A few years ago some of my college buddies and I went on a 4-day overnight canoe trip in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota.  We flew in from all around the country, met at the family house of one friend, got outfitted and food supplied, and then set out the next day from the town of Ely.  I was unofficially appointed the navigator/map-reader, maybe due to the fact that I had more outdoor experience than the others. Everything went swimmingly the first day, and I started feeling pretty proud of my abilities, which for me is a classic red flag that disaster awaits. Just as a quick aside here, the Boundary Waters (at least where we were), are different from Adirondack canoe waters in one key way: the portages and campsites are not sign-posted, so map reading becomes a little more important because, unlike the Adirondacks there are no signs to confirm that you are in fact, on the right track (or not). 

On the second day, I determined based on my expert map-reading that we had about a mile of paddling until we swung left into an outlet that led to a portage.  I kept my eyes peeled and after a while I started to feel like we had gone more than a mile, so I tried to read the map closely and match it to the landscape before my eyes.  Somehow I just couldn’t find anything that made sense. It was disorienting. I expressed to my friends that I thought we should already have turned. A couple of them looked at the map with me and none of us could make heads or tails of it, so of course we decided to just keep going.

After maybe another hour or so, we finally came upon the first group we had seen all day – a couple of fishermen in canoes – so we decided to approach them and see if they knew where we were on the map.  They informed us that we were about 2 miles into Canada (none of us had passports) in the Canadian equivalent of Boundary Waters, Quetico Provincial Park, for which we had no permits. So, we quickly turned our now-illegal selves around and paddled hard into a headwind until we were back in America. Now properly oriented, I was eventually able to find the outlet leading to our next portage, which had been somewhat obscured by a small island I hadn’t noticed. Needless to say, my friends were less than thrilled with my navigation that day.

In my last blog post, I mentioned a white paper that was shared with me by the president of the American Camp Association.  The paper is not the best thing I’ve ever read. It has a lot of jargon and feels quite speculative in places.  But there are parts of the paper that really resonated with me and one of those parts was about skills that workers in the future will need, among which are empathy, emotional regulation and the ability to thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty.

What better way is there to learn about ambiguity and uncertainty than on wilderness trips? I would say that the best trips and hikes I’ve been on in my life all had that key quality of uncertainty.  We didn’t know where we were on the map, or if we would make it to our campsite for the night or if we would reach the summit. 

There is a lot of joy and satisfaction in the problem solving that comes with resolving the uncertainty.  That is a piece of what I try to impart to campers on all of our trips. There is an art to doing this because it needs to be done in a way that gives campers some real agency and choice while also maintaining their safety. That is what we do at Camp Regis Applejack because a) it is incredibly fun and b) it teaches campers lifelong skills that they will need to thrive.