Cold! Bone-chilling, face-numbing, teeth-chattering cold is a significant memory of my “Outers” experience in high school. Outers is an outdoor education program unique to a high school I attended in a small town in northwestern Ontario. It was, and still is, an endurance course not for the faint of heart. It instills a sense of power, a feeling of accomplishment, self-worth, and the knowledge that you are tougher than you think you are. Although no matter who you are, and how tough you think you are, it will make you snivel, moan, cry, whimper, swear, gripe, grumble and wish with all of your heart that you had never joined up in the first place. But you may also find yourself laughing, joking, giggling, sniggering, chortling, and thanking your lucky stars that you are fortunate enough to live in a place which offers such a program. Sometimes all of the above within a five-minute spread.
When I was involved in the Outers Program it was split into three different parts: The fall program, which involved learning how to read a compass then navigating through the bush and across lakes with a topographic map while learning to work together in brigades consisting of six to eight people, all the while trying not to kill each other, then paddling, and then humping, a two-hundred-pound Voyager canoe across lakes, rivers, and portages; a winter program, which meant strapping on snowshoes, carrying packs, and using slush sticks to get through deep snow, thick brush, and wide open, frozen lakes without losing fingers, toes, earlobes, noses, or people; and finally a spring program, which consisted of charting a trip from point A to point B somewhere in the wilderness, over a twelve-day stretch, while taking enough clothes, food, tents, sleeping bags, and provisions to ensure that your entire brigade would make it back alive, and in one piece.
Our first winter trip involved all the girl brigades going out to Lerome Lake to do some training with our snowshoes, and then cutting some firewood for the coming overnight trip. All week before our first overnight the temperatures hovered between -35 and -40 degrees and my father informed me that if it did not warm up he wasn’t going to allow me to go on the trip. At sixteen years old I thought it monstrously unfair of him and spent most of the week worrying that I would have to stay behind. But to my great joy, the weather warmed up to -25 and Dad said, “Go and have fun.” So I packed my arctic sleeping bag, matches, and roll of plastic, which we were to use as our lean-to shelter, and cheerfully joined the rest of the girls for our overnight adventure.
The warm tropical temperatures of -25 did not last long; that night, the mercury began to fall quite rapidly and by midnight it was once again in the low forties. I learned a few things that night. To begin with, rating an arctic sleeping bag for -35 to -40 is false advertising. A piece of plastic, open on one side toward a fire, cannot suck more as a shelter. And no matter how giant the logs are that you are burning, when it is that cold only half of you at any time will be warm.
I’m pretty sure that no one managed to get more than a few minutes sleep at a stretch that night as we spent most of the night spinning in front of our fires. Everyone was thrilled to finally see the sunrise. That is until we discovered that our orienteering trip that day was still a go. More than half the group refused to budge from their only source of heat, but to me this seemed to be just prolonging the torture. I decided that I would much rather be out and about and keeping warm all over than sitting still and freezing the side of me not facing a fire. So a few hardy girls split up into a couple of groups and we strapped on our snowshoes, picked up our slush sticks, and headed out into the maelstrom of frozen wilderness.
Later we learned that with the wind-chill factor the temperatures were under -100 degrees that day. No wonder it felt like summer when we made it off the lakes and into the shelter of the trees. The snow was deep and looked like crystalized sugar. Our group was small so breaking trail was even tougher than usual as we dragged our bodies through chest-deep snow, over log falls, and across windswept expanses. It was cold. Bone-chilling, face-numbing, teeth-chattering cold, but oh what fun.
Photo Credit
Gab Halasz: All Rights Reserved
Recent Gab Halasz Articles:
- Ho, Ho, Ho and Merry Friggin' Christmas
- Chicken Train, Sitting All Day
- Two Lone Pine Boys - Part 3
- Two Lone Pine Boys - Part 2
- Two Lone Pine Boys - Part 1
I nice bit of a vignette although it feels like it should be part of a series of snapshots of the Outers process. I can think of fewer parts of the High School experience that were more fulfilling than being involved in the program. Like you, most of us carry vivid memories of outers around with us and will, I suspect, until the end of our days.