Wilderness Orientation 2024: Taking Pride in What We Do

For the past 54 years, new Proctor students have joined seven other students and two faculty members to venture into the woods for five days and four nights of backcountry camping throughout the mountains of New Hampshire. Sending 18 groups into the woods for five days requires effort and sacrifice from the entire community. 

 

From organizing food, to preparing gear, to securing camping permits, to ensuring proper safety training, to having our faculty spend the first week of the school year away from their partners and families, Wilderness Orientation requires a remarkable investment of human and physical resources. Despite all this effort, we are 100% committed to launching the school year this way because we believe so deeply in the impact of a wilderness experience. 

When Orientation groups stepped off of their busses Friday morning, our new students carried thinly veiled emotions on their sleeves. There was genuine joy, a significant amount of relief, and uniform pride in what they had accomplished. Our faculty leaders mirrored the emotions of their students. As children ran into the arms of their parents who had been gone for the past five days and the thought of a warm shower and good night sleep became more than a wish, our faculty beamed with pride in their groups. Joy, relief, pride. 

For those of us who were not group leaders, seeing the mix of joy and exhaustion on our colleagues faces makes us proud to work at a school that prioritizes an experience like Wilderness Orientation. It is hard. It challenges even the most experienced, rugged individuals because it asks us to live in close community with each other, to embrace our flaws, to appreciate our strengths, and to understand that any living community will have its natural ebbs and flows of energy and emotions. 

When we ask much of our students, they learn they are capable of all that we ask, and more. When we ask much of our Wilderness Orientation groups, they, too, learn just how competent they are. When we join together as a fully community at our first assembly later this morning, we will look around the Norris Family Theater and know that every student has shared in the same wilderness experience. Every student has been challenged to do more than they thought possible, and it is on this foundation that we will build our community. 

Thank you to all of the individuals who made this year’s Wilderness Orientation possible, especially all of our group leaders and Wilderness Orientation Coordinator Kayden Will for being the mastermind and organizational genius behind this invaluable program. 

Check out more photos from Wilderness Orientation 2024 on Flickr!