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Adventure Treks on College and Reunions

It’s been a big week for early enrollment decisions for some of our Adventure Treks Alaska and Leadership Summit students. Huge Congratulations to Anna Gabianelli and Ali Hamlin for getting in to Dartmouth, Michael Moorin for getting in to Princeton, Ariana Lutterman for Yale and Josh Silver for Brown. We can’t wait to hear where others of you are going. Please let us know, we can put you in touch with AT students already attending your new school!

Not everyone is as fortunate to land at their first choice of school as these students did. If you didn’t, please know that sometimes in the big picture that can be a good thing, too. You just may not feel that right now, but you will probably feel great about the school you end up attending at a later date.

We know that the confidence, resilience, love of community, tolerance for uncertainty and independence strengthened at Adventure Treks will be part of the toolbox that will insure these great students’ success at college. Here is a link to an article by my friend and business partner Steve Baskin, a camp director who blogs for Psychology Today on how summer camp gives kids an advantage in college.

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/smores-and-more/201112/creating-advantage-in-college

Fourteen of our Alaska students attended a reunion in Pennsylvania last weekend and Several Cascades Challenge students will be getting together next week in NC near my home. I am excited to get to see them and hope they can come over for dinner! I am so thrilled that friendships made at Adventure Treks are thriving beyond Adventure Treks and are important enough for people to work hard to spend holidays with each other. These relationships are what Adventure Treks is all about and i know many more of you will find time to visit Adventure Treks friends. One group of former AT instructors, now in their late thirties and with children, have gotten together every New Years Eve for the past 11 years!

All 2011 students should be received something from us soon. We are proud of our new 2011 brochure. It will be landing in your mailboxes in early January. Enjoy the run up to the holidays.

Best, Dock

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To over protect or to under protect- that is the question

My nine year old daughter squealed with delight as the wind whipped through her hair. We were probably going about 35 miles an hour down a steep downhill. Her eight year old sister, the quieter of the two, looked up with a similar sense of glee. We weren’t on a roller coaster or a mountain bike; my kids were standing up in the back of a pick- up truck! Before you cast aspersions at my irresponsible parenting, know that we were riding on public transportation, or what passes for public transportation in Guatemala. My six person family shared the back of the pick-up with 16 others and my kids were actually in the safer positions. The vehicle was so overcrowded that people were hanging off both the back and sides. This was the only alternative to walking the nine miles to town and at 65 cents per person the price was fair. Cheap compared to the fifty dollars it would cost to ride Harry Potter at Disney! From my kid’s perspective, they now wish the crowded pick-up could replace the family mini-van as their daily transportation to school!

Traveling in Guatemala as a family was the eye opening experience that we had intended for our kids. We called it a field trip, not a vacation. For them to be approached by even younger children selling trinkets in the streets in order to put food on the family table was entry into a world far different from theirs. They were surprised to see seven year olds working, carrying 30 pound bundles of firewood on their backs along the side of the road; or five year olds with their own shoe-shine business.

I certainly came home with the conclusion that my kids were even more overprotected than I had thought. A recent Wall Street Journal article written by Lorene Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids asks “If age ten in America is now the new two?” Compared to life in a Guatemalan village, it certainly is. To go from a world where simple balloons carry warnings that they should only be used under parent supervision for those under the age of 14 to a world where five year olds roam freely, obliviously ignorant of the US State Department warnings about every possible threat from carjacking to kidnapping to imminent earthquake, was eye opening.

Can our kids live a full life in a bubble wrapped world? Parenting in the 21st century is more challenging than it’s ever been. Consequences from a single misstep can have a lifetime of consequences and the media insures that we hear about every potential misstep every second of every day. But what do our kids miss when we remove all risk from the equation? For all of us parents, who keep the safety of our kids first and foremost, it’s a giant balancing act. How do we as parents give our kids experiences, teach them to assess risk, and to discern between reasonable and unreasonable risk? How do we train them to make good decisions as they navigate an increasingly challenging, difficult and competitive world?

