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.

Service

Service to others and to the environment are core values of Outward Bound and they are integrated into each course. Participants follow Leave No Trace ethics as part of their service to the environment. Students develop an ingrained appreciation of service, seeing the impact of their actions firsthand, by multiple small acts of service with and for their crewmates while leading and supporting each other throughout the journey.

Solo

Students will engage in Solo, a period of solitude, as a way to take a break from the physical nature of the expedition and experience a time and opportunity for self-awareness, reflection and application of learning. Students are prepared for their Solo and have opportunity to reflect on their current experience and personal growth as well as the application of their experience into their learning and social environments.

Outcomes

During this multi-element leadership intensive course, students use the course area to develop new, and hone, existing leadership and community-building skills. Students will recall and demonstrate proficiency in the technical skills in backpacking and canoeing and demonstrate self-awareness and the emotional intelligence needed to become a compassionate leader who builds relationships and strong bonds with their crew. Through the experience and practice of working together as a team, developing trust and applying progressively learned personal and group skills, students recognize and demonstrate sound principles for being a successful and efficient crew. 

Course Area

South Central Pennsylvania/Appalachian Trail/Delaware Water Gap

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.