Who We Are

Carrie and Zach, Grand Canyon hiking guides

Your not quite fearless, but very experienced leaders

Carrie’s story:

I grew up as a very shy kid in the midwest, the daughter of a doctor and a stay-at-home mom, and the oldest child with a sister and a brother. Every summer and spring break, my parents would load up our minivan and pop-up camper with gear and we’d drive to National Parks, campgrounds, and lots and lots of historical sites all over the United States and Canada. I remember being completely mesmerized by my first sight of the Rocky Mountains at age 6, so the seeds of loving nature and travel were planted at a young age.

From those years onwards, I always had a small internal voice telling me that I was meant to live an extraordinary life. “Does everyone feel this way, or is it just me?” I wondered. In my school years this voice led me towards performing arts, and I spent countless hours playing clarinet in band, singing in school choirs, and learning to act and put on plays in my high school’s remarkable theater arts program. I desperately wanted to get out of the midwest and live the artist life in a big city!

Beneath the surface of a privileged, middle-class upbringing, I also grew up with a lot of religious indoctrination, perfectionism, and undiagnosed mental illness in the family. To cope I became pretty mature, stoic, and self-sufficient at a young age, and also frequently disassociated (not that I’d realize that was what was happening until much, much later.) I’d escape into my imagination, write poetry, and dream about my escape.

I applied to only out-of-state colleges and in 2005 I escaped to Hofstra University in New York, to study theater and film. It was in college that I began to question the conservative Christian beliefs of my family, and this questioning coincided with my discovery of alcohol. I distinctly remember the first time I ever “caught a buzz”, that warm and relaxed euphoric feeling of having all my social anxiety erased, finally.

Despite drinking and partying on weekends, I continued to be an overachiever throughout college, pulling straight As, working part time, and having a blast exploring New York City with friends. My interests in social justice and anthropology developed during these years, and in 2007 I was accepted to go on a summer volunteer program to Kenya, Operation Crossroads Africa. The volunteer work and integration into Kenyan culture was amazing, as were the opportunities to drink cheap Tusker beers and party with my new friends in the program. I used this summer as a test for my real dream, joining the Peace Corps. After graduating from college early in 2008, I moved back home to Ohio for 6 months to work at a restaurant while awaiting my assigned Peace Corps departure to Tanzania…

Zach’s story:

I grew up in a small town in northwestern Ohio. I always was able to keep myself entertained. Starting at the age of 6 I began piano lessons and I still enjoy playing music to this day. My parents homeschooled my younger brother and I, and we did a lot of hands-on learning. I enjoyed math, science, and art while disliking spelling and grammar. I remember being obsessed with dinosaurs, spaceships, legos, and building forts in the snow.
As I grew older I got more into sports. Baseball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. Maybe my best memories are street hockey in the summer, on the pavement, sometimes violent, always exciting. Several neighbor kids lost teeth and there were a few broken bones as well. When in little league baseball I was the first one to figure out how to throw a curveball. It was fun but as we grew older we didn’t really win anymore.

I ended homeschool to go to high school in order to play baseball. We won about 3 games my whole high school career. The coach blamed me but I blamed the coach who spent every evening at the local sports bar. Even though our team was terrible, we kids were all tight as friends and most of us had a good time.

High school school work was too easy for me, my small town school not offering a lot of good opportunities. My junior and senior years I started attending classes at a local university for college credit. One time in calculus class, a teacher didn’t give me an A on a quiz for not explaining my answers. The rest I got As on.

When high school ended I headed off to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. This was my heading off to the big city moment, leaving my small town. I didn’t really go back to Swanton too much after that, there was so much more to the world and I felt very free.

College dragged on as I endured years of Aerospace Engineering School. It was hard to stay focused as the subject matter was much more dull and boring than I expected. I found myself growing more interested in entrepreneurial endeavors and less interested in career engineering jobs.

I grew up being told to be careful of alcohol, like it was in my genes to abuse it. Eventually I stopped listening to the advice of my family and started drinking more and more. It made me feel less socially awkward, having been pretty uncomfortable my whole life. I gradually used it more and more, abusing it often and having a lot of friendships that evolved around drinking.

School was at a really hard point and I didn’t really know what I wanted with life. And then I met Carrie. She changed my world.

