Our second Nature Guardians trip was shaped by the youths’ interest in exploring and becoming better at navigating in the woods and using navigational tools. They also wanted to go to Long Lake Provincial Park, which is a perfect place to practice navigating, as there are few official trails. With this in mind, we brought compasses and copies of topographic maps of the area. We took some time to orient our selves to the map, discussed a bit about how compasses work, how to find north, how the compass direction relates to the map, and how to use landmarks like the road and the lake shore to avoid getting lost.

Then one of our members had brought a map of geocaches, which also showed where the well-worn trails were, so we decided to set out and find some geocaches the old-fashioned map and compass way! Amazingly, we were successful with one geocache! then we hiked, explored and chatted our way to very close to some other geocaches for sure, but we didn’t find them. A GPS would certainly be helpful for that final fine-tuning! We also learned that 2 hours is simply too short to do all that we want to do each time: some learning and work, getting to know each other, play, explore, hike, have snack time and check in on ideas for the next field trip. Fortunately, we have some excellent future group leaders and flexible kids in the group who kept us on time track, and cheerfully cut out some fun things when it was time to get back to the pick-up spot! We all want the parents to trust us to get back on time so we can keep doing this. :) But next time, we’ll do a 3 hour coastal hike! Stay tuned for details there.

Also, we had a great turn out, with 11 young people coming out on a chilly and cloudy Sunday afternoon before a snowstorm! And, welcome to our new volunteer, Heather! She is just completing her masters in Child and Youth Studies at MSVU, and brings a lovely, warm and enthusiastic presence to our group. We are excited to have her with us on coming trips! Thanks so much Heather!