203: Giving Kids Transformative Outdoor Experiences with Coldwater Foundation
Feb 28, 2024Season 4Episode 202
Carole Joy Seid
As parents we often wonder how to best prepare our kids for real life. They won’t always be under our roof, so how do give them the tools and courage they need to go out into the world in strength?
One of the keys ways we have seen kids develop incredible fortitude and spiritual depth is through outdoor experiences. Our friends at the Coldwater Foundation provide wilderness journeys for kids 12 and up. In this episode from the archives, Carole talks with Kevin Sutton, co-founder of Coldwater, about the ways wilderness experiences help prepare kids for real life.
Coldwater still has some openings in their trips for older students, ages 16 through 18. To learn more visit their website, coldwaterfoundation.org.
As parents we often wonder how to best prepare our kids for real life. They won’t always be under our roof, so how do give them the tools and courage they need to go out into the world in strength?
One of the keys ways we have seen kids develop incredible fortitude and spiritual depth is through outdoor experiences. Our friends at the Coldwater Foundation provide wilderness journeys for kids 12 and up. In this episode from the archives, Carole talks with Kevin Sutton, co-founder of Coldwater, about the ways wilderness experiences help prepare kids for real life.
Coldwater still has some openings in their trips for older students, ages 16 through 18. To learn more visit their website, coldwaterfoundation.org.
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Carole Joy Seid:
I am up here in Grand Marais area of Minnesota on Mink Lake with our family's friend, kevin Sutton, and Kevin and his wife Jen and our family go way, way back and we're going to tell you a little bit about their story and about the honey I'm sorry, not Honey Rock, but the cold water story and it started at Honey Rock so I got ahead of myself. But welcome, kevin.
Kevin Sutton:
Yeah, thank you. It's so good to be here and with you and to have you up here Finally, actually after several years of your family's coming here and being involved in our programs. It feels like this has been a long time coming and it's great to have you here in person and on the property and seeing firsthand what the ministry is and I just you know. I think I would want to start off our conversation by saying thank you to you for, you know, encouraging your families to be a part of this and that's played a big role as we grow and develop as a young ministry. So it's great to have you here and it's great to be sitting down to a conversation with you.
Carole Joy Seid:
I have enjoyed this so much. So when you say my families, you don't mean my blood family although my blood family is here right now as well one of my grandchildren but you mean the families that I've been consulting with over the years.
Kevin Sutton:
Right, the home school families.
Kevin Sutton:
That that, and getting to know those parents, has been, has been really.
Kevin Sutton:
I mean the conversations that we have held with families that are homeschooling have really gotten right to the heart of what our educational goals are. Those those parents are are, you know, keen to dig deep and conversations about experiential learning, about whole life faith, about spiritual formation being integrated with the ways that we learn and and therefore, the ways that we teach in community. I mean the conversations have been, have been, rich and and you can see it in the kids too, you can see their. I mean they are an enthusiastic bunch of young people and whether they are, you know, here on service team and and involved in that five week program, which, which is, you know them, doing actually a lot of physical work and building and getting to know one another, or whether they are traveling right now through the wilderness, as we have I think we have probably 34 people out right now on trip going through the wilderness in the boundary waters, getting to know one another and facing challenges. They're they're an enthusiastic group, so they've been a real joy to serve.
Carole Joy Seid:
I'm so glad. Well, so 34 people going through the wilderness, but they're not together. So explain kind of how the groups are set up, because we've got how many separate groups.
Kevin Sutton:
So that's a great question. We have four groups out right now. We divide all of our campers into small brigades or small small groups, teams. The most that we can take into the boundary waters is nine people. So with every group that's out, we have two of our leaders and then seven students. So that's that forms a group, and they're divided also into age groups. You know, I think right now we have we have some 10 to 12 year olds that are out and we have some 12 to 14 year olds that are out, roughly so, and we have a boys group of students out and we have a girls group of students that are out.
Kevin Sutton:
So so they're divided up for other reasons also.
