Survivor Man was this past Thursday through Saturday morning, and it was quite the experience. I still am no a camper, mind you! But the experiences I had were worth going for. Let me share two of the biggest ones right here.
Lesson #1
After meeting at 6:30 AM Thursday morning, we headed off to the mountains. Upon reaching the parking lot, the leaders split the YM into two teams, and gave each team a map. I should mention that this map was void of names. Nada. They were all blotted out. All that was on the map was nameless lakes and trails, with one lake circled: our destination. "Get us there!" they said. And so each team had to figure out which lake we were trying to get to, and then get there. First team there got a prize.
My team was quite indecisive. It took us about 20 minutes just to take a guess at which lake was circled, and then about every 5 minutes on the trail, Jordan (one of the priests in my group) would stop us all and take out the map to look at it again for 20 more minutes. But here is the lesson that we learned upon finally reaching the lake (which, by the way, I was right from the start. Island Lake!). Every time our group would stop so that Jordan could triple check the map again, our leaders would scratch their heads, get this pained/confused look on their face and say one syllable. "Huh!" That's it.
The whole way to the lake went this way, and upon finally reaching the right lake, the leaders took the time to give us this analogy: The devil makes us doubt ourselves. Every time we make a decision, he tries to get us to think it's the wrong one. Especially if it's the right one. Every time that we decided to keep hiking on to Island Lake, the leaders would always say something that planted just that little seed of doubt in our hearts. But through it all, I had made my decision that the right lake was Island Lake, and so that's where I urged our team to go the whole time. And upon reaching the lake, we not only realized that we were the first team there, but that this whole Survivor Man experience was going to be full of little lessons like that.
The other thing we learned from that experience was that our leaders are like the devil.
Lesson #2
This lesson took part during the second day. After waking up Friday morning, (if you could call it that. Not many of us got any sleep) we packed up camp and went off hiking to our next destination which was supposed to be six miles away. But that's another story.
After about .5 miles, we got lost. Figures, huh? Well, we went up over a mountain, and as we peaked the top of it, there were some really marshy areas where the trail we were on just disappeared. After spending about 40 minutes looking for the trail, we just decided to put our orientation skills to the test. So we got out the map we were using (which was much like the first map we had - no names), found the direction we needed to head in, and started down the canyon. Unbeknownst to us, one of our leaders had a GPS with the trail loaded onto it.
After hiking a ways with just using the compass skills we had, the leaders collaborated and made an executive decision to turn us around. We, with the compasses, had felt that it was a good idea to just go strait for a river that we needed to follow. But Brett, with the GPS, had seen that we were most definitely NOT going in the correct direction. So finally, the leaders instead of being followers, became leaders and decided to take us back to the trail. Here is what our path looked like (the black dotted line in the bottom right was roughly our path).
The lesson we learned from this experience was thus: sometimes, bush whacking can be pretty fun! You can feel really accomplished sometimes by using your own reckoning to find your own way to the destination, but they way our leaders put it, and I totally agreed with them, was that they would rather get there knowing that they were on the right path than just blindly walking. Brett, with the GPS, was watching our trail as we made our own way, and he said for the first half hour, we were going pretty parallel with the right trail. But soon, we veered off and became quite a far ways away from the trail. That's when they decided to stop us and give us a little lesson.
What I took from this experience was that this hike is a lot like our life. We can feel really confident with ourselves, justify every little thing we do, say that we're good people, but when it all comes down to it, we may not be on the correct path. Even if we have been going parallel with it for a long time, we haven't been on it, and thus we don't know when it could make sudden turns and we could get completely lost, like what happened to us. The GPS on this hike we compared to repentance, or the prophets trying to get us back on track. Because, as you can clearly see on the map, we were quite a ways before we finally turned around to go looking for the trail again.
Anyway, there were many more experiences I had, but it would make this post much longer, and so I settled with these. All in all, it was a neat experience!
. . . But I still dislike camping.
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