I wish I had all the answers; hopefully a summer at Adventure Treks helps… it gives a teenager independence, challenge, the ability to try some “risky” activities and the opportunity to learn to assess risk, but with a great role model looking over their shoulders and adding both input and veto power.

Letting go in a scary world can be tough; giving our kids the tools to make sound decisions is our only defense. There are consequences to both over parenting and under parenting. Parenting is quite a ride, isn’t it?

Best, Dock

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Recent Research on Adventure Treks Benefits

Most students report that Adventure Treks was the best summer experience of their lives and the friendships made at Adventure Treks last for a long time. But in addition to creating a great wilderness adventure experience, our focus has always been making Adventure Treks a growth – oriented experience.

We are excited to report the results of a University of New Hampshire study on Adventure Treks. We used to think that improving self confidence in youth was important and it still is, but increased self confidence does not correlate as highly with future success as does increased social competence. Thus, the purpose of the study was to discover if Adventure Treks improves social competence in teens. Social competence includes the ability to have meaningful relationships with others, the sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself, the ability to address issues when they come up and a desire to seek out strong relationships in the future.

After analyzing two years of data, the researchers conclusively proved that after a summer with Adventure Treks, students are more motivated toward developing meaningful relationships with others and their focus towards learning and growth has positively shifted. It was not lost on the researchers that these results may be unique to Adventure Treks because of the skilled level of facilitation by the Adventure Treks instructors and our intentional focus on building a community.

In addition to improving social development, there was a strong correlation that an Adventure Treks summer helps students avoid negative social behaviors. We will also note that the researchers were impressed with the level of social competence our students demonstrated from the beginning.

The simple conclusion is that while Adventure Treks is an incredible amount of fun, it also contributes and reinforces positive social development in already wonderful kids.

This study will be presented at all the major outdoor education conferences this winter as well as several mainstream education conferences throughout the year. Thank you to The University of New Hampshire and the many families who participated in both pre and post tests.

At the end of each trip, Adventure Treks students complete a survey about their summer experience. Here are their self reported results:

I feel the Adventure Treks experience improved my:

Ability to Lead Others – 74.5 %

Self Confidence – 76.1%

Outdoor Technical Skills – 88.2%

Sense of Responsibility – 77.5%

Communication Skills – 64.7%

Safety Awareness – 60.8%

Spirit of Volunteerism – 71.5%

Ability to be a Better Friend – 69.4%

Love of the Outdoors – 90.0%

You are providing your child with a great formal education but we all know that many of the skills needed for future success are best learned outside of the classroom. The official 21st century skills include collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, and leadership. Adventure Treks is pleased to provide a fun and exciting format that helps teenagers improve these skills.

Best, Dock

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Thank you for a Great 2011 Season

Thank you to all. Our 2011 Adventure Treks season ended on Monday and we can now officially say thank you for a great year! It feels like it’s been our best year in a long time. I know it seems like forever since you left your friends and your instructors, but we haven’t stopped. This fall, we have provided outdoor and science adventures for 859 students from 14 different schools. We have integrated several of these programs into our new 126 acre summer camp facility, Camp Pinnacle, located just a mile from our office. It’s great fun to finally have our own facility for our NC programs. The Blue Ridge students got a sneak preview last summer (www.camppinnacle.com – the website is still a work in progress.)

Most importantly it’s been a very safe year. Combining our 859 school students and our 438 summer students, we ran a total of 13,100 user days. Out of 1297 students, only one student went home for an injury at Adventure Treks. (A broken collar bone incurred from falling off a mountain bike in California).While even one injury is too many and while it hurts missing our goal of zero, we are glad our injured student has healed.

I want to thank our 80 field instructors and 7 office team members who poured their energy and commitment into making this summer safe and successful. It’ been a real privilege working side by side with each one of you and I can’t thank you enough for always putting our students first and for your commitment to creating incredible and indelible experience for youth. In our next blog we will be releasing results from a University of NH research study along with our own research that shows the demonstrated positive effect that Adventure Treks has on youth. I am proud to be part of an organization that makes lives better while connecting students with nature.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank our students; we get to work with incredible kids. And I’m convinced that AT kids are pretty much the best kids in the world. It’s been an honor to have the opportunity to work with each one of you.

