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| Look at all those smiles! |
Last weekend when we met at Lookout Mountain, the Pine Martens were handed a group challenge! This season, the Pine Martens are learning the Art of Navigation and Lookout Mountain is a great spot for practicing our navigation skills.
For their navigation challenge, the Pine Martens were tasked with leading themselves through the network of trails to a high viewpoint about two miles away from the parking lot. The only tools that they were given were a few maps of the area. The mentors knew that the Pine Martens would need to utilize their collaboration and compromise skills to come to consensus about which way to go when the trail forked. In this sense, this challenge included an introduction to navigation while at the same time requiring strong group leadership and circular decision making.
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| Which way to go? |
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| Lets consult the map |
As it turns out the Pine Martens are becoming quite efficient decision makers. Today, the Leader of the Day did a good job of making sure all voices in the group were heard as he shepherded the group toward consensus on multiple occasions. The mentors enjoyed observing these circles from a few yards away and watching the Pine Martens put their skills (that we learned only last year!) into action.
Of course, it's about the journey, not the destination, and explorers live this motto on every outing. We enjoyed taking breaks to check out cool, out of the way creeks and large, interesting faces of exposed rock. Additionally, we discovered TONS of different kinds of fungi during our hike. Some of us noted that it seems that mushrooms pop up a lot in the fall and we hypothesized reasons for this as a group. We ended up agreeing that the main reason was that fall provided plenty of dead and down material for fungi to eat during a time that had the right temperatures and enough rain to make the forest damp so that mushrooms can thrive.
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| So |
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| many |
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| cool |
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| fungi! |
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| But wait... |
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| ...there's more! |
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| Perched under some devils club |
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| Green |
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| Hidden cliffs |
Upon, reaching our overlook, we took some time to celebrate our accomplishment and nourish our bodies with the rest of the food from our lunches. After taking some water, we headed back down the trail, looking for a good spot to hold our closing circle. Unfortunately, during our descent, one of the boys accidentally rolled their ankle. The mentors wrapped it up and we made our way out of the woods together. The mentors tried to illustrate for us the link between our rapid descent on the trail and this injury. Hopefully, more than just the one of us who got hurt heard this message.
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| Celebrating at the top |
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| More fungi! |
We eventually found a proper spot for closing circle. Because we were running short on time, the mentors tasked us with shrinking our gratitude into one word during our Attitude of Gratitude circle. It sounded almost poetic as we went around the circle sharing one word of thanks each.
To see the rest of the pictures from our day, click here!
