Outdoor Adventure

JOURNAL & GALLERY of ADVENTURE

ENTRY #1
05 August 2006
Bush Initiation

Okay, here we go! This first batch of pictures are from my first go at survival training, back in March of 2004. That was... quite an experience.

Since the experience is what it's all about, I won't be writing a great long story of what happened, but I will tell you a little of how the training was structured.

The training lasted 9 days:

Day 1: Arrive, settle in. At night everyone moved out to the training area and slept in our arctic tents. This was important to climatize us for what was coming.

Day 2: Classroom training all day on a wide variety of subjects. Stuck to the basics of fire, water, shelter mostly. Bow also showed us all sorts of neat things he had made, but that was not the focus.

Day 3-4: Individual phase. Moved out to the bush and were placed at our sites. Everyone spent 2 days and 2 nights on their own.

Day 5-7: On the morning of Day 5, we were gathered in and put into 2 equal groups. Enter: the Group phase. 2 days, 2 nights again.

Day 8: Day 8 was spent doing a lot of show-and-tell of our sites, skills we'd worked, and talking about what went good, what should have been done better. We also got some more lessons from Bow, this time on site. We were all very tired, wet, and cold at this point. Once we were finished, it was time to pack up and clean up our sites and the camp in the training area.

Day 9: Recovery, more discussions about the training.