.

Please contact Kurt if you would like to sponsor a reading or workshop in your community.