Armstrong Scholars

Jenn Peach led the 2017 Armstrong Scholars program alongside Daniella Beinstock. When the 13-day excursion began, the high school-age women saw Jenn as mature, but little else beyond that — she was there to lead and instruct. After Jenn and Daniella held the open conversation period around the campfire, the dynamics of the entire group changed. One of the memorable questions they fielded around that campfire in the dark: “How do you have the courage to go do things by yourself?”

“At some point I said that I was the person who gave me permission to do things, and it sparked this fascinating conversation about the ‘permission’ to be certain things as a young woman. It opened everyone’s eyes to each other.”

Jacqueline Ruggieri held her arm up to the screen on our Zoom call. Scrawled in beautiful cursive on her wrist: “gulp life.” The phrase comes from a poem written by Joie Armstrong, and according to Jacqueline, it perfectly embodies who she understands Joie to have been before she was tragically killed in Yosemite National Park in 1999.

“Joie is that poem, ‘Gulp Life,’” she says. “There are at least three of us associated with the program who got this tattoo on our wrists independently of each other.”

When she got the tattoo in 2011, Jacqueline was a NatureBridge educator seven years removed from her experience as an Armstrong Scholar. For her, the path from one to the other is clear and direct. Without participating in the Armstrong Scholars program, she’s not sure where she would be today.

The Armstrong Scholars program began in 2000 with a clear, heartfelt idea: to honor Joie Armstrong, a NatureBridge (then Yosemite Institute) educator who was tragically killed at age 26, with an annual adventure in the national park where she’d once taught. For Kim Laizer and Heather Sullivan, both friends of Joie, it became something transcendent: a way for their friend to live on in spirit that would impact them and hundreds of other women for years to come.