The Red Tailed Eyas met for their
second outing of the spring season at the N. Lake Whatcom Trailhead.
After reviewing the weather history, it turns out it rained almost a
half an inch in Bellingham on this day! These observations matched
what we actually observed in the field: rain, and lots of it!
Luckily, Conor brought a tarp for us to use.
On our last outing, we were given a
shelter and fire building challenge. We learned a lot during our
debrief of this activity and recognized topics that we would like to
learn more about. One of those was learning utilize tarps and
paracord when making shelters. We also recognized that we needed more
instruction on how to build a fire outside, especially in wet
environments. Today the weather and the woods provided us with a
great opportunity to further both our shelter and fire skills.
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| The space left where a nurse stump formerly existed |
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| Hiking in the rain |
After a long hike up into the woods, we
came across a semi-protected grove of cedar trees and decided to set
up camp here. We were introduced some of the considerations of
setting up a tarp for a rain shelter. What way should the tarp
angle? Will the wind affect the tarp here? What if I don't have very
much paracord?
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| Taking refuge from the deluge |
After getting our tarp set up, we sat
down for a snack and a quick drink of water. After this, we set off
into the surrounding forest to harvest materials that we needed to
build our fire. Some of us collected brachiated hemlock boughs to
use for kindling, others pounded cedar bark for tinder, and the rest
of us found a downed cedar tree that looked like its branches may
have been dry enough to use as fuel for our fire.
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| Preparing fuel by removing the bark from some downed cedar limbs |
After some good group discussion around
how to build and maintain a fire, and adequate time to source all of
our materials, the time came to try and light this fire. This was
challenging, and many of us took turns using ferrorods to send sparks
into our (ideally) dry tinder bundle. In the end, however, we were
unable to get this fire started.
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| It was a solid attempt! |
While reflecting on the whole
process, we recognized many things that we did well. We utilized all
of the members of our group and shared the tasks of kindling
collection, fuel collection, and tinder bundle making. We gathered
enough of these materials so that we could maintain this fire for at
least a half an hour. We respectfully took turns trying to light the
fire. Unfortunately, we did not do a good job of keeping our
materials dry while we were collecting them, and that ended up being
the fatal blow to our fire building process. Nonetheless, it was a
great learning experience for us as a group and illustrated the
challenge of building a fire in a wet, wet forest. We decided that we deserved some warm tea after a strong effort, so we harvested cedar and hemlock tips and licorice root fern and made some warm drinks for our cold hands!
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| Heating some hemlock, cedar and licorice root fern tea |
It should be noted that in addition to
working well together as a group, we showed amazing resiliency today.
It would be hard to imagine a randomly compiled group of middle
schoolers who would be so happy and content to explore in a downpour
for five straight hours. The mentors were impressed with our ability
to keep ourselves entertained and happy with imagination games as
well as task oriented focus. Be sure to check out the rest of the
pictures form this outing here.
