Trips Team Tackles Food, Routes and More—Remotely

By Alex Ernst

This June, instead of organizing a game of scatter dodge on the ballfield, our staff was hard at work at home, collaborating remotely to improve the quality of our program. And despite not setting foot on Deer Island, they accomplished a great deal, especially in the area of wilderness trips.

Trip head Charlie Barnes walks upstream on the Foster River trip. (Chase Edgerton)

One of the projects they undertook was developing a trip head accreditation program, something we had talked about for years but never had the time to bring to life. The general idea is that staff begin training to be trip heads when they are CITs, working through a checklist of skills they will need to be effective wilderness leaders.

From meal planning to compass navigation to teaching paddle strokes, these skills fall into four major categories: safety, trip planning, canoeing and campsite. Ideally, by the time a staff man turns 21—the age at which he is eligible to be a trip head—he will have worked through this program for three or four years.

The accreditation process allows us to standardize our training and provide even better wilderness experiences for campers. It will lay out a clear path for any young man to one day be a trip head. Many seasoned trippers offered advice and suggestions for this program, and we are excited to set it into motion next summer.

We also had a team working on trip food and nutrition, scrutinizing our current meals and finding ways to make them more calorie-dense and nutrient-rich. Trip food is a topic dear to our hearts, and everyone seems to have a favorite campfire dish. 

Bowls of granola await milk and cocoa on the Bloodvein River. (Ben Woods)

Not too long ago, we carried heavy cans and lugged them over portage trails. Then we started using dehydrated food, and now we have freeze-dried food as well. Many of our meals are high in sugar and carbohydrates, so we are looking to boost the levels of protein and healthy fats. Our trip food team also made it easier for trip heads to order their food by putting recipes and menu planners all in one place. They even created a Trip Head Food Manual, a guide for the often-daunting task of ordering enough food for 12 people, but not so much that the wannigans are unmanageable! 

Yet another element of our summer planning was to look at contingency plans for the future. With the Canadian border closed to non-essential traffic this summer, we looked at a number of new canoe routes in the US, including an old Voyageur route from Rainy Lake to Lake Superior that would start on Deer Island and culminate in an 8.5-mile portage—to be completed by Seniors.

Also close to home is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, famous for its beautiful waterways, yet untouched by Kooch paddles. A little further away is the Flambeau River in Michigan, 150 miles of scenic paddling with class I and II rapids. Whether we set up our tents on Canadian or US soil next summer, we will be ready to launch new adventures!

This article was originally published in the Fall 2020 Tumpline.