Adventuring

I have been doing a lot of living lately. I've been traveling. Went to Hawaii to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday, to West Palm Beach, Florida for a conference, and just got back from a very fun trip to Colorado.

In Colorado, I learned how to use a compass and topographical map. A good life skill, you know? I was there with a group of incoming freshmen for the university where I work. About half the group participated in the orienteering activity, also known as the "adventure race" while the other half was rock climbing. We had to find different locations based on our topographical map and see how many of them we could find in a five hour period of time.

We split up into three teams. With 30 minutes to go (and the threat of penalties if we didn't make it back in time), my team decided to try to find one more location on the map. This last location looked to be just under a quarter of a mile away and with 15 minutes to go, we found our final location. At each location we had to complete an activity, and at this point, our guide informed us that this activity in particular would take about 9 minutes. He told us that everyone needed to agree whether or not we were going to complete the activity, because once we did, we would have about 5 minutes to get back to our original starting point without penalties. What this meant was that we would all need to sprint back to that point.

We all decided to go for it. We designated our fastest runner to put the materials back where we found them and all agreed to sprint back to base camp. Now, I'm 35 and in pretty good shape, and the average age for the rest of my group was about 19. I am proud to say we all made it back with about 2 minutes to spare, completely out of breath, and proud of ourselves for going for it. Turns out that with that final activity, we won by one point! If we hadn't gone for it, there would have been a tie. I will never forget the sight of my team sprinting across that field of sage as we hustled to make our rendezvous point in time.

In addition, we set a new camp record for the most locations found!

I was reminded that sometimes the rewards are greater when we take risks. My whole team felt a sense of accomplishment and we all agreed that even if we didn't win, we had given the activity our all.

Sunset in Colorado