Meet Elsebeth

I am on a mission to support people towards greater nature-connectedness — and my prescription for that is Soulhike. I believe that disconnection from nature is one of the greatest lacks in today’s modern society. If we are out of touch with nature, we are out of touch with ourselves — our bodies, our deeper needs, and also those of others. We then make choices we would otherwise not make, to satisfy needs we would not have if we felt more connected.

I think one of our deepest needs is to contribute positively to the world — and it is out of this need that I made the decision to leave an academic teaching job to teach in a way that lies closer to my heart. I realise that more information is not the answer. Through interaction we can learn much more — and we need to go beyond interacting only with our own species and open ourselves to deeper interaction with the more-than-human world. Yes, I mean inter-action, since I experience that the more-than-human world answers us back. Communication is always dialogic.

And what about my real-life bio?

I was lucky to develop a deep connection to nature in my childhood, growing up in Nuuk in Greenland. My parents were biologists, dedicating their lives to wildlife protection across the Arctic and to climate-change research. They took me into the mountains and told me about the living world. When I was nine years old, in 1990, we moved to Denmark.

Then followed thirty years of schooling, marriage, two children, and a teaching career — and then the unravelling of that life, followed by moving to Iceland in 2020. Here I was brought back to my child self, who played outside all day in the fjöllin. I started taking on jobs in the Icelandic Highlands, and chose to go fully into guiding and hiking in 2025, when I founded Soulhike.