Classic Courses

Are you ready to take a journey that will change your life? You won’t look at day-to-day drama the same way after you’ve conquered a high mountain ridge, made a boat obey your command in windswept waves or slept under the stars watching bats swoop overhead. Joining an Outward Bound expedition changes you. Your crew, your Instructor, your route and your adventures will have a profound and lasting impact on you as you rise to meet exhilarating natural challenges in some of the country’s wildest places.

• Build skills, form connections: Learn and practice wilderness, teamwork and leadership skills. Find connections with your crewmates based on support and respect (and fun too!), and in the thick of challenges, discover there is more in you than you know.
• Value strengths and strengthen values: Uncover your unique character strengths, develop your leadership abilities and learn how to let compassion in to everyday life by pushing your own limits and working alongside your peers.
• Demonstrate mastery: As you gain confidence in new skills, take on more decision-making responsibilities. Work together to achieve team goals, solve problems and succeed both as individuals and as a group.
• What you’ll learn: For High School students, the opportunities to carry more weight (literally and figuratively) and make impactful decisions with accompanying consequences fills the expedition as you go through numerous trials and triumphs. It’s all about independence.

After you come home, many of the character, leadership and service traits you uncovered on your expedition stay with you, helping you navigate your daily life with more resilience and success.

Outcomes

Participants will recall and demonstrate learned skills to live and travel with their crewmates on the river. Participants will have the opportunity to become proficient paddlers as they travel first to the calm narrow water trails of the New Jersey Pinelands Reserve.  Students will demonstrate rescue skills, river navigation, backcountry cooking, Leave No Trace, Watershed Curriculum, and campcraft.  Additionally, students will apply their developed  trust each and communication and problem solving skills on the river and on the ropes course.

Course Area

The Pinelands National Reserve is the first National Reserve in the nation, founded in 1978. Later in 1988 becoming, UNESCO also redesignated the Pinelands as a single-site Biosphere Reserve with the United Nations. With over a million acres the reserve occupies 22% of New Jersey's land area and it is the largest body of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston. The Pinelands are home to dozens of rare plant and animal species as well as  the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer system, which contains an estimated 17 trillion gallons of water.

The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area encompasses 67,000 acres of mountain ridge, forest and floodplain on both sides of the Delaware River in the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. From the southern end of the park, you can view the S-shaped chasm of the Delaware Water Gap, where the river cuts a twisting path through 1,400-foot Kittatinny Ridge. Within the river watershed, you'll discover steep wooded-and-rock slopes, bountiful rhododendron, dark hallows, tinsel-like ravines and tumbling waterfalls.