Our Guide Team
Although her roots reside in the foothills of Northern Colorado, Akasha lives a semi-nomadic life exploring deep wilderness, new perspectives, and communal connection. She was raised tending to awe and honoring the cycles of the natural world that mirror the changes within human beings. Her Mother, both Mama and Mother Earth, have served as her greatest teachers, graciously cultivating space for curiosity, empathy, and transformation.
Akasha’s belief in the healing power of the natural world and reverence for the teachings offered by all more than human beings led her to rite of passage work.
Her professional journey began with a logistics internship at Rite of Passage Journeys, which quickly evolved into a full time guiding season and a pull to step into leadership as Rite of Passage Journeys Assistant Director and Basecamp Manager. With a keen interest in increasing access to wilderness initiatory rites, Akasha co-founded Living the Wheel. Guided by this commitment, she began developing independent programming rooted in the vision fast model as shared by the School of Lost Borders and Alchemy of Prana, where she has both quested and served as an assistant guide
Akasha weaves an exploration of ‘eco-hierophany,’ the understanding that the sacred is revealed through the Earth, into her guiding and personal life. Sharing her love for wilderness, art, food-as-medicine, and nature-based ceremony as reciprocal exchange that continually expands her relationship with self, community, and the natural world. Her work centers around supporting life transitions through initiatory rites and threshold practices in wild places. She brings a tapestry of experience, lineage, and love for the Earth into her work, offering spaces where people can step across thresholds, meet themselves anew, and return with the gifts the wild asks each of us to bring forth.
Akasha Dove
Founder, Lead Guide
Shaped by the alpine majesty of western Montana, Koby has always found solace in the wilderness. Growing up on the edges of suburbs and woodlands, he developed both a natural affinity for the land and a keen sensitivity to the societal disconnection that plagues our times. His early experiences sparked both a profound reverence for the beauty and need for nature, and a painful awareness of the shortcomings of a culture which fails to provide true guidance and mentorship to young people.
For Koby, serving as a wilderness rite of passage guide is a way to help address the mental health and greater meaning crisis afflicting today's world. Driven by what he calls an ‘initiation urge’, he embarked on numerous journeys of extensive solo travel, musical creation, education and meditation before undergoing his own 12-day wilderness rite of passage 2022. There he realized his calling to guide others through similar experiences, embracing the role of apprentice, then mentor and finally lead guide the following summers.
Since then, Koby has deepened his work by guiding with both Rites of Passage Journeys and Journeymen in Washington, supporting people ages 12-70 through thresholds of change. He also co-founded Living the Wheel, where he designs and facilitates wilderness vision fasts, mentorship immersions, and nature-based rites of passage for all ages.
