March 27, 2002
Rains wash out Appalachian Trail hiking trip for second year
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Rained out for the second time in as many years, nine students from the Traverse Bay Community School did not let the weather get them down.
On a week-long trip to North Carolina, an annual pilgrimage available to the school's older students, the recent heavy rains and flooding in the Mid-Atlantic states sidetracked their planned three-day hike of a portion of the Appalachian Trail. After two days of hiking and forging swollen rivers they finally crested a mountain.
However, a weather system blasted them in the face, sending them back to base camp a day early. The cold and rain turned a hoped-for three nights of camping into just one.
Leaving for home a day early, the group redeemed their adventure by sidetracking to explore the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. There they took a historical tour of the cave, complete with old-fashioned lanterns to light the path.
"It sucked that we got rained out both years," said Geoffrey Bloom, an eighth-grade student at the school, who nevertheless saw the silver lining in the clouds. "The most fun was getting to the top of the mountain and looking around. Crossing the rivers was kind of fun but it got old after the seventh one."
The intense rains also washed out plans to camp out on the 700-mile trip to North Carolina and back. Students noted the dramatic flooding as they traveled.
"In certain places we were last year you could see the river from the road, this year the water was up to the guardrail," said Bloom, a second-year veteran of the hiking expedition.
Again, the lesson was flexibility as students and their six chaperones had a mini-lesson in economics. They counted pennies and stretched their budget to include a motel stay, where sleeping bags came in handy as campers lined the floors.
The trip was part of the school's Intensive Week, where students throughout the school drop what they are doing and focus on one topic for a week.
The school holds three Intensive weeks every year, the first in October focuses on teambuilding. This helps the school's villages, or multi-age classrooms, get to know each other and learn to work together.
The second Intensive Week is held just before Spring Break and features a variety of options. Besides the hiking trip, students in the sixth through eighth grade could also choose from these topics for the week: play production, print making and health and fitness. The play production class put on a production of "The Mikado," a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. Some students from the school's third through fifth grade village helped with this effort.
Students in the third through fifth grade could chose among first aid, regional studies of the United States, and exploring the rainforest for this Intensive Week.
The final Intensive Week is held just before the school year ends and also features a variety of topics, which in past years has also featured a bike trip across Michigan for older students.
One of the goals of the Intensive weeks is to let students delve in-depth into a profession, art or craft. This concentrated block of time focusing on one subject helps students determine if they want to pursue a topic more in the future.
"The purpose of the Intensive Weeks is that three weeks out of the year we stop everything we do and do one thing for a week," said Chris Post, a teacher at the school. "All schedules are off that week."
For the past four years, Post has led the students on the hiking trip to North Carolina and he previously led the bike trips. He finds the trips, which are open to seventh and eighth graders only, a unique bonding and growth experience for the kids who go. Often, students who went as seventh graders are among the first to sign up the next year.
"This is mostly about personal growth and getting out and experiencing the mountains," said Post, who picks which students will go along. "The kids change a lot on the trip and it is a lot of fun motivating them up the side of the mountain."
Bloom is intimately acquainted with this motivation.
"The most difficult thing is telling yourself you can do it, looking up at the mountain and saying, 'Oh, yeah, I'm going to climb that,'" he said. "When you get halfway up and look back across the valley, then look up at a solid wall in front of you."