For their first outing of the spring season, the Red Tailed Eyas gathered at N. Galbraith. As we waited for everyone to arrive, some of us rubbed the sleep from our eyes while others partook in some typical morning roughhousing. During this time, some of us remarked, almost proudly, that as a group, the Red Tailed Eyas don’t have “focus” and that we “don’t work well as a team,” and “would rather squirrel about in the forest,” than exhibit real intention. Little did they know it, but they were about to make themselves liars. As it turns out, the Red Tailed Eyas have a strong capacity for collaboration and focus that many of them did not believe they possessed!
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| The more debris the merrier (warmer)! |
In the month or so prior to this outing, we experienced a whole range of storms. We had lots of snow, rain, some freezing rain and of course, plenty of wind. This was evident as we moved through the forest; whole trees had been uprooted and fallen over, taking out smaller trees on their way down. The usually voluminous ferns had been flattened by the weight of the snow and freshly fallen trees and many broken limbs now littered the forest floor.
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| A meeting of the minds in our opening circle |
After our opening circle, we moved deeper into the woods and came across two shelters that had been built by another BEC group a few months earlier. We took time to assess how well these shelters were built and discussed the plusses and minuses of each. We then chose to redistribute these shelters back to the forest in order to keep in line with our Leave No Trace ethic.
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| One of the shelters we found - looks like someone spent a night in here! |
Then, suddenly, the mentors presented us with a surprise challenge! Because we are one of the oldest group, and our earth skill for this season is Shelter 2, the mentors designed this challenge to test our ability to build fire, build shelter, and work together.
The mission that we were tasked with was to build a shelter (one that would allow us to survive one night in) and a fire that lasted for at least ten minutes. The only materials that we were given by the mentors were two matches! In addition, we were allowed to use our knives and any other means of starting fire (flint/steel) that we had with us. With that, the mentors started a stopwatch, stepped back, and left us on our own to figure out, as a group, how to complete this mission!
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| Planning how to complete our mission |
After some initial group planning and delegation of tasks, we got to work in the shelter and the fire. Some of us collected sticks to build the frame of our debris hut. Others began to search this saturated forest for any hope of dry wood for fire building. Eventually, our hour and ten minutes were up (we were granted a ten minute extension by the mentors just before our original hour expired). We managed to build an effective debris hut and prepare a tinder bundle and some small kindling for our fire, but were not quite able to get it lit out there in the wind and the cold.
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| Adding more ribs to our debris hut skeleton |
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| The "skeleton" of our debris hut |
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| Harvesting cedar bark for our tinder bundle |
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| How should we build this fire? |
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| Debris hut in a partially completed state |
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| Trying to light the fire with flint/steel after we used up our two matches! |
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| It takes a lot of debris to keep us warm in a debris hut |
We held some great focus in our debrief of this challenge. We felt that we had done well on the shelter portion of the challenge and after assessing the debris hut themselves, the mentors agreed. While we were discouraged by our inability to start a fire, the mentors were less concerned with this. They told us that we had done very well in preparing our tinder bundle and collecting and preparing some very dry sticks for the fire. It is hard to build a fire in the wet woods, even with matches, and this really challenge helped us see areas where our fire skills can improve.
The richest conversation came during our debrief of how well we worked together as a team. We recognized that everyone brings tidbits of knowledge and experience to a group and it is important to make sure everyone is heard in order to do our best as a group. It was also noted that we worked together better when we were flexible and willing to compromise rather than stubborn and concerned only with our own wants and needs when it came to distributing the individual tasks necessary to complete our shared mission.
After three and a half hours of intentional, focused work and some solid self reflection, the mentors gave us the rest of the outing to do with what we pleased. We found some bike jumps hidden in the woods that held our attention for the rest of the outing. We had a blast running, jumping and racing up, over and around these dirt sculptures for the rest of our day. We even got to see and hear two barred owls talk to one another in the branches right above where we were playing!
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| Running and playing on the jumps |
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| Cringe-racing casualties |
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| Looking up at the two barred owls who were looking down on us |
In our closing circle, we shared what we were grateful for (as always) and also shared what kinds of skills we would like to work more on this season. We expressed a desire to learn about different styles of shelter (now that we seem to have the simple debris hut down pretty well) and more about fire. The mentors were excited to assist us in our quest for more skill and experience in these areas. As a final takeaway from the day, It was encouraging to see how capable we really are and how good we can be at working together when we set real intention around that. We are excited to grow our skill surrounding fire and shelter this season, and to continue to explore how effective we can be as a group when we work together!
Be sure to check out the rest of our photos from our outing here!