Carole Joy Seid:
And give us a little bit of an understanding of what takes place in this group. This isn't just your average girl scout, boy scout camp. What's going on out there, yeah?
Kevin Sutton:
so I think maybe to start I'll talk a little bit about our leaders, because they are the heart and soul of the cold water ministry. College students and upperclassmen some of them are graduates have come. They came weeks ago to begin training. They've been in training for about six or seven weeks. They spend three weeks about doing a wilderness trip that is, wilderness leadership expedition. They're out. They begin a camp here. They did about five and a half days of backpacking and about 12 days of paddling. They do a solo experience, they do a run in. At the end they finished that. They're learning. They're learning about themselves. They're learning to pay attention to what the Lord is doing in their lives. They're learning to express the ways that they would like to be together as a community, as a group. They're facing a challenge, really the same challenge that everyone faces when you go into the wilderness Challenge of wind, challenge of rain, of heat or cold. Challenge, right now, of bugs out in the wilderness. Challenge inherent with navigational problems, setting up shelter, making your own food.
Carole Joy Seid:
Setting up shelter. What do you mean by that Setting up shelter?
Kevin Sutton:
Yeah, so the Boundary Waters is a wilderness area. There's no man-made buildings or anything there. So you're camping outside using a tarp or a tent. You're sleeping on the ground, you're making shelter with what you have with you. Our groups use a flat tarp that has webbing on the corners that you can pull from with cord. Students learn knots and a method of tying those shelters. There's also a bug net that gets hung beneath that tarp that protects them from insects, and they set that up together and they make camp for the night and then they prepare their food and they often will look back at the day and ask what happened in the day, what did we see in our team, what did we see in each other? They'll have a conversation with each other about those things, each of them really trying to learn, trying to figure out their place and figure out how to grow. They'll sleep that night at that campsite and then their leaders in the morning will give them another destination and they will begin again.
Carole Joy Seid:
So yeah, it's a good.
Kevin Sutton:
You know there's a rhythm to that that takes place. That, I think, is not only true about just what is normal in traveling through wilderness, but I think there's a rhythm behind that that's inherent in what happens to us in life.
Carole Joy Seid:
A quest, a journey that's kind of found in several pieces of literature. Yes, even the Gospel of Mark is really all about kind of a quest. Yeah, so as you're describing this, kevin, what I'm hearing is they're doing this, they're doing that. I went to camp where the counselors did all these things, right right exactly, and that's not the case with this.
Kevin Sutton:
You know we're trying to give experiences to people that will be real for them, and part of experience is just facing problems and solving those problems. So we have this thing that we talk about with our leaders, that we want them to really protect the problems for their students to solve, and not so much the problems that are artificial, but I'm talking about the problems that are real, either generated because of the circumstances that they're in, that just wind just comes and it happens and then it creates a problem, and then we work to overcome that or respond to that, and then also, of course, the problems that are a result of our choices and then reacting to that and making a correction or an adjustment because of that. So we had I think it was a few days ago when the group first arrived, you know there was a group of girls that were preparing for their trip and what we do here is they do a canoe over canoe rescue, they practice. So if someone capsizes their canoe on a lake in the wilderness, then the group all paddles toward them and there's a method to write that canoe, to empty it of water, to get packs on board, and you can imagine how difficult that is when it's windy and yep, and it's wavy and it's cold and there's some chaos. And so they were doing that exercise and their leaders were holding them to complete it, because if that happened in the back country then that's what you would do you wouldn't leave each other behind, you wouldn't be able to quit the activity because it was windy, you'd have to follow through.
Kevin Sutton:
So they held them to complete it and in the process they got blown down the lake and ended up taking their canoes out of the water further away from the camp. And then they went back to the camp, they carried those canoes, they portaged those canoes back to camp, and they didn't know that that was going to happen, but that was sort of a natural result of it. And the leaders were thinking, okay, well, what's a problem? That's? You know, how do we protect that problem for our students? Well, we won't bail them out, you know. But we'll do it with them, and that's true of how we think. You know, we're in it with you, but but this is your problem too.