It’s been a great year! We’ve worked hard and we are ready for vacations of our own! Today instructors Liddell Shannon and Kara Sweeny put their kayaks in on the Headwaters of the French Broad River here in NC. They will paddle through 8 states all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. They will have a big support crew of AT friends and family for day 1. Next week, D’Mac and Niki will be traveling to Nepal to trek to Everest Base Camp; Neil is going to Chile to climb big peaks as is Callie and Kenny who are headed to Ecuador. Sandy, our administrative director is going paddling in the Everglades while John Greene is going paddling in New Zealand. The Dockendorf family will spend Thanksgiving exploring Guatemala. Many ski areas (Mammoth, Park City, Jackson Hole, Big Sky to name a few) are now getting their Adventure Treks instructors and ski patrollers back for the winter.

We remain hard at work, collecting and implementing ideas to make summer 2012 even better. We are adding a new trip to Colorado, Opening Camp Pinnacle and much more. We are excited that Mike P. will be joining our office team full time in January. Close to 200 students have already signed up for 2012 and a few trips are already almost full.

Thanks for your role in summer 2011 and we sure hope you will be part of great adventures with us in 2012!

Best, Dock

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Resilience

We remain in full swing at Adventure Treks. Our twelfth school program of the fall is in the woods. We have two more programs next week. It’s been non-stop since May and I will admit, all of us are excited for November and the chance to take some personal time, but we still have work to do.

On Monday, we received a wonderful letter from a summer 2011 student. She had wanted to break the cheerleader prism from which she felt others viewed her, so she joined us last summer in British Columbia. She did an outstanding job on her trip and this success was wonderfully reinforced by her letter. In it she stated that she has brought back from Adventure Treks a willingness to push herself in every new challenge she entertains. She never wants to miss the most “beautiful view in the world,” and she now realizes that the “beautiful view” comes as a result of the hard work invested in “gaining the summit.” Having already encountered snow in July, bird-sized mosquitoes, huge rapids, and heavy backpacks, our student notes that school challenges she once regarded as insurmountable are now easily overcome with a little perseverance and diligence.

On Tuesday, I used the theme from her letter to welcome 48, 8th graders from Atlanta as they embarked from their bus into the middle of Pisgah Forest, NC. It was a brilliantly sunny and warm day in the midst of perfect fall foliage. Knowing the weather forecast, I prepped them for the imminent adversity they would soon face. 36 hours, almost 2 inches of rain and a 30 degree temperature drop and, we had all the ingredients necessary to strengthen a school community, enhance life-long friendships and build a little resilience! Or we would have 48 cold, miserable, tired and wet children facing the shared worst experience of their lives! These are the times where we know that the leadership of our instructors makes all the difference. This is the time when character counts and a strong personal example makes all the difference.

In retrospect, my greatest learning experiences as a kid were the times which weren’t easy or fun, and things didn’t go as planned. I remember endless portages, sleeping with two inches of water in the bottom of my tent, and bushwhacking up the side of a mountain with no idea where the trail was. All these “disasters” facilitated my current work ethic and character. I hope the experiences we are facilitating today are ones our students will find to be productive down the road.

As a parent, I often find myself wanting to make things always easy and fun for my kids. It’s hard to not want this but I also realize that this is doing them a disservice. How hard to push? When do we pull the plug? (This school group will be spending tomorrow night at a facility with warm showers and lots of hot chocolate –instead of the camp site they were scheduled for.) This is the delicate balance we grapple with as we make decisions with uncertain conditions. It’s what makes Adventure Treks more art than science and the reason we all love what we do.

Thanks for being part of our community. Our 2012 schedule and a new video will be released tomorrow. Look for an email from us with details.

best, Dock

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A Big Announcement! Adventure Treks is now operating Camp Pinnacle!

Today, Tuesday Sept 6th is a huge day in our 18 year Adventure Treks history! Today we begin a long term lease of Camp Pinnacle. This is an 84 year old summer camp with a rich history located on a 126 acre wooded campus just a mile from our office. It has a beautiful 20 acre private lake and can comfortably host 200 people in over 30 separate cabins and buildings. The camp closed down after summer 2009 and has operated as an events facility for the past two years.