Carrie’s story:

Meeting Zach changed my life too. We met at a bar in Columbus one chilly February night. I was out with my girlfriends and he was out with his guy friends. Our tables ended up merging, and fueled by liquid courage I flirted with him. He asked me out and on our date one of the first things I told Zach was that I would soon be leaving for the Peace Corps. Because we knew our time was limited, we tried to play it cool and casual, but there was no denying our connection. We became inseparable as the clock ticked away on my four months in Ohio before leaving for 27 months, or so I thought…

We shared a similar upbringing and desire for adventure, and also a youthful and irresponsible love of partying. Before I knew it, I was in love, and in denial. “If I were you, I wouldn’t leave…” my best friend warned me. But Peace Corps had been my dream for several years, and I couldn’t imagine myself changing course for a guy. On the night I said goodbye to Zach I sobbed out, “I love you,” and he responded, “I love you too.” And I got on a plane the next morning.

We kept in touch the best way we could, which meant snail mail letters that would sometimes not arrive, emails I could only get every few weeks at internet cafes, and an occasional phone call after he scraped together the money for an international calling card.
Peace Corps Tanzania was truly “the toughest job you’ll ever love”, as advertised, and even though I breezed through training, learned Swahili very well, and thrived living with my host family for the first six weeks, once I got to my isolated, middle-of-nowhere village by myself, the reality set in.

I was a young, naive, and romantic 22-year-old with limited work experience being expected to integrate and manage projects in a tiny village where I was the only English speaker and no one had any idea why I was there. There were high highs and low lows. I left my village a lot to meet up with other volunteers in cities. Drinking was a huge coping mechanism for most of us. I made fruit wine in buckets at my house and although I wouldn’t drink by myself, anytime an American friend came over we would get lit. Looking back, I can see that I was just doing the best I could with the limited coping mechanisms I had. I was sinking into depression for the first time in my life, and missing Zach made all of it worse.

Zach’s story:

The few months after meeting Carrie were (at that point) the best of my life. I felt like I finally had someone to adventure with, something I had been craving since childhood. She quickly became my best friend, even with her pending departure to Africa looming. As hard as it was, I vowed to myself to not ruin that adventure for her, and didn’t ask her to stay.

At this point in time I was not doing that great in school. I had lost the passion for it a long time before, but being alone again sent me into a dark place. I spent a whole winter with a blanket over my window, smoking weed, and lost in a cold world of darkness. I knew my time in Ohio was nearing its end, so I looked for something else to do to clear my mind. School needed to be put on pause.

I helped my parents move to Arizona, and imagined a life out there, away from all the flat cornfields of my youth. Still Carrie was there in my mind. I would write her letters, and have the occasional phone call by use of prepaid phone cards. Whenever I received a letter, with exotic stamps, in brown paper envelopes… those were the best days.

Eventually Carrie came back for the wedding of her childhood friend. I picked her up from the airport and she took me as her date. It was the most amazing week, solidifying how much we actually cared for each other. When it was time for her to go back, I again vowed to allow her to make her own choice, as hard as that was. She admitted that Africa was really hard, and that she wasn’t happy there. I’m glad she decided not to go back, as hard as that decision was for her.

Our story:

From that day, when Carrie decided to not go back to Tanzania, our two stories became one. The two of us quickly set off for California, tired of waiting for the right time to see the world together. We criss-crossed the country, putting in road tripping miles, eventually settling in Arizona for a year to save money. We hosted Couch Surfers from all over the world, hoping to maintain these new friendships on own travels.

After a year of working and saving, we took a flight to Colombia in 2012. We spent the next seven months traversing Latin America, seeing 13 countries, volunteering, learning, exploring. Carrie was trying to use her film degree to make a documentary. We still have that footage somewhere, though I’m not sure if we have ever watched it all. Hopefully someday we can just look at our old selves as different people, instead of spending the whole time watching in judgment. We were pretty young and naive, but what 24-year-olds are not?

With inspiration from our first trip to California, we decided our next step in life would be to spend some time living in San Diego. Carrie continued working serving and bartending jobs for easy tips, and Zach into cooking.

Zach started cooking from the bottom, as a prep cook at a money-laundering gastropub. As a quick learner, after two weeks he was running the breakfast shift, but after six weeks had to quit when the restaurant’s check bounced. He was hired in his first interview after that to work as the pastry chef in a fine dining establishment, where he would spend the next two years.

There Zach learned about world cuisine, as the constantly-changing menu created daily growth for a young chef. He worked through different positions in the kitchen, and eventually became friends with the owner’s daughter, who was a vegan chef. Better vegan cooking was an exciting thing to learn, as Carrie had been a vegetarian since before they met.