Carole Joy Seid:
So yeah, and this phrase protect. Say it again.
Kevin Sutton:
Protect, protecting the problems for for your students. So it, and because it's easy, as a leader of younger people, to just do it for them, to tell them which way to go, rather than then give them space to discover and choose which way to go. And that I mean that could be more, that could be inconvenient, right? Like if, if you know that you're supposed to, you know, paddle in in a very clear direction that you see, but your student decides you know they decide that it's a different direction you might still allow them to, to paddle that direction and and prompt them to discover. You know the outcome, you know of the choice that they've made, but you're allowing the the weight of responsibility to fall on them. But you're supporting them. You're not.
Kevin Sutton:
You're not you're not abandoning them, you're working with them, but I think it's that that value of discovery as an educational value, that that turns just an activity into a memorable educational moment that has lifelong outcomes for us, and we we're doing that all the time out there. You know, students are coming up against crux moments where they're forced to come up against a limit and then move beyond it.
Carole Joy Seid:
So yesterday, as we were talking with your sweet wife, Jen and you and I, we were talking about this phrase that you taught me yesterday from order to chaos, or disorder to reorder, and you said that that was the rhythm of experiential learning. So what is that all about?
Kevin Sutton:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a rhythm of life Like. I think we want to be in, I guess stasis, or we want to be just in balance and we want things taken care of. We don't want to feel uncomfortable, we don't want to feel discomfort, we want things to go smoothly, we want things to be convenient, and so we order the world around us to be like that, and it always gets interrupted. Something always happens that interrupts our ordered world, and then we're forced to respond, and in these wilderness programs, that's a rhythm for sure. Even from day one, students come from a world that is familiar to them. They come from their home, where they know what they have, they know where their phone is, they know where they can get food, they know what that food is, they know what their schedule is, when their family is coming and going from the home, they know what time the TV show is or how to get a hold of their friends. And then they leave all that, and they literally leave everything, and they drive outside of a service area where they can no longer get contact with their phone, and suddenly they're in a world that they don't know. It's not familiar, and they don't know what the rules are.
Kevin Sutton:
That's what I mean by disorder, and maybe it even feels a little bit like chaos when you add to that various new characters that have just walked into their life and are strangers and now they're sharing a tent with them, or the variety of food. Our food system doesn't look like the food that's in your refrigerator. I mean, it's healthy and nutritious and can be prepared very well, and we eat really, really good food. But because of the nature of wilderness travel, the food looks different. It's not what is normal to them, and they're no longer sleeping in their bedroom with a light switch and a closet full of clothes and all of those things that are normal.
Kevin Sutton:
They have only what they brought with them, what they've carried, and so it's actually total chaos for them, some of them away from home for the very first time, and I don't mean visible chaos, although sometimes it is that I think we pride ourselves in trying to keep an orderly camp and the cabins are orderly and a good, clean camp is something that we expect, but interiorly, inwardly, they are in chaos. They don't know. They're looking for signs of how do I get back into balance, how do I regain some familiarity, and it's that kind of seeking to regain balance that sends a student looking for answers, asking questions, cooperating in an effort, you know, to get things back, you know, into order again, and and so things are reordered. You know, order, disorder, reorder, and I really believe in that, in that as being like, necessary for growth, necessary for for us to learn and grow from the experiences that we're facing.
Carole Joy Seid:
And and what about the faith piece in this? Because I've, as we've been talking the past few days, there's a lot that this is all based really on a faith journey for these kids.
Kevin Sutton:
Yeah, right, and, and and that's that's where that. That's part of that, you know. You know what holds us together? It's really you're asking what do I value? You know, what do I look for when things aren't the way that they should be? What order is present in the universe that will help me? And we know that God, god created, he brought order out of chaos. That's what he, that's what he did and that's who he is.
