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Jacks Genega has an MTV Video Music Award, a Cannes Lion, and multiple Clios for her visual effects design and video editing talents. She’s worked red carpet campaigns for American Express, Coca-Cola, and IBM. She spent a decade in New York City, years in Boston, and three years living along Amsterdam’s cobblestone canals. But when I spoke with her recently, she was calling from her van somewhere in the American wilderness, where she now lives full-time as the founder of Wildcard Wilderness, teaching survival skills to others seeking transformation in nature. Her journey from award-winning film editor to nomadic survival instructor is remarkable enough. The reason behind it is even more so.
The Story Behind the Story
When people ask how she transitioned from city life to full-time van dwelling and bushcraft instruction, Jacks has two versions of her origin story. The first is simple: burnout. After years of 90-hour workweeks in film editing, she was ready for something different. When she discovered the world of bushcraft, everything clicked.
But the deeper story goes back much further. In 2004, when she was just 19 years old, Jacks was kidnapped at gunpoint by two strangers in Boston. She was taken to a park where she was beaten, sexually assaulted, robbed, and abandoned. It was a high-profile case — the attackers had victimized multiple women across the city — and the road to recovery stretched out for years.
“I kind of grew up with this stubborn mentality that if I pretended like it didn’t happen, I’d be OK,” Jacks tells me. “I think most of us know that’s not the right way to deal with heavy circumstances and trauma. You kind of have to go through them to move forward. I never say ‘move on’ — I just say ‘move forward.'”
For years, she reached for things that would make her feel like “something other than a trash bag.” Some were what she calls “false medicines” — substance abuse, workaholism. Her job gave her validation, a way to be seen in a world that, as she puts it, “isn’t built to deal with people who have extreme traumas.” But she was also reaching for positive things: therapy, spirituality, connection.
The Call of the Wild
In her late 20s, Jacks befriended people who lived along the Appalachian Trail. Staying with them, she felt a pull toward the woods — a sense of aliveness and curiosity that fed something deep within her. “I felt that I had suffered for so long trying to fit in a world that I think essentially tried to get rid of me,” she explains. “But when I was in the wilderness, I felt that I belonged. I didn’t have to work to be somebody. I just was.”
But there was a problem. Having survived such violence, she was afraid of everything — getting lost, injury, wildlife. “I always feared the worst in life because the worst actually happened,” she says. So, she studied. She started small — backyard fires, tent camping in friends’ yards. The more she learned, the more freely she could explore.
Fire and Ice
In 2017, Jacks moved her editing company to Amsterdam. That same period, one of her attackers went to trial. Coverage of the case made the The New York Times. He was found guilty, but she felt the sentencing wasn’t fair. “In my head, I’ve already been sentenced to life because I never got the chance to have a normal one,” she says. “So, they should too. But they didn’t.”
Struggling to settle into her new life in the Netherlands, a friend suggested she turn to nature — her place of healing. She decided she was ready for her first solo expedition. She chose Iceland.
On day one, she fell into a crevasse. She managed to shimmy out, her rucksack having caught on rocks below. Later that same day, she felt the ground shake beneath her feet — an earthquake. As she watched, the entire face of a distant mountain collapsed in an avalanche. She has before-and-after photos of the landscape: The second one is simply missing a mountain. Most people would turn back. Jacks kept going.
On the third day, approaching the trail’s end, she sat in a grassy knoll surrounded by mushrooms and blue butterflies. A white arctic fox pranced nearby. And something shifted. “I realized that if you’re constantly searching for meaning in why something happened, there’s no point,” she says. “Just live. Have the best possible life you can possibly have. Justice wasn’t a number. Justice was in my body and in the life I could create.”
It was, she believes, one of the first times she’d truly experienced solitude. For years, she’d avoided being alone because she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts, her memories. “It was nature that started to really wash away those insecurities,” she says. “In solitude in nature, I found the best medicine I could have ever asked for — that I didn’t even know existed.”
Building the Skill Set
After Iceland, Jacks was hungry for more. She took a weekend survival course with Woodland Ways in Scotland, then enrolled in their yearlong Northern Forest program — traveling monthly from Amsterdam to study firecraft, navigation, plant identification, shelter building, and winter survival. She hiked the West Highland Way and the Coast to Coast Trail. In 2023, she spent 21 days hiking across the Swedish Lapland in the Arctic Circle.
When the pandemic hit and her mother passed away, Jacks returned to the United States. She continued training with instructors like Dave Canterbury and eventually worked for his school before launching Wildcard Wilderness — a name that winks at both her own story and the unpredictability of the wild. “With skills, wisdom, and guts, you can be the wild card and overcome against all odds,” she explains.
Creating Space for Women
Many of Jacks’ courses are designed specifically for women, addressing obstacles she understands intimately — from practical concerns like hygiene in the wilderness to deeper fears about safety. She references the viral “bear versus man” debate, in which women were asked whether they’d rather encounter a wild bear or an unknown man in the woods. “Statistically, the chance of being attacked by a man in the wild is actually higher,” she notes. “It’s a shame, but it’s true.”
She knows this fear from experience. While wild camping in Scotland, she was approached in the middle of the night by a stranger who announced: “I can see you, but you can’t see me.” She spent the rest of the night awake, one hand on a knife, the other on her personal locator beacon. Later, she learned the man was locally known as “the Loch Lomond Loony,” someone who terrorized hikers in the area.
“What I’m really doing is providing a space that feels safe for women to fail,” she says of her courses. “I wanted to be the instructor I wish I had — someone who could hold somebody’s hand and say, ‘You can do this.'”
What’s Next
Today, Jacks partners with organizations like Georgia Bushcraft and The Survival University in Colorado. She’s launching a new program called STEP — the Survival Training Expedition Program — a multiday backcountry expedition where participants learn navigation, fire-making, and wilderness skills while hiking and establishing new camps each night.
When I ask her to distill her philosophy into one piece of wisdom, she pauses. “Survival really comes down to mindset,” she finally says. “It’s figuring out what’s going to give you the fuel to keep going forward when you feel ready to give up. It’s the will to live.”
She thinks for another moment. “Everyone is always going to be a lot more capable than what they think. Believe in that. Believe in yourself. Don’t give up.”
It’s advice she’s earned the hard way — from red carpets to crevasses, from the worst humanity can do to the healing that wild places can offer. And now she’s dedicated her life to helping others find that same transformation.
Follow Jacks on social media: @wildcard.wilderness
Learn more about her courses and products: WildcardWilderness.com
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