Why Choose The High Desert Center?

The High Desert Center offers semester long residential Gap Year Programs that focus on community, adventure, useful skills, and purpose. We seek to co-create a dynamic learning community. Our programs have been evolving since 1994, when it began with a summer outdoor education camp founded by Dev Carey. For many years we offered sustainability programs for young adults while trying to answer the question: How does one help young people find the skills and inspiration to create a meaningful life for themselves within the context of community? The current High Desert Center Gap Year Programs represent our best efforts to take the most successful strategies and components and link them together into the kind of long programs that support participants in discovering who they are and what they want and then learning the skills to start living it.