Beginner Camping and Service Project

OVERVIEW

Picture this: You’re on a backpacking trip and the rain has soaked through your pack and gotten the paper you wanted to use to start a fire all wet. You’ve strayed off of the trail and can’t find your way back to it because you’ve never really used a compass before, and you have no idea what all of those squiggly brown lines mean on your topo-map.

Want to avoid ending up in this situation on your first backpacking trip?

Join me next weekend at Douthat Lake State Park, in the beautiful Alleghany Mountains of western Virginia, and learn some important outdoors skills like navagating by comapass, reading a topo-map and terrain, and fire starting with nothing but twigs and sticks. We’ll also cook up some tasty camp morsels that we would take on a regular backpacking trip into the back country.

Camping will be at the Douthat group tent site (which isn’t free) but I’ve worked out a deal to get us in for no $$$. All we need to do is a service project for the park on Saturday. It’ll be hard work, but it will be really rewarding. Afterward, we will probably swim and boat on the lake.

This won’t be hard core camping. (There will be all the amenities of the park.) I would like to take people who signed up for the club because they’ve not really had a lot of chances to get into the outdoors the past. If you are Survivorman’s second cousin, I will be VERY upset that you took this chance from others.

However, you WILL NEED, at a minimum, sturdy shoes/boots that can protect your ankes from rolling (we’ll be hiking off trail), sturdy long pants/jeans that will resist briars, sticks, and scrapes, and a day pack. Also be willing to get muddy if its wet and to accidentally run into a few little six and eight legged critters while off the trail.

Lastly, I will make available 8 spots for this trip. I reserve the right to recruit one of Survivorman’s second cousins, to make 10 total, because I will need an assistant with a compass course.