Hot Lava!
The Summit and Everest Intersession has begun and Riekes Center is full of excited new people eager to try the many flavors of athletics, arts, and nature connection available here. The Nature Awareness department has our own Summit/Everest program too. This month, we’re training for a two-week wilderness backpacking trip in May.
How do you train for a wilderness trip? Studying the terrain and memorizing maps? Carrying 50 pounds of weights in a backpack over miles of hiking trails? Well, probably. But we’re going for something more fundamental, and a lot more fun, first. Today we worked on getting our woods legs. Getting your woods legs is sort of like getting your sea legs, but for the wilderness. It takes practice, and for most folk used to walking on flat, even pavement, it can be challenging! Luckily, the training is really fun.
Remember playing Hot Lava in the playground when you were 7 years old? We did that, but through the park. We set down our stuff and challenged ourselves to get as far away from it as possible in any direction, without setting foot on the ground. We started out balancing on a fence.
You can probably tell how challenging the fence balancing was (not at all). So we quickly moved up to clamber over logs and branches.
Even though we were only feet (or inches) above the ground, the stakes were high! We all fell into the hot lava at least twice.
Whether we pushed the edges of our experience by simply balancing over a log, or by full-body leaps into trees, we all found our woods legs by the end.
