October 10, 2008

The second expedition started off with a bang as we did 2 days of trail work in our expedition groups. We were trying to slow the effects of overuse on some of the fourteeners (14,000' + mountains) in Colorado. We worked to fill in an overused trail on Mount Elbert by thinning it. We partnered with a volunteer from the CFI (Colorado Fourteeners Initiative). We did restoration work too, adding plugs to prevent people from walking on the wider part of the trail. We also used logs and dirt to fill in the wide trail.

We loved the hard labor and found it rewarding to reduce the impact on the heavily used trails. The trail work also offered us a great time to talk and get to know each other in our new expedition groups. We were camped at a lower campsite and hiked up to our section of the trail each day. On the second day, a huge, dark cloud formed above us as we were working. We got our things to together and hiked back down through snow and rustling aspen leaves.  Overall, we had a lot of fun doing service and being handy!

In addition to trail work, some expeditions were able to summit the fourteeners on which we had been working away.  The South Elbert Expedition summited Mt. Elbert on Saturday the 4^th of October. We left our base camp at 6 am and began our journey to the summit of Mt. Elbert. We started the hike with our headlamps, but then decided to try to hike without them once we got onto the trail. We even passed by our trail work but could not see our beautiful work because it was too dark. After about on hour or so we began to see the sun rise over the other mountains.

The sight of the sun was marvelous and lit the rest of the way to Mt. Elbert's summit. We thought the beginning of the hike was fairly cold, but as we went higher and the snow became thicker and the winds began to pick up it got even colder. The snow also made it hard to summit because it was slippery in some areas. The wind and cold slowed us down a bit, but everyone persevered through the challenges the weather offered.

When we reached the summit everyone was freezing and elated. We stayed up on the summit for about 10 minutes and apprentice Oren gave us a few "summiting beans" (jelly beans). Afterwards, we descended back down to our base camp and everyone warmed up again.

The second expedition didn't just provide trail work, summiting, and new friendships, but a bunch of awesome classes that made the 2nd Expedition more than memorable. We learned a whole range of new things, from how to tie a bowline knot to how our public lands are managed in America.  We got to place ourselves in a gigantic grid of different leading styles and investigated the anatomy of a stove.  What really brought these lessons full circle is that we got to apply what we learned during our days of hiking and trail work.

We applied our new first aid skills (from WFA) and leading styles awareness as we prepared for our Independent Student Travel day in which no instructors hiked with us. It was all up to us!  From the stove lesson, we were able to quickly repair a malfunctioning stove and continue with our meal of cheesy pasta.  The lesson on the US's public lands only put our environment into a much larger and more important perspective, illuminating the freedoms we have as students taking chances in the wilderness. The lessons haven't left our minds, and just like the classes we had on the first expedition, the lessons we just learned will continue to support us in the future after our RMS.

As if that's not enough stuff to do in 10 days, we always made time for other community building activities.  On our expedition a typical night would be to go back to our tarp and cook dinner with our tarp mates.  One night we varied from this routine and decided to have a group "potluck" dinner. At our group dinner we had three stoves, three meals, and nine very hungry people. It was my first time doing a group kitchen, so I was shocked to hear that you were supposed to share your food made for three with all the other people!  We reluctantly doled out our cheese, tomato, onion and other delicious goodies and pasta into other peoples bowls, but when we got a hefty share of cous-cous, and mac-n-cheese, our bellies were quite content.

Not only did we do group dinners, immediately preceding circle every night was a spontaneous sing-a-long. The most frequent song was "Be a Man" from the Disney movie Mulan.  We played games of wilderness Jeopardy in which the highest score was 5,200 and the lowest was -4,300. The competition became quite heated on the last question, in which our EL, Sam, pulled off a clump of needles from a tree and told us to identify them. Overall we spent an enormous amount of time together on our trip singing songs, cooking meals, having healthy competition, games, and the works.  Not bad, considering we also built new trails, did restoration work, and managed to do some hiking as well!

By: Julia Hurley, Chris Ta, Ian Tullis, and Hillary Saunders