Our intent is to use this great facility to expand our Adventure Treks programming to younger ages. We are excited to reopen Camp Pinnacle under our direction for summer 2012. We will combine the best from our wealth of outdoor adventure and education experience with years of Camp Pinnacle tradition to create a unique and incredible summer camp experience for students ages 8 – 14.

Camp Pinnacle will also give Adventure Treks a much larger base camp for our Southeast programs, and our science based school programs known as the Southern Appalachian Science Center. Camp also creates opportunities for our star Adventure Treks students to begin their outdoor education careers earlier by allowing them to give back to our Camp Pinnacle campers as soon as they have completed a year of college. We are also excited to give Camp Pinnacle alumni a camp they can once again call their own and maintain this beautiful piece of property as a place to educate children rather than as a site for a lakefront housing development.

In true Adventure Treks style, we take official possession of the property this morning and around 11AM, 68 students from the Walker school of Marietta, GA will arrive for four days of outdoor education programming. No time to celebrate, It’s time to get to work!

Please spread the word about Camp Pinnacle. We will need your help. We are going to grow Camp Pinnacle slowly to make sure it’s quality is as unique as Adventure Treks’. For summer 2012, we will offer just two, two-week sessions. The new website CampPinnacle.com will be up in a few weeks.

Huge thanks to the well over 100 students who have already signed up for Adventure Treks summer 2012! You are going to love your new fleece and we are already working hard to make next summer even better than last. Many instructors have already committed to next year. Only 295 days until summer 2012! There is a lot going on in the AT world and we are very excited you are part of it!

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Adventure Treks begins the Fall Season!

After a demanding but wonderful summer, many people expect that we get a long period of relaxation and personal outdoor time before we begin the challenges of preparing for next summer. While that might make the most sense it couldn’t be further from the truth.

On Tuesday, we opened our 9 week long fall season where we provide outdoor education, community building and science based programs for students from 14 different schools. We had only 8 days to travel across the country, catch up on sleep, download the summer and prep for our new season! Our schools will come from as far away as Florida, Tennessee and Ohio for these 4-5 day programs in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. In just four days, students will rock climb, backpack, hike above 6,000 feet, whitewater raft, play many teambuilding games and learn some of the science behind the natural world in which they will be immersed. Some programs are based out of a summer camp but most students will sleep in tents in Pisgah National Forest.

As a teacher who has worked with us over the past 15 years recently remarked, “I love your summer programs, they are incredible but you generally are already working with students who love to be outside! When you work with schools you reach many kids who, without you, would never get to experience the magic of the outdoors. It’s with these students that you do your most important work!”

Both programs are important and rewarding. It’s great fun sharing Western Carolina with 17 of our summer instructors who have traveled from the West Coast and over 850 students and teachers. Our instructors are currently in the woods with 88 tenth graders from the University School of Nashville, TN. tomorrow they go rafting.

As you return to school and leave the magic of your Adventure Treks summer behind, Think of us here in NC. We are still living outdoors with smiles on our faces. Do know that most every evening through Halloween there will be a plus delta still going on as over 800 students get to experience the magic of AT.

We wish you much success with your new school year. Enjoy the Labor Day weekend. Our thoughts go out to our students in NY, NJ and VT who have weathered Hurricane Irene.

Please stay in touch with us and your many AT friends.

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We aren’t ready for summer to end!

And then it was over… One minute I was talking with several students at their airport gate, the next minute they were gone – bound on a jet to their families, returning to their familiar world, but returning just a little bit changed. Spending time in wilderness does that to you. So does spending time with great role models.

I must say, I am sad to see the summer end. Usually I am exhausted. This year I have had so much fun with our great students and instructors, that I can’t imagine it ending. (Though I can’t wait to make my family a priority again) This has truly been an incredible summer, my favorite summer in years. It has also been a very safe summer, and that has been most important.

