Starting this summer Indian Brook is offering an awesome, new opportunity for young women. Hopefully, this will be the first of many options for Indian Brook girls to gain skills and confidence in living outdoors from a base camp that builds on their prior experiences with short wilderness trips. The focus of these adventures will be wilderness crafts, survival and traditional camping skills, understanding the local ecology, and forming a small community of confident girls in the outdoors.
“The idea behind this experience is about becoming comfortable in the woods, creating a home there [not just surviving] and learning to rely on one another as strong, capable young women, not to mention being a little wild, said Clara Kazarov, former Outdoor Living Skills activity head at Timberlake and consultant on this new offering at Indian Brook
The trips will take place twice during the summer, once during each half summer session, for roughly 1.5 weeks. With the guidance of a few skilled staff, the group of 10-12 girls will spend some time before their departure forging relationships within the group, learning basic skills such as orienteering and preparing in other ways for their adventure. Living, working, creating, and playing outside respectfully and confidently is one of our goals. We also want to provide campers with strong leadership roles to create their own summer experience.
This is an exciting opportunity for girls who want to feel comfortable living, playing and working outdoors. They will decide as a group what skills they want to do – such as bow drill practice, leather crafting, outdoor cooking, friction fire-making, journaling, nature observation and shelter building.
. They will also be responsible for gear, food pack-out and navigation. Once the group leaves the full schedule of life at Indian Brook, they will have the time and space to have a deeper relationship with the woods.
In doing this, we hope to bring something new and exciting to the Farm & Wilderness community. Campers will share their experiences with others when they return to Indian Brook and, later, with their families and friends. This experience will surely be an inspiring reminder that learning can take the form of an adventure.
If you are interested in the program please contact: Karissa@farmandwilderness.org