Mounting a Challenge

If you can conquer a fourteener, why not a seat on the local school board — or in Congress? Since 1998, the Women's Wilderness Institute has focused its activities for girls and women on the great outdoors, but those activities lead to changes indoors, too. "It's been proven that the wilderness is a really rich learning environment where you develop skills that you can use for the rest of your life," says WWI's Wendy Gruenberg.

Even political life. At Moving Mountains, the institute's annual fundraising dinner, Marie Wilson, author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World and co-founder of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, will talk about how women can, and must, lead the way in politics, too. "In the wilderness, we're doing the same kind of work that she's doing on a national scale," Gruenberg points out. "We're giving women tools."

Tickets for the dinner, which starts at 6 p.m. tonight in the Seawell Ballroom at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, are $100; tickets for dessert and Wilson's speech only are $65. For more information, go to www.womenswilderness.org or call 303-938-9191.
Wed., Oct. 11