Here We Do Hard Things!

Have you ever built a wilderness survival shelter in late fall with nothing but the clothes on your back? No sleeping bag, no blanket—just you and the forest. One such shelter is called a Debris Hut. It requires an enormous amount of leaves—nearly four feet thick all around—to provide enough insulation. It’s tough to build, but it keeps you alive!

Sleeping inside a Debris Hut can also be a difficult experience. With its small stick frame and snug insulation, it feels like a claustrophobic sleeping bag. You quickly learn to construct it so that no sticks poke into your back, butt, or head. You must reach a meditative state to make peace with the inevitable spiders and other critters that will crawl on you during the night.

But when you wake up, you feel different. Not just slept-on-the-ground different. You feel as if you’ve joined in the harmony of the forest. Nature no longer sees you as an intruder. You crawl out of that shelter to the sound of birds singing unusually close to you. Deer often sauntering by, ignoring you in your benign covering of sticks and leaves. I once found myself waking up in the middle of a herd of elk that was moving past me at dawn, nervously watching their 600-pound footfalls just inches from the tiny opening in my hut.

The Debris Hut is the perfect metaphor for Trackers. At first it’s hard work—dirty, uncomfortable, and even occasional hazardous fun (elk can mean business). But once you push through, you’re changed and there’s no going back.

Trackers Will Be Hard

Because what we do is so unique, Trackers programs can feel harder than conventional education. Our programs can be more complex than many youth camps. We transport kids in buses to visit real wilderness sites in all weather conditions. We teach skills that demand physical and mental growth and resilience. These are skills most people have forgotten—skills that might even scare some folks. But at Trackers, we have a saying: “Nature Doesn’t Give a Fox!” We say this with gratitude and appreciation, believing that the natural world is our best teacher. A teacher who challenges us to be clever, resilient, strong, adaptive, and compassionate.

At Trackers, we do hard things because of this connection to nature!

We see that this old-school wilderness education is slowly vanishing. It’s becoming harder for educators to bridge the growing gap between modern comforts and true nature connection. Constant access to easy internet answers, online social validation, and endless negative comparisons make kids doubt their ability to handle challenges. Many outdoor programs are understandably changing their programs to cater to this trend. But we don’t want to do that at Trackers. We won’t. Instead, we’re investing more in our Leader-in-Training (LIT) program for tweens and teens. We want them to have experiences where they inspire and connect with younger campers so that maybe one day they’ll start their own unique and even better version of Trackers—a place where we understand that challenging paths can lead to profound connections.

Guiding so many people through doing hard things is… well, hard. But the alternative—disconnection from nature, isolation from family, and living for the internet—feels harder. Instead, we at Trackers are here to accept that spider on your forehead! Because it was there first, in that bushel of leaves you gathered to keep yourself warm and help you survive.

Here in the web of Trackers, we do hard things. And we plan to keep doing them!