Willamette National Forest Volunteer Opportunities

This course discusses common issues on the trail that can cause everything from minor annoyances to life threatening problems. The author, in his 9th year volunteering with the Scorpions, is an outdoor writer and includes 25 different examples and 9 different outdoor-themed essays. 

We open with a common problem of time management and group think. Next is how a leader says something matters at least as much as the content. Working conditions (smoke and thunderstorms) are next, followed by heuristics or efficient thought processes that may be wrong, including overconfidence or familiarity, fatigue, hurry, and interruptions, turning around points, expert halos, being lost, personality types. Time on trail is introduced as a way to be simultaneously cognizant of time and workload. We finish with a list of several other issues: breaks, double standards, public shaming, gender and gender roles, teaching, letting people work on their own, and little things, which of course, are often in relationships big things.