When fine dining grew stale, Zach took a tour around San Diego, working for several different places, from corporate chefing to food trucking. Zach and a friend eventually started a food truck together, and Eat Your Heart Out was born. The food truck grew very popular very quickly, and the job soon took over Zach’s entire life.

Eventually the itch to travel was too strong for us to ignore. After 5 years in California, we took a flight to Thailand where Carrie had gotten a job as a hostel consultant in Bangkok.

After Carrie’s job in Bangkok ran its course, she picked up a videography gig for a yoga retreat in Sri Lanka.

Zach worked at several different restaurants in the country, learning Sri Lankan food, other middle eastern cuisines, and sharing his own plant-based recipes. He had the best time working for Ahimsa Vegan Cafe, where he helped some local guys expand their restaurant to another side of the island. There his specialty was savory jackfruit tacos.

Carrie eventually found a yoga school in Sri Lanka where she did her first yoga teacher training. The concept for Bigger Life Adventures was born in 2018, during this time in Asia. While exploring the majestic temple ruins of Angkor Wat with a friend, she said to us, “Why don’t you guys just do yoga retreats? You have all the skills and travel experience for it!” At first the imposter syndrome was strong, but by the end of that short trip we had a business name, website, and tentative plan! We hosted our first retreat at a simple campground in SoCal that summer, and some of the guests who attended then still come back regularly to this day!

In 2019, after returning from Asia, we opened Grand Canyon Eco Retreat, a glamping, yoga retreat, and guiding business near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. We hosted sold-out retreats at Grand Canyon Eco Retreat for five years, while also hosting in different destinations with Bigger Life Adventures!

Bigger Life Adventures is the result of all of our skills coming together. We hope to continue in lives of service, hosting retreats and sharing what we have learned in our years of travel and life experience.

Fast forward to 2025, and we have hosted nearly 100 of yoga and adventure trips around the world with hundreds of people. People in recovery from alcohol, people who are sober-curious, or people who are just seeking a deeper, healthier travel experience and a bigger, more exciting life! All our retreats are open to all, alcohol-free and trauma-informed. We are all recovering from something! 60% of our clients come back again to at least one more retreat, proof positive that the community we have created is wonderful and powerful!

Carrie spends time training yoga teachers in trauma-informed teaching techniques, offering classes in treatment facilities and schools, and running the yoga program at Flagstaff’s Juvenile Detention Center. She has also become an Ayurvedic Health Counselor and enjoys teaching workshops and doing private consultations to share this holistic wellness approach, the sister science of yoga, with people who need it.

Zach has become a Reiki master and just published his first cookbook, Plants on Plates. We both also work with our teachers at Lakshmi Rising School of Yoga & Wellness in Costa Rica and Italy, Carrie training yogis and Zach training plant-based chefs!

On top of Citlaltépetl, highest mountain in Mexico, and the highest we’ve ever climbed!

Our Certifications

Carrie:

Certified Yin Yoga Instructor via Bernie Clark’s Asana at Home Program – in progress

Yoga Alliance Certified Continuing Education Provider

Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher with 500+ hours of training certified by Yoga Alliance

Advanced 300-hour Yoga Teacher certification from Dr. Liz Lindh at Lakshmi Rising School of Yoga & Wellness

Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher & Teaching Yoga to Teens certified by Prison Yoga Project & Yoga Ed.

800-hour certified Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor via Joyful Belly Ayurveda School

200-hour Vinyasa Yoga teacher training certification from Lara Baumann at Quantum Yoga

Wilderness First Responder certification from National Outdoor Leadership School

Permitted Day Hiking Guide in Grand Canyon National Park

Zach:

Reiki Master certified by Lisa Powers

Holistic Nutrition certification

Wilderness First Responder

Permitted Day Hiking Guide in Grand Canyon National Park

Carrie Hoffman

Trauma-Informed E-RYT500, YACEP, Ayurvedic Health Counselor, Wilderness First Responder, Boss-lady

Zach Minnich aka “Zachalicious”

Vegan Chef, Holistic Nutritionist, Writer, Meditation and Breathwork Guide, Hiking Guide, Reiki Master, Wilderness First Responder.

Our Story

Our Certifications

Where else to find us?

Watch or listen to Carrie and Zach on these other podcasts:

Find us elsewhere on the web!