Hello World!
I'm working my way towards making a website and realized that making a blog would be a nice stepping stone and a fun way to share some of my travel stories. I've linked to a picture I took last summer in Colorado. I went backpacking on a Sierra Club Leadership training trip. One morning when we were having our daily briefly and I gave my enlightening talk on proper camp stove use I noticed these magnificent beasts.
I learned and shared a few tidbits of information over the 5 days I had in Colorado. We were 6 leaders in training and 3 instructions between whom easily have 50 years of outdoor leadership experience! Hailing from the UK and USA.1) We ran a scenario in which one of our instructions became "lost" in the woods. There is a proper technique to searching and it requires a little forethought to achieve the best results. Everyone dashing into the woods can easily lead to more people becoming lost. We had 2 of us stay where we last saw our lost friend on the trail and the remaining people were made into the search crew.
A) Always set a time to abort the search and return to make a new plan. This is important because we don't want to become someone needing rescue ourselves and it's possible the lost soul may return on their own to the trail and we will still be looking for them.
B) Search in a grid pattern. Distances between searches is dependent of visibility because a searcher must always have another searcher within line of sight. i.e in a dense jungle you would be close together and in an sparsely vegetated field you would have much more distance.
C) Do you have a whistle with you? You should always bring one when you are backpacking because it's one of the 10 essentials. (Perhaps I'll get to these later) Good you brought a whistle!!!! It's much more energy efficient to blow one and to yell. Before everyone splits up. Make a plan 2 or 3 or 17 whistles in succession means I found him/ her? Go with three it's always the magic number.
