Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Every year as part of my job I lead a team of 10 college student leaders on a 7 day backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.  It is one of the best parts of my job description.  I really love the day to day work that I do with these leaders but to actually get to go into the back country for a week and get paid for it is pretty cool.  Our program has built into it 4 main elements used in the learning/development process: Solo, where they are on their own for about 24 hours, Leader of the Day, where two of the leaders are responsible for all of the decisions made for the day from traveling to setting up camp to meal schedule, Final Expedition, where the guide and I leave during the night and they are responsible for getting safely to the trailhead, and Summit, where, you guessed it, we give summating one of the Sisters a whirl.

All in all it is a pretty sweet deal.  I get to be part of breaking in some students who have never been in the wilderness before and be part of furthering their leadership skills on the whole.  What I don’t like about it is the masochistic training schedule our university’s strength and conditioning coach put together for us.  I swear this cat must be endorsed by the National Association for Lunging Lungers.  Every day has you doing 764 more lunges than the previous day.  I don’t know what’s worse, doing the lunges now or summating a 10,000ft mountain without doing them.  Personally I am leaning toward not doing them since it is only one day of the trip instead of every day leading up to it.  On the bright side though my tush now deserves to be cast in bronze and put in the Louvre.