Kroka Winter Semester 2019

Our winter home On February 20th we ventured out from our basecamp in Marlow with high spirits, excited that we were finally getting on the trail. We crossed Lake Warren and continued on until we were 0.5 kilometers east of Beaver Wood Pond, where we had our first real experience of setting up our winter camp. We learned about site selection for our tent, stove setup, and evergreen bough harvesting for our tent floor. This would become our routine for the duration of our winter legs. We quickly learned how privileged we are to be “hot” camping when, at some point or another, each of us will have to leave the safety of our shelter in the middle of the night to go pee. Leaving Kroka Base Camp Cooking dinner over the outside firescreen In this same vein, we are learning to have a relationship to cold and one of my semester mates, Grace J., beautifully captured this in a reflection she wrote about befriending the cold: “I certainly know that when I...

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...

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 ...