The credit goes to a wonderful Adventure Treks instructor team. They are tired, but it’s that wonderful kind of tired in knowing they have worked hard, made a difference and accomplished more than asked of them. The instructors used their years of experience to facilitate amazing and indelible experiences.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t thank you, our parents. Thank you for lending your incredible children to us. We love our kids and we are really going to miss them! Never have we had such consistently excellent communities and such a wonderful bunch of intelligent, kind, eager and excited kids. It has been a true privilege to be able to be of influence on these great kids who will become tomorrow’s leaders. People who disparage today’s youth need only spend a few days at Adventure Treks to become optimistic about our shared future.

We hope we returned your child to you full of stories, sun-kissed and healthy, more physically fit than before and with a great appreciation for the wonder of the outdoors, the give and take of living in a community, and the awareness of what it takes to be a contributor. I hope your child has had glimpses of their best self, are more confident to accept new challenges, more eager to accept responsibility, and demonstrating more initiative at home. I know they had the time of their life without electronics and media and hopefully they are eager to keep outdoor activities as part of their lives. Ask them to cook dinner for you. They should be able to pull it off without a problem.

We will miss the intensity of summer, the shared bonds with students and instructors and the boundless energy of our students. But Adventure Treks is hardly over for the year! We begin our fall programs for schools in two weeks. Eighteen of our seventy summer instructors are moving to North Carolina. Between August 26 and November 1, we will serve over 900 middle and high school students from 15 different schools in 7 states. These programs are a great introduction to the outdoors for students who might never get there without a school sponsor.

It’s sad to say goodbye to our students. I understand how a Principal feels at graduation – proud of the accomplishments of their students and wishing them well, but a little empty from the loss of saying goodbye to so many good friends.

Thanks for a great summer. We will keep this blog going with many more updates. Expect a thank you video in a few days. Pictures from your child’s trip will be posted on FLICKR soon. You will get details.

Thanks again for your support.

my very best regards,

John Dockendorf
Director

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Greetings from 30,000 ft – Lifetime Friends at AT!

I’m back in Oregon after spending time with the Blue Ridge students in NC. It’s a very busy last week of Adventure Treks. 13 trips have finished and 9 are still out there going strong. making the most of every remaining minute at Adventure Treks. Every student on the Pac NW Experience 2 summited Mt Shasta today matching the 100% set on Mt Shasta by Cal Challenge 3 a few days ago. We are very happy for them. these are the days that forge life long friendships!

When I speak to a group at final “plus delta” as I am doing every night this week, I like to celebrate our students many successes. The most important point I make, however, is imploring them to stay in touch with the great friends they have made on their trip. I am firmly convinced that friends made at “camp” are the best friends you can make. They have been tested through adversity, challenge and shared responsibility. This is personal for me.

As I look back over 51 years, I have been blessed with great friends from all phases of life. My best friends however remain my friends from my boyhood at camp. Friends I camped with, paddled rivers with and jumped off cliffs with 35 years ago.

We try to get together at least once a year. This February, as I surveyed our group of ten skiing at Alta, I was impressed at the level of professional success of my camp friends; from a PHD scientist for NOAA, to a leading surgeon, to the director of Innovation for a Fortune 500 company, to a judge, to a CEO of the nation’s top solar energy company, they have all achieved “success.” I am definitely the slacker in the group.

More important than professional successes, these folks are successful in their personal lives. Everyone is healthy, in good physical condition, married, raising great kids, involved in their communities and…. happy!

Certainly many factors influenced their ability to succeed. At the top of the list is excellent parenting and a good education — everyone has achieved an advanced degree. The interesting thing is … each one of us would say that our most formative (and valuable) experiences were the multiple years we spent at camp. Not school, not sports, not extra-curricular activities.

Like your child did this summer, we learned, developed, and shared outdoor experiences that still bond us. We spent our summer outdoors. We spent our time in small groups, learned how to cook, gained a myriad of outdoor skills, learned personal organization and faced natural consequences. We acquired life skills; we learned to assess risk, to challenge ourselves, to work as a team, to make good decisions, and to look out for others. We learned when to lead and when to follow. Perhaps most importantly, we learned to be comfortable in the face of adversity, and learned to be resilient. These are things not generally taught in a classroom. We spent nights sleeping in the rain, not eating if we couldn’t get a fire going, and portaging our heavy canoes. We explored places that we believed others had never seen. We challenged ourselves and shared the joys of living in a tight community.

