D of E, for those of you who don't know is a community based, challenge with expedition elements. It's for young people aged 15-25 and you must complete all sections of your award within 5 years. My knowledge, having completed two of the three available awards and being in the process of completing the third, is that the awards are a way to get young people today to interact within their communities and learn new skills. The four standard sections are physical, volunteering, skill and expedition, with the fifth section in the final 'Gold' award being residential.
The naming of this post refers to the danger my friends and I encountered on an expedition for D of E, an extra-curricular activity. Extra-curricular activities include homework, therefore this post will tell you how homework almost killed me.
These posts will be focusing on my expeditions, the first in this series my most dramatic expedition- Silver practice.
For your practice expedition on the silver award you have you complete one overnight and two day hikes, so we did our practice with the Bronze awards on their final. It wasn't a particularly nice day, but we motivated ourselves with songs and jokes. We noticed throughout the day that we were getting further and further behind our schedule, in spite of keeping up pace and cutting out unnecessary breaks. We were exhausting ourselves and it was beginning to rain. We furthered our depleted energy levels with goofy nicknames- the most popular and longest reigning being 'bum'ole'. By the time we got to the camp site the air was feeling miserable and we were getting rained on. Our tent went up in the drizzling English reliable' and we settled down to cook... well, Sam settled down to cook. He was perfectly happy for us to sit in the tent and eat marshmallow fluff, so that's exactly what we did. Later he and his guitar joined us and we had a soggy jamming session with fluff and Ben's legend. Jamaican ginger cake and custard comforted us for desert and we snuggled down to bed. The main reason I decided to finally write this blog post was actually due to another post I wrote where I described my PTSD-like symptoms I get when in the rain these days (which is often as I live in England). If I'm out in the open - walking down a street, between buses or in the middle of a field - and it begins to rain, I can often have a dizzying experience, including racing heart, flash backs and accelerated breathing. These symptoms have dramatically calmed since October 2010, but when I first noticed them, they could be set off by something as simple as hearing the weather-lady mention 'light drizzle'. You see those were the words our teacher used when we asked if the rain we woke up to would continue. "Oh no," she had said, "the weather reports are for 'light drizzle' but it'll stay cloudy all day."
We should have known not to trust her.
So there we were, one hour later hiking up a hilly, uneven road and hoping the wind would ease up, and a teacher roles up in her car. Winding the window down barely 2 inches she shouts that the weather 'isn't pretty'. Wow, you're in your little car with your cushiony seat and heated fans, water proofs that are waterproof and coffee cake and you're telling us that the weather 'isn't pretty'? Okay. Now, seeing as the routes we were using weren't actually ours but the Bronze award candidate's, it didn't matter so much that we stuck rigidly to them. This was good news for us when this teacher suggested going "through the valley- the wind won't be as strong through there!" We thanked her for her help and cursed her as she drove away, safe, warm and dry because by this time we were in a torrential down pour- and I mean really bad rainfall, not just 'oh I don't want to go to school it's raining'. This was the kind of rain you couldn't possibly drive in*. Little did we know the temperature was dropping by the hour and the rain getting heavier by the minute. To us it was one continuous piss-fest in which we were apparently stuck. We sheltered on our way into the valley to discuss our options (we found a giant pot-pipe which we stood in for a few minutes deliberating). We could go back and run the risk of falling down the hill we'd just climbed on top of having to retrace our steps about 0.75km to the road our teacher took, or power on ahead through this valley and face the ever realising possibility that the wind was in fact channeling through the valley, contradicting what our teacher had said some 25 minutes previously. We took our chances and soon decided we had made the wrong decision of going ahead into the valley. We met an older couple who informed us that the latest weather report was a red alert for rain in the area we were walking, that they were going back to their car to take refuge and that we should do the same. However our teacher was now out of sight and with rules on phone use on a D of E expedition quite clear, our only options was to keep going and hope we saw another teacher at the opening of the valley. We quickly started referring to this place as the Valley of Death and began singing (by which I mean yelling but still not hearing each other) dramatic power ballads including You Never Let Go and You'll Never Walk Alone. After about 20 more minutes, we noticed an ever-forming river running through this valley, which wasn't marked on the map. We wondered whether the map was outdated, but realised that there was fresh, growing, green grass under the raging torrent and that it couldn't possibly be an everyday feature of this valley. This was when it dawned on us that we might be in trouble. For a start, the further we went into the valley, the higher the stream/river/raging-water-beast rose, and the higher it rose, the more disheartened we became. We had to keep going forward as the river had now cut us off from the path we had taken, but in order to carry on forward we had to cross over the river. There weren't any fallen branches around and the water was too deep and quick moving for us to wade through, so we were pushed along the hillside until we reached a cluster of rocks which we used to jump across the river. Now in hindsight I'm sure it was only about 1 foot deep, but it was getting pretty wide and it was absolutely gushing along through the valley. Although not terribly deep, rushing water can unbalance the best D of E-ers. This was the point at which we realised we might actually need our rubble sacks**. The issue with this was that we knew we wouldn't get out of them if we got in, as our energy levels were dropping, bags absorbing water and so becoming heavier and our team spirit hitting an all time low. Sam, our self-appointed chef, decided we needed to stop and have some food before we made the decision to abort the expedition. Ruth, our on-hand animal expert, observed that usually animals (in this case, sheep) would find a hallow to rest in until a storm blew over, but these sheep were climbing to the top of the valley, indicating the storm wasn't anywhere near done and up was the safest option, however after climbing about 25m, we came face-to-face with barbed wire fencing, preventing us from going over the top. One of our team started to panic so we found a mound of grass and rubble back near the river to sit and Sam got out a packet of New York Bagels. They were the loveliest food I've ever eaten- as I can imagine anything would be in a crisis- and we laid down our options again: we'd had to cross the river numerous times and were back on the left hand side (where we had been when the river started forming) and could see a few rocks where we could pass back over, we couldn't stay on this side as there were a good many trees and the wire fence extended down into the valley after this point; going back was totally not an option and neither was going up, so we finished our bagels and resolved to go forward and pray.
