Kroka Winter Semester 2019

Hello All! We are coming to the end of our time here at base camp. It has been over a month now since we arrived and oh how we are ready to take flight, but first let me update you on what we’ve been enjoying during our final stretch of this leg. When we arrived back from the White Mountains intensive we glided back into the flow of base camp, jumping right in with chores and a regular schedule.   We had a lot of stinky laundry and unpacking to do which made me wonder, “If that was only 3 days, what will it be like when were out there for 18 days? Or 21!” I hope that we’re all smell blind by then for our own sake.               Later in the week we had the pleasure of making shoes with Sarah Shields who is a parent of a winter semester alumna from 2018. It was an incredibly fun process and involved a lot of hard work, focus, and friendly competition.   At the beginning of the day as the lesson was starting Miron announced that he wouldn’t be able to make a pair of shoes

During this past week we went on our White Mountain Intensive, which has put into perspective what it will take for us to truly be ready for the three legs of our coming expedition: the Green Mountains, the Uapishka Mountains in Quebec, and from Lake Champlain down the Hudson River to New York City. Everybody has been focusing on their big jobs and developing their techniques for how they organize their particular knowledge base in a way that fits with our group.             We had a visiting teacher from Vermont named Roger Haydock who taught us about the geological composition of the land around us, and the ways in which changes in the geological structure millions of years ago impact the political, economic, and social environment today. He shared with us fantastically colored maps, some showing the topography of the land and others showing the origin of bedrock as it slowly swirled and glommed onto pieces of our continent. Roger had the most beautiful maps,

Hello All! Here at base camp we’ve spent the last week in further expedition preparation.  We have been working hard to complete our knives. After finishing the blades, we set the metal into square blocks and crafted our handles from different shades and densities of beautiful wood to make a unique variation between our creations.   It has been wonderful watching the hard blocks of wood transform into curves and slopes that form to the hand holding them.   When this process was done we began creating the sheath, first learning the contours of our blade and then working the leather to hold onto the knife like a dear friend. When the leather was wet we created a design on our sheaths that might particularly speak to the person to whom we were gifting the knife.                In this past week or so we experienced a great rain, which brought some warmer weather but took with it the snow. So very disappointing, but it gave us the opportunity to let our Nordic skis have