Christina Stolzlechner Woods

In Memoriam
1959–2024

Christina Stolzlechner Woods

Christina (née Stolzlechner) Woods, a generous patron of QBE, passed away February 7, 2024, at the age of 65, after a courageous battle against an aggressive cancer. Her kind financial support helped us weather the COVID pandemic and reboot our expeditions in 2022.

Christina will be remembered by many as an outstanding competitive skier (hailing from an illustrious Austrian ski-racing family). Her father Hans Stolzlechner was a coach for the Austrian national team, her brother Nils was a member of the American national ski team, and her godfather was the legendary Toni Sailer, winner of all three Alpine skiing gold medals at the 1956 winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

Born in Munich in 1959, Christina grew up in Kitzbühel, Austria. She helped anchor the women’s ski teams at Aiglon College (high school) in Chesières, Switzerland, and at Scripps College, in California. After she graduated with a BA in 1980, she moved to San Francisco. There, she made use of her fluency in multiple languages to launch a successful career in international luxury travel and hospitality. In 2009, she moved with her husband to Vallejo, California, where in her spare time she enjoyed photography, gardening, Mozart, and watching weekly sailing regattas from the deck of their bayside cottage.

She is survived by her husband Guy Woods, her sister Dorothy Stolzlechner, her brother Nils Stolzlechner, her mother Greta Breeden, other dear family members, and her countless close friends who all forever will remember her boundless optimism and relentlessly cheerful disposition. She will be greatly missed.

Godspeed Christina. And thank you.

Expeditionary learning. It works. And here’s the evidence:

This is a tale of two schools: an ocean apart geographically and demographically, but with the same noteworthy co-curricular requirement for every student. One school, St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, New Jersey (USA), costs US$13,000 (about 11,500€/£9,700) a year to attend, though most students receive financial aid. The campus is surrounded by urban blight. The other school, Aiglon|Switzerland, costs close to ten times that much. It is situated in the idyllic Alpine ski resort of Chesières-Villars, high above the Rhône Valley and nearby Lake Geneva. Interestingly, as dissimilar as the schools are in many respects, both have a common challenge: helping their students build character, resilience, and self-esteem. In that regard, it turns out that kids who come from extremely “advantaged” backgrounds can struggle as much as kids who come from “disadvantaged” backgrounds. (It can be dispiriting, even emotionally debilitating, to grow up in the long shadow of an extremely successful and/or famous parent, trying to find your own identity and path in life, just as it’s hard to overcome the many day-to-day challenges of growing up poor.) To address the character/resilience/self-esteem issue, both schools rely on a time-tested pedagogical strategy to get impressive results: EXPEDITIONS.

Two entirely different schools. yet their Small-group expedition dynamics and results are almost exactly the same.

Your scribe met QBE director Will Sutherland years ago at Aiglon, when it was much less expensive. Will was a mathematics teacher and sports master. I was a student. Challenging outdoor expeditions were one of the pillars of the school’s co-curriculum—and ethos. (The founding headmaster, John Corlette, spent some time at Gordonstoun, in Scotland, with expeditionary-learning advocate and Outward Bound® founder Kurt Hahn. Consequently, “JC” became a believer in the benefits of outdoor adventure early in his teaching career.) As much as anything else, the expedition component of an Aiglon education defined our unique boarding school experience. And apparently it still does. Here’s a recent Aiglon video of a rock climbing sortie:

FYI: A via ferrata (Italian for “iron route/path”) is a climbing route that employs steel cables, rungs, and or ladders, fixed to the rock to which climbers attach harnesses to secure themselves and mitigate the danger of any potential fall. Vie ferrate eliminate the obvious risks of unprotected scrambling and climbing or the need for sophisticated climbing equipment; in other words, they facilitate mountain climbing for beginners.

*QBE is not affiliated with Aiglon|Switzerland and the presence of this video on our blog is in no way an endorsement of QBE Outdoor Education by Aiglon or vice versa. It is intended only to make a point about the profound impact of outdoor adventure on high school students.

