Wilderness Exploration

The wilderness trips are the heart and soul of Team, and a defining aspect of the program. It is the time on the trail that brought the community together, and kindled tenacity and growth in each student. Beyond the inspiring beauty of the wilderness it is also a perfect classroom. Everything on the trail is a group effort as well as an individual responsibility: students share the load by taking turns leading each day, route finding, map reading, cooking and cleaning, and setting up and breaking down camp each day. One of the goals of Team component is for students to gain the necessary competence to run wilderness trips on their own. To that end, our students actively participated in the planning of our trips, including fundraising, food selection, purchase, and repackaging, and equipment maintenance. 

To further help our students safely enjoy and share the wilderness, Team teaches a comprehensive Wilderness Medicine course as one of the core classes in the Team program.  Throughout the school year, students learn how to prevent and manage injury in the backcountry. The wilderness medicine course includes lecture, textbook learning, hands on practicums, skills clinics, and practical and written exams. This class culminates in a series of moulages that help students bring together the skills and emergency decision making processes they have learned. 

From the very first lessons in the classroom and the very first day hike, students begin to apply their knowledge of mitigating common medical problems in the wilderness such as blisters, infection, dehydration, and heat or cold related illness. Many Team students have decided to further their skills in Wilderness Medicine by completing a Wilderness First Responder course after Team. A WFR is a baseline for all wilderness guiding and outdoor education employment and thanks to the Alicia Scott Lee scholarship fund, Team has been able to provide a number of scholarships for students to be able to attend these classes for a WFR certificate. Over the years many students who have completed their WFR have gone on to work in the industry and many have returned to be wilderness leaders on Team trips, or patients in the moulages.  

The Wilderness Trips Logistics. In the past, wilderness expeditions during the school year included: a backpacking trip in the Sierras in September, a backpacking and rock climbing trip in Joshua Tree National Park in April, and a service trip and backpacking trip to Humboldt County’s Lost Coast in June. Students also do a short backpacking and camping weekend on Angel island in early February! In addition to the backpacking trips, Team students also spent eleven days exploring Marin's open space and wilderness areas, approximately one outing each month.

With this new Academy model of the program, we will most likely do two big backpacking trips a year with 1-2 additional camping trips.

 All the money for the trips is fundraised for by students, thus, the expeditions put no additional financial strain on the district. The costs for each wilderness trip include hiring leaders, purchasing supplemental gear, food, van rentals, and maintaining an ample fund to cover any out of pocket costs in an emergency. This fundraising was completed through car washes and other fundraisers, gear sales and a few annual grants. The Joshua Tree and Lost Coast trips were contingent on successful fundraising during the school year. 

 
Wilderness permits and a successful group size for an expedition is fifteen. The outdoor education industry standard ratio of students to trained wilderness leaders is 2:10. This ratio allows for prudent guidance and care for students as well as sufficient personnel for any kind of evacuation procedure. To stay within such guidelines, Team will break the class into three groups of 9-10 students, and three wilderness leaders for each wilderness expedition. 

Finally, a large part of any successful wilderness trip is well taken care of gear. This gear is expensive and as a public school program Team made sure to provide everything that the student would need to be in the wilderness comfortably and safely. To that end Team maintained a comprehensive gear room with backpacks, jackets, sleeping bags, bear cans, stoves, cook kits, tents, first aid supplies. Learning how to operate and repair the gear was an intricate part of the program and is an important skill to have in wilderness trips.