It’s been a while since some of us have been on trail, so remembering our knots took a little refreshing! We did a quick lesson during our second meeting, and everyone did pretty well—most people remembered their knots pretty quickly. We went over the square knot, bowline, double half-hitch, and taut-line. Hopefully, soon we’ll get to practice our tarp skills and see what everyone remembers from that too!
We also went through our route and collected UTMs for each of our campsites, then practiced using compasses. Since bushcrashing requires solid navigation skills, we made sure to practice setting bearings on the map. Compass skills are easy to forget, but everyone did awesome!
At our next meeting, we worked on organizing and packing our kettle pack. It was way easier without bug bars and TP! We went through the kettle pack inventory list to make sure we had everything we needed, we got a brand new stove this year! I also showed the girls our new water filtering system that we’ll be bringing along, along with our platys. We’ve even added an old-school alarm clock to the kettle pack—I’m not the best at waking up on time, so I’m hoping guide of the day can use it to help get everyone up in the mornings.
The last thing we did was go through some gear order form items—those who ordered boots got to check out the new version! The new Astrals dry way faster, so that’s a win.