Below is another video, a short documentary, about an annual trekking expedition that is required for graduation from St. Benedict’s Prep. Many Newark schools are what Americans call “challenged”; their achievement test scores are embarrassingly low. But St. Benedict’s, an inner-city Catholic school, is a remarkable outlier—it graduates 98% of its students and 85% go on to earn undergraduate degrees! The school believes that a five-day trek every first-year high-school student is required to join is a large contributor, if not THE key, to its remarkable academic results.

“It is probably THE most important thing we do…above and beyond the academics…. Every school in the country should find some way to get their kids out in nature to realize there’s something bigger than you.”

—Ivan Lamourt, St. Benedict’s Director of Counseling

The school’s regular expedition route is a 55-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail, the famous woodland path that stretches across 14 states, from Maine to Georgia, through the ridges and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. The school has been such an amazing success story that it and its Trail expedition were featured on the popular U.S. television news magazine “60 Minutes.” (QBE did its first post about St. Benedict’s a few years ago.)

What is striking are the comments of students from both Aiglon and St. Benedict’s; they are all on the same page. They come away from their outdoor adventures with similar revelations. They learn the same life lessons. And those lessons stick.

*QBE is not affiliated with St. Benedict’s Prep and the presence of this video on our blog is in no way an endorsement of QBE Outdoor Education by St. Benedict’s or vice versa. It is intended only to make a point about the profound impact of outdoor adventure on high school students.

So there you have it: the magic that happens when you undertake a strenuous exploit, outside your comfort zone, to achieve an ambitious goal.

Sailing expeditions are a variation on the trekking/mountaineering theme, just in a different register (You’re on the water, not land; and you use your arms and hands more than your legs). Participants learn teamwork, resilience, and leadership along with sailing skills and something about our area’s local cultures and history. They form strong bonds with new friends—their fellow crew members. And, like other young expeditioners, many of them come away with experiences and new insights they can use to help craft winning university admission essays.

Service projects are laudable and enormously satisfying moral imperatives. Challenging small-group expeditions, organized and supervised in large part by the participants themselves, are a different breed of endeavor—consequential investments in motivation, character, and confidence that also pay surprisingly high academic dividends. Who would have thought? Testing your limits outdoors usually translates into higher academic achievement in the classroom. It seems a stretch. But there’s ample evidence it’s true. Ambitious expeditions can be life-changers in many different ways, and we enthusiastically commend them to parents and teens looking for transformative summer enrichment.

Our Lives Are What We Make Of Them

Photo: Patrick Roberts

Many of the ELS's enthusiastic supporters and generous patrons attended boarding school at Aiglon College, a British international school in Chesières-Villars, Switzerland. The ELS's founder once taught there. Aiglon was established in 1949 by an Englishman named John Corlette, who, while teaching at Gordonstoun in Scotland, met Kurt Hahn and was introduced to his ideas about the importance of challenging students with various demanding experiences. Convinced that Hahn was right, Corlette integrated rigorous hiking and skiing expeditions into his own school's basic curriculum. He also required all students and faculty to gather every morning for a meditation—an inspirational message followed by several minutes of reflection. The following is an excerpt from a meditation he personally delivered:

"... an awful lot of so-called grown-ups, many of whom are really only children with grown-up bodies—an awful lot of these grown-ups spend an awful lot of time complaining about their own lives, how uninteresting their lives are, how they never meet any interesting people, how dull their jobs are, how small their pay is, how silly their [partners] are, how idiotic their children, how unreliable their cars, how tasteless their food.

Well, all this may be true and a lot more, but if they are complaining to other people, and invariably they do, they are complaining to the wrong person. They should be complaining to themselves, for they are themselves to blame.

Our lives are what we make of them, and if they are dull and uninteresting, frustrated, colourless and unsatisfying, it is because we make them so.

[...] it is no good blaming those mysterious people 'they' at whose door we like to lay so many of our misfortunes. It is no good blaming God [...] As Shakespeare says in Julius Caesar, 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'"

He then went on to prescribe three remedies:

1) Accept responsibility for your own life.

2) Spend the time to know yourself.

3) Have the courage and self-confidence to be yourself.

That philosophy is in our DNA. And that is why, year after year, we do what we do.