Kevin Sutton:
And so there's a pattern there to this that is is really helpful and and and just I mean, in the same way, you know, god did not abandon us to figure it out. He promises that he will be with us. You know, he promises that he will be close, he promises that he will take the burdens that we have, and he invites us to place our burdens on him. So you know he, he's made the universe to be ordered and allows us to, to, you know, seek him with within it. So I think, I think even just you know like, how is, how is this? How does this become formational?
Kevin Sutton:
And I think for people, not just young people, but all people there's, there's a need for us to deepen the, the kind of trust that we place in a living and loving God, not not just as an idea but as a living hope for us.
Kevin Sutton:
And there's no way to deepen trust or to deepen faith without the process of experiencing what it feels like to have to fully depend on our faith, to depend on God when we can no longer do it ourselves.
Kevin Sutton:
And I think we talked a little bit about that analogy of like someone who's on a rock and they're on the edge of a cliff and they're having to step back. So they're stepping and they're tied into a rope with a harness and it's 100% like secure and dependable, and they have to step back until they're no longer standing on their own weight. All of their body weight is on that rope. And the feeling of doing that is fear. Even for people that have done that over and over and over again, there's that just that little bit of fear that comes, which is really a question Can I depend on this rope and can I depend and trust in the people that are holding it? Yes, and that feeling of fear is so close to that feeling of of placing our faith and our trust in God when we don't know what the answers are.
Kevin Sutton:
He's reliable. Yeah, if he's reliable, and I don't think that we we in our insulated lives, lives where everything is familiar and convenient and easy to get to, where many of the problems have been taken away I don't think that we can under really understand that we can't exercise that faith. Yes, so, because it stretches us. It's, yeah, it stretches us and you know so. When students go into the wilderness, they go into a place that they don't know about and they're fearful of the unforeseen. They don't know what's around the next corner, they don't know what to expect. They have opportunity to trust, to trust that God is with them and will provide for them and we'll watch over them.
Carole Joy Seid:
Yeah, but on the other hand, kevin, like just to comfort the parents who are just going. Oh, my word, I'm gonna go lay down now. I'm freaking out that, like last night, as Jen and I were having tea together, her phone kept going beep, and it was another group calling in saying we're okay. Another group beep, we're okay, everything's good. And each of the groups called in and I wasn't aware that you had this little system, even though our phones don't work out here. Yeah, how do you do that? And the way that you keep available to the teams. They're never out of your care as leaders, right, I mean.
Kevin Sutton:
I think the broader question is one of being in the outdoor industry and being a program that is really interested in the best practices of outdoor leadership, and there are standards, there is a system that we utilize to not only to have contact for a leader when they need to, but to prepare for trips.
Kevin Sutton:
To prepare by having a plan, to prepare, with training, to prepare with really studying your route and knowing if something goes wrong where would you go, what is your evacuation plan. To prepare with having a working knowledge of medical issues that are in the group, by having all of our leaders have wilderness first responder training, which is an eight day eight to 10 day wilderness first aid course taught by a wilderness medical school. They have that certification, they take part in many, many conversations around the topic of risk management and they prepare for it. So, within that, one element of that is communication and doing our job to make sure that the risk that we are giving our students is largely perceived. Risk and the actual risk are things that we sort of expect, and that's not to say that there's not actual risk, because of course there is. It's actual wilderness, I mean.
Carole Joy Seid:
Yeah, it's not Disneyland.
Kevin Sutton:
Right, the wind is real and the hot sun is real and we have to respond to it. And so when a 12 year old goes through the wilderness and goes through a storm or through darkness or whatever, that's the very same thing as a seasoned wilderness person going through it and we are prepared and we respond and we minimize risk everywhere we can.
Carole Joy Seid:
But it's still a big part of the experience.
Kevin Sutton:
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
Carole Joy Seid:
You haven't sanitized the experience.
Kevin Sutton:
No, no, we haven't, and that's a good thing, that's a good thing to step into that. Amen, amen, thank you.