My vision for Adventure Treks has been to give others the same indelible experiences I gained through many 8 week summers at camp, but to package it with an intentionality that would facilitate the same results and skills, in much less time. The experience has to match the needs of today’s very busy families and shorter summers. I hope as the summer draws to a close, you and your child will be able to reflect back on his/her Adventure Treks experience and feel it had a tangible effect on positive personal development that will last long beyond the summer experience.

The life skills learned at camp were important, but the most valuable benefits from my camp experience are the friendships which are strong to this day.

Please encourage your child to keep in touch with the friends made on their adventure. I hope 30 years from now, your child will still be going on adventures with friends made at Adventure Treks.

It’s a privilege to get to know these amazing Adventure Treks kids. We LOVE our students! I hope you will be able to meet some of these great kids as well when they get together outside of Adventure Treks!

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On Bears and Alaska!

I am certain you have seen the media coverage on the bear attack on a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Group of teenagers up in the wilds of Alaska. I know it made parents of any student still in the outdoors with us a bit nervous. The good news is that everyone will fully recover. As the person ultimately responsible for all of our students, it certainly made me a bit nervous. I wanted to better understand this incident before we published any comments (though of course we have communicated with Alaska parents.)

Anytime there is an accident or incident in our industry or at Adventure Treks, we try and study it, learn from it and figure out ways to prevent it from happening at Adventure Treks. Initially this bear attack made me extremely nervous because it contradicted our heuristic that there had never been a documented bear attack on a group of four or more. (This group size was 7) In Alaska we do everything in groups of four or more. We also have bigger hiking groups than we do in the 48 (12 (including instructors) instead of 10) primarily to make us more intimidating to bears. Over the years we have had very few bear encounters. We figure they hear us coming from miles away and lay low until we have passed. Of course we also carry bear spray, just in case. So far, in 13 years of running programs in Alaska, we have never had to use our bear spray.

NOLS is an excellent company and one of the safest. They didn’t do anything wrong and it seems like their students were very well prepared. This was a different type of trip than we do in Alaska in that it was an off trail section, it was a student led section and the students were hiking in an area known for bears. None of this would have created a problem except the students discovered that going up stream drainage was the only way they could move through heavy underbrush. Unfortunately it was early evening and even more unfortunately a momma Grizzly happened to be coming down the drainage. The consensus now seems to be that the students were a little spread out and the grizzly had no idea the group size was designed to be big enough to supposedly intimidate her.

Could a bear attack like this happen at Adventure Treks? It is certainly less likely at Adventure Treks but it is still possible. Our mission is different than NOLS. We do not do student led sections in Alaska; we stay on developed trails, and hike in larger groups. That doesn’t mean, however that it couldn’t happen to us. Bear and nature are unpredictable …as is life. The alternative to a risk free environment would be staying home in a padded room playing video or virtual reality games all day. We believe that ultimately the latter would be more risky to the mind, body and spirit. We have to accept an element of risk if we want to truly live. We at Adventure Treks and our partners in the outdoor industry like NOLS, do everything we can to minimize risk so people can enjoy the Adventure Treks experience. Whether driving in the suburbs or hiking in Alaska, we face some risk each day as soon as we get out of bed. Many philosophers will even argue that risk is an essential part of the human experience and to not have risk is to not be human. Our mission is to minimize risk, we know we can’t eliminate it completely and we thank you as parents for understanding the risks associated with our programs and activities.

We are ecstatic that all the students in the NOLS bear attack will recover. We have relocated our last backpack in Alaska which was going to be about 35 miles away from the NOLS incident. We feel a little bit better staying far, far away from that area this year. We always like to err on the side of safety.

And if your friends say you are crazy to let your children hike in the woods, raft the rivers and climb the rocks, you might remind them that they let their children drive in cars. 42,000 people a year die in car accidents. We know the outdoors is safer than driving, even in bear country!

Best, Dock

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