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Maria brings twelve years of professional instruction and a lifetime of learning from the land to Rugged's hunting and tracking courses.
Students do not simply learn to follow an animal. They leave with an understanding of ecological relationships, seasonal movement, and ethical harvest that changes how they read any landscape.
She grew up in a family of hunters and ranchers in northern New Mexico, reading sign and processing wild game from an early age.
Those skills were later formalised through CyberTracker International, where she earned one of the highest tracking certifications available, alongside formal study in wildlife biology and ecology.
Slow down far enough and the ground starts telling you things. Most people walk straight over the whole story.
Courses are immersive and deliberately slow, built on the idea that the core skill is not fitness but attention — the ability to stop, look, and read what is actually there.
Students work through prints, scat, feeding sign, and travel corridors, then extend into shelter, wild plant identification, primitive tool-making, and field processing of game.
Maria works on wildlife corridor restoration projects and mentors young women entering the outdoor industry, an area where representation is still noticeably thin. She also continues her own study in ethnobotany and traditional ecological knowledge systems, and much of what she learns there finds its way back into the plant modules she teaches.
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