Another member of the team and I kept going by setting tiny targets- which felt like miles- "just get to that tree... great, now try to get to that bush... pull into line with that sheep... now get to that big open expanse which has a telegraph pole in the middle of it where we can hear cars in the distance". Wait, a telegraph pole... we're saved! You know those rules on phones I mentioned earlier? They state a phone can be used in an emergency to contact your supervisor. As this was a practice expedition, we didn't have a supervisor, but were without contact numbers for our teachers. So we used Ben's GPS. And it was a very good decision, because the telegraph pole meant signal, and signal meant showing us where that distant road was, and we could see the road on the map but as we were in an expanse, didn't know which way the road actually was. We got to the road and the phone went away. We met up with a teacher who pointed us the best (safest, most populated and fastest) way to get to the finish point which was now all we cared about. We bumped into another group from a different school who informed us that we were the only school out of 8 who were expedition-ing in the area who hadn't aborted (they were on their way to meet their teachers in the school minibus). After crossing another few roads, the rain had eased considerably (though still present) and we found a group of aging walkers going to the same destination as ourselves. Thinking it was best to walk with company, we kept in the wake of these relatively experienced and apparently high-stamina walkers. It wasn't easy and at one point I almost took my shoes off, thinking it more comfortable to just walk in socks as the only purpose my shoes seemed to be serving was holding water. We walked along a legitimate river which would have been beautiful if not for our traumatized states, then reached a hill. It wasn't an easy climb and at points we had to stop but the lovely group of ridiculously fit over 50's kindly allowed us brief periods of rest.
When we reached the top of the hill, we took a look at the view below us and felt relieved that we'd made it. We were in awe, but probably more for the fact that we were still alive than the beauty (as we were informed by others around us). Waiting for our lift home was agony, as the tearoom- the only piece of civilization for seemingly miles around- refused entry to walkers and the public toilets were without toilet paper, heating or facilities for drying hands. Oh and did I mention that the previous night we discovered my water proofs were actually not water proof?
Ruth's mum picked us up (us being Ruth, Laura and myself) and had loaded the back seat with towels, bath robes and hot water bottles, and brought food and hot Ribena. I wasn't a fan of hot Ribena at this point, but it was amazing to peel off our soaked layers, snuggle into towels, blankets and warm dry seats and drink the first warm nourishment we had had since our Jamaican ginger cake and custard. Charlotte*** took a longer route to stop off at a chip shop and buy us hot, fresh chips. We nibbled these and relaxed for the next I-don't-know-how-long until we reached my house, when Sister brought my own dressing gown and some flip flops out for me to transfer from the car to the house in, but after trying and failing to use my legs, Sister gave me a piggy-back inside and I went straight upstairs for a hot bath.
The next months were filled with anticipation over our second, upcoming practice which eventually was cancelled, anxiety about wind or rain and thoughts of our final expedition. That expedition will be talked about in the next edition of my D of E series, but at our award ceremony for Silver, we found out that the weekend I just described saw 1/3 of the annual average rain fall for that area. So rather than having the rainfall spread over th course of the year, we received 30% in just two days.
And that's how I almost died doing extra-curricular activity.
*Our teacher was going at a maximum of 5mph and later she told us she'd pulled over quarter of a mile along due to the weather reports.
**For those of you who don't know, rubble sacks are bright orange, thick, plastic body-bags which are used in an emergency, for example if someone goes into shock or has a fall and needs to keep warm but can't move. they're also quite useful for keeping things dry in overnight if you're without room in your tent.
***Ruth's mum, aka the best D of E chauffeur ever.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are in no way affiliated with the Duke of Edinburgh organisation or charity. Experiences some individuals have on their expeditions do not reflect the nature of the activities, nor are they necessarily common in such activities. This a post about Francesca Grace Hall's personal experience on an expedition organised by her school through the D of E program and does not represent Duke of Edinburgh awards in any way.
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