Outdoor Ed Field Trips

So our outdoor education field trips to Fort Clatsop, Ecola State Park, and Lake Sylvia State Park are right around the corner. Early Tuesday morning each age group at camp will leave for one of these locations and all of them except for the oldest group will return Tuesday night. The older campers will stay the night and return back to camp Wednesday night. In order to ensure that all of these trips go as planned I am reviewing the fifteen pre travel steps as laid out in Chuck Browns’ PRM 150 course.

I have spent the past six weeks working on aspects of the trips such as routing and scheduling, groups, rationale, locations, participants, accommodations, communication, and budgeting. These parts of our trips have been outlined in previous posts, and have been prepared for quite some time now. Recently I have been meeting with the various unit heads and senior staff members to go over the remaining facets such as activities, staffing, equipment, food and water, transportation, as well as safety and risk management.

Activities for the younger kids who will be attending Fort Clatsop include a hike from the fort to the ocean, exploring fort exhibits, and participating in the National Park Service Junior Ranger Program. Those heading to Ecola State Park will enjoy a much more difficult seaside hike past the Sea Lion Islands, and an afternoon swimming in the Pacific Ocean. As for the oldest group who are traveling to Lake Sylvia State Park, we have planned several extensive hikes throughout the area which will lead them to lookouts amongst the Olympic Mountains. They will also be able to swim in the nearby lake, and participate in team building activities throughout the entire campout.

Due to the fact that the staff assigned to each age group will be traveling with their own campers, the main issue of staffing relates to safety and risk management. The youngest campers will be in the hands of the National Park Service Rangers, a guide that the camp has used in the past, as well as staff certified in first aid and CPR. The group traveling to Ecola State Park will be accompanied by an EMT in addition to several staff members certified by the Red Cross. The oldest campers will embark on their excursion accompanied by myself and a former Israeli Army Officer. In addition, all of the campers and staff members are covered by the camps’ insurance policy.

All of the equipment we will be using is brand new, and was covered by the grant funds that I allocated earlier in my internship. The younger groups will be sent with hiking essentials such as a base camp first aid kit, bug spray, sunscreen, compasses, binoculars, a dry bag, and tarps. However the older group will be sent with these items in addition to much more extensive gear such as a camping kitchen, tents, flint sticks, campers tools, propane, cookware and mess kits, extra stakes, stake mallets, lanterns, rope, glow sticks, biodegradable soap, toilet tissue, and coolers.

Food and transportation were fairly easy tasks to plan for thanks in part to our camp caterer and office manager. They have arranged for a charter buses to take our campers to and from our outdoor education locations. In addition our camp caterer has arranged for all of the necessary food to be available for us to take with us on our trips. All of our sites are developed campgrounds or parks and have clean running water.

The final step in the pre travel procedures is known as triple check. This will include checking the latest weather forecast before departure as well as going over these steps again with all of the staff involved. This is to ensure that the trips go as planned, and that all of the staff are on the same page.

Attached to this post is a picture of an A-frame immediate action shelter that the campers built during one of my activities in the forest.

Listed below is a link to one of the books that Chuck used in our class text called Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming. Chapter 9 of this book includes pre travel steps, responsibilities of a trip leader during the trip, and evaluation procedures.

http://nirsa.humankinetics.com/showproduct.cfm?isbn=9780736052504