This year, the Crew, and some invited older scouts from the troop, got to go on the Arctic Wolf training. Arctic Wolf is a snow survival skill training that focuses on surviving in the snow, search and rescue, avalanche awareness, and more. The group got up early and departed from the church at 8 am. Upon arriving in the mountains by the snow, we unloaded gear and backpacked almost a mile on snowshoes (with some of us dragging polk sleds too!) to our campsite. Once we arrived at our “campsite” (aka an open snowy field off of the main trail), we set to work on building our snow shelters. This involved stomping down snow, then cutting condensed bricks out of the snow with saws and shovels, and stacking the bricks around an area to build our shelters. After the tiring work of building our shelters, we settled down for dinner and went to bed.
We woke up the next morning (thankfully without a midnight wake-up call to do a hasty search in the dark) to pack and tear down our shelters (of course with light-hearted jokes about how we were spending Valentine’s Day freezing in the cold with our friends). We then broke into groups of 6-7 to do the different “stations” of activities. These included learning how to build a hasty shelter in the snow with only a tarp within fifteen minutes, how to build fires on the snow, how to use avalanche probes and beacons, how to recognize the danger zones for avalanches, how to rescue an immobile person off of a slope with a z-rig and burrito wrap, and how to conduct a hasty search in the snow.
After a morning of going through stations, we finished packing our gear and headed back out towards the car. Funnily enough, we ended up doing a larger-scale hasty search for one of our adult leaders due to them accidentally dropping a hat by the trail, leading the group to think there was another training exercise. Overall, it was a great outing; we got to learn a lot of cool skills and we got to spend time together with our friends which is always a party.
By JaredÂ