It’s been a great and really busy first couple of days for the group.

Sunday – Day 1. Started off as all classes do on the first day with introductions, some hesitations about what a new class would be like. But we all settled in and got going right away. I really enjoyed bringing in a short piece on the history of the College, where it all began, where we have gotten to and how we got there along the way. One surprise for the students was that The University has 42 distinguished professors in all and 5 of them are right here in the College! Many Colleges in the Universities have none!!

Net on the agenda was a review of the the importance of field notes and proper procedures. One of the things I have put together for them is a 2nd field book that they will fill in with pages I have put together as a Field Reference manual. Basically, all the stuff you need to know but couldn’t fill your brain cells with; From Relaskop directions to Planting Spacings; Volume Tables to Log Grades, Volume Ratios, Bark Thickness Tables, Metric Conversions… you get the idea. 48 pages of all the useful stuff you wish you had in the field, all in a pocket reference.

Out to the field for pacing exercises and compass work. Let’s just say that a few people were a little rusty on their pacing… but by the afternoon we saw a lot of improvement. We’ll have plenty of practice on this over the course of the two weeks.

Ann (my wife) came in for a session in the afternoon that we both have found to be very useful and important over the last several years. she started with an introduction on how groups interact and function based on the makeup of the group and then moved on to talk about Humanalities, an understanding of how our personalities shape us and help us to function in the groups we interact with. It was a great session on helping the students identify confidence or lack of and what drives the various types of personalities to be successful. She then had the groups self-divide into their perceived identities and think about how they would interact with the other types in problem situations. They started to understand how to identify and classify other personality types and then create strategies for successful interaction.By day 2, I now realize that we have created a whole class of amateur psychologists as every guest speaker is being analyzed!!

Monday-Day 2

Our first day out to the Club Cabin which will be our “Home” for the next 8 days. After a settling in and breakfast in the cabin, it was off for the first of many field trials. A Pacing trial up past Cronemiller Lake and to the Logging Sports field. A bit over 1800′ and already seeing some great improvement in a number of people. Gold Medal to Robert who missed the overall distance of 1859′ by …………. wait for it ………… 1 foot! Seriously, 1 foot! An overall error of …. well it’s a really tiny number!

Next few hours we tackled aerial photos and interpretation. A good part of that was spent on orientation for stereo viewing and that session went well. But of course, there is always the testing and I gave them all the standard U.S. Army Moessner stereo viewing test. All, of them did excellent on the test. A good thing as I reminded them that in the Army, if you didn’t do well on this test, there was always an infantry position!!

Photo interpretation was next and after a brief discussion on strategies for interpretation I broke out the Photo Interp game, a series of 14 images from around the world, some very difficult and asked them to identify the specific places. Kind of a “Where’s Waldo” from 20,000 feet above game. They did really well on this and I was pretty impressed. The most difficult one was the Beijing Olympic Stadium, which they all knew was some sort of major sports complex, but you had to know that the Olympic symbol  had been rearranged to a bird’s nest for those Olympics to identify it as Beijing.

Lunch time and we fired up the outdoor grill.   Iron Chefs Jessica, Robin, and Tiffany took charge as the guys couldn’t get the fire started, or at least that’s what the chefs said! Great lunch, burgers and dogs. Guest culinary judges Herman, Ben, Colin, and Robert gave them all passing grades. I believe Colin may have been the strictest as for some reason he had to try quite a few burgers before deciding! 

On to a statistics review and all I am going to say is that everyone stayed awake and alert. Statistics after lunch and I didn’t loose anyone. A major success!

Back to the field and now a pacing trial with compass on slopes at the Rusty Axle traverse site. Great afternoon of field work and back to calculations of closure errors and coordinates. And with that, day 2 was in the books.