I recently traveled to Albuquerque to attend the Wilderness Risk Management Conference, which was excellent and gave me multiple opportunities to reflect on the importance of outdoor recreation and on what we do at Camp Regis Applejack (CRAJ) to keep campers safe.

There are multiple layers to unpack here, but I will start with the topic of risk itself. The president of the American Camp Association shared an article with me last year on the general topic of the changing workplace, and on some of the skills that workers will need in order to succeed. One of the sentences that leapt out at me was that workers would need to be able to “thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty.” I will write more about this in a future post, but to summarize my thoughts: there is no better learning tool for those skills than wilderness trips and outdoor education in general. I believe that too much of education is devoid of uncertainty, challenge, interest, or excitement. Educators need to be more outspoken about the fact that we cannot prepare our kids for the future they face with standardized tests. And not only are wilderness trips incredibly useful for teaching students to thrive in uncertain conditions, they also teach teamwork, resilience, appreciation for the planet and maybe best of all, they are fun. Almost all of the students at camp described outdoor trips as among their favorite parts of camp.

OK. So, the first layer of our approach at CRAJ is similar to that of many of the organizations I met at the Wilderness Risk Management Conference, such as Outward Bound, the National Outdoor Leadership School, and a number of summer camps around the country. The backbone of the approach is this: there is so much value in taking kids (and in fact, all people) into the outdoors that it is worth the inherent risk. The two key questions for all of us who undertake this work are: 1) what are the risks we are willing to tolerate and 2) what do we do to manage those risks. One of the risks in the wilderness is that there are unpredictable and uncontrollable factors, such as weather. At camp we mitigate those risks by checking the weather report daily and training staff to pay attention to weather-related factors that impact safety. When we are at the camp beach, we pay close attention to incoming storms and the instant we hear thunder, even if it’s in the distance, all campers must get out of the lake and we don’t return to the water until 30 minutes after the last audible thunder. Similarly, when we sail or canoe on the lake, we take precautions by having campers wear PFDs at all times and getting off the water in unsafe conditions, such as extreme wind.

There are some other broad measures we take at camp, ones that are important for parents to understand. The first is that the majority of our staff are over 21. I have visited many camps where a high percentage of the staff are teenagers. I am not criticizing those camps, but the fact is that many teenagers are still very much developing their own independence and sense of judgment and responsibility. I do think younger staff can be excellent, but they need to be appropriately supervised. There are camper supervision ratios that are governed by state law, but aside from that baseline standard, we train our staff to avoid being 1 to 1 with campers if at all possible. That means that if one camper needs to leave the beach to go to the bathroom, a friend will be asked to tag along. Background checks of all staff are also required by state law, but again, it is important that we go beyond that requirement and make sure we set up a culture of safety and respect that is a constant part of camp life.