Danielle and Roland Mott have been traveling the country by car over the past year working for Leave No Trace (LNT) Center for Outdoor Ethics, an organization that teaches people how to enjoy the outdoors responsibly.

“The goal of it is to educate people about how to make responsible decisions when they recreate outdoors, with a purpose of minimizing our impact, which allows for the protection and preservation of the places we like to play,” said Roland, who mentioned that he and Dani’s relationship has revolved around the nature since they first met.

The Subaru/Leave No Trace Traveling Trainers first developed their passions for the outdoors during educational programs that incorporated LNT principles they were part of in high school. Before joining LNT, the couple, both 26, said they spent the last eight years or so educating persons interested in the outdoors through guiding white water rafting, backpacking, and climbing.

“We were living in Portland at the time and saw that Leave No Trace was hiring for traveling trainers,” Dani said. “We read the job description and totally fell in love with the idea. We put every ounce of our beings into that job interview.”

Since being hired on, the couple has been traveling around the country teaching free educational workshops and training programs to anyone from groups of kindergartners to college students and park rangers.

“We are on the road and traveling 11 months solid out of the year,” Roland said.

They both said another huge part of the job is constant logistics, whether it be figuring out where they will camp each night, the distance between events, or when they need to re-stock on food. They can store about two days worth of food in their cooler and cook almost every meal, so determining where and when they are able to stop for food is extremely important.

Although they promote and live an outdoor lifestyle, Dani and Roland are no strangers to office work, which they do in many coffee shops while on the road. Roland said it’s a lot to juggle between writing blog for LNT, creating videos, and connecting people to LNT’s principles via social media, even though the events are the bread and butter of what they do.

Dani said although she and Roland had been living and traveling together for years, working together was not a part of their relationship until now.

“We went into it thinking we’d be totally fine working together, we thought we had it down,” she said. “I think the first three months were the hardest for us, but we came home for the holidays and had some time to reflect. Since the new year, we’ve gotten our procedures down and we split up our work so there’s no butting heads.”

In addition to Roland and Dani, there are two other traveling teams from Leave No Trace that tour the country. Dani said because they only stay in one place for about a week at most, it can become challenging to create long-term connections with those communities, so the northeastern region’s team focuses on this issue.

“What Kate and Tracy are doing is really trying to grow those community relationships—getting on a deeper level with people we are working with at events,” she said.

The contracts to work as traveling trainers typically run in 12-month increments, but Dani and Roland signed for 14 months, which will be coming to a close this December. Dani said they are extremely passionate about their job because it’s easy to promote something they believe in. They want to keep growing with the non-profit and are contemplating signing on for another term.

“We’ve been living out of a car for six to seven years now and we just figured out how to get paid for it,” Roland joked. “We’re just really into simple living.”

While on the road, the two outdoor enthusiasts are offered amazing experiences they said would not be an option unless they were constantly traveling. Roland said they have developed a delicate balance between work and play.

“We have to work a lot but we also get play days where we’ll go find a nice hike or rock to climb, find a park and do some yoga,” Dani said. “We always try to balance work with our own needs.”

Dani and Roland both said there are innumerable things they have learned while traveling, but favorites that stick out in both their minds revolve around the people they’ve met along the way.

“It’s just been amazing seeing passionate people in every corner of the U.S. engaging in their own way in their own cultures and disciplines, whether it’s mountain biking, trail running, or just walking their dog in the park,” Roland said.

“Second to that is that I’ve really felt blessed to be able to climb all over the U.S.—everywhere from the Red River Gorge in Kentucky to Joshua Tree to Smith Rock,” he added.

He said they try to foster a sense of responsibility and respect on an individual level.

“This land belongs to all of us and we need to minimize our impact,” Roland said. “I think that our generation is really awesome in that we’re starting to question the status quo, question the way we’re heading and saying, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a better way to do this’.”

Dani said the whole experience of working for LNT has been eye-opening, especially seeing all of the different ways in which people live.

“We grew up in the suburbs of the Golden [Colorado] area, and there’s pretty much one way of life. It didn’t really sit well with us,” she said. “You can experience these whole new worlds and ways to live, not just personally, but in our relationship as well. It’s about who we want to be in the future, what kind of world we want to live in and how we can engage in that.”

For more information about Dani and Roland’s travels, check out the Leave No Trace blog to read their latest stories.

Images courtesy of Dani and Roland Mott