Hey Y’all, Max here.
Last February PLP 8 and 9 went to Loon Lake in what was my first ever field school with PLP. Unfortunately, I came down with a case of COVID on the second day and my experience was cut short ( you can read about that here ). Anyways, this years trip to Loon Lake was, in my mind, a re-do of last February.
The first big difference from the PLP 9 trip to Loon Lake was that PLP would not be taking control of the educational aspects of this trip until the fourth day of the trip; for the first three days we would be managed by a different source. This source was called Pinnacle Pursuits. From what I’ve learned about them, Pinnacle Pursuits is an organization dedicated to taking groups of people (i.e students, businesspeople, etc. ) and teaching them skills and lessons in the great wilderness that can be applied in daily life back home, as well as in your workplace or school.
Specifically for PLP 10 this trip was mostly an ‘experiential team-building and leadership retreat’. Looking back on the trip as a whole I’m glad there weren’t so many students. Both PLP 8 and 9 went in February which meant there were around 100 students, and I honestly think there being only around 30 people this time around contributed to what made the trip so great.
Anyways, the man who would be our guide, teacher, and personal instructor for the next three days was a man named Jono. Even at first glance I could tell he was a highly qualified and serious person. To phrase that better, I would say he was serious when he needed to be, and relaxed and humorous when he didn’t need to be serious. He also never mentioned it, but according to the Pinnacle Pursuits website he was the founder and CEO of Pinnacle Pursuits. Little did we know by the end of the third night he would become like a god to us.
I’m not going to go over every lesson and activity we did at Loon Lake, just the ones I think were/are the most important, and anything I think I showed growth from participating in. I apologize if I don’t have a day-to-day in-depth analysis of everything we did, but I am already planning to make this post 2-3x longer than my normal posts, so I really cant have it be that long.
The first lessons we did the day we got to Loon Lake was mostly assessment of our skills, getting to know each other, strengths and skills, etc. So I wont go too far into that, either.
The only part of the first day I want to mention is the part we did on leadership styles. In booklets we were given and would use throughout our time at Loon Lake, there was a page where we had to give numbers to different statements, depending on how much we could relate to the statement. 1 being rarely relate to and 5 being regularly relate to ( or something along those lines ). Later, we could identify out leadership style depending on our answers to the statements. Apparently, I’m an Encourager and a Challenger. Encouragers celebrate others, and give support. Challengers test themselves, challenges the way things are done, and take risks. I found this interesting because these are two seemingly very different descriptions, yet I can slightly relate to both. I don’t really consider myself a natural leader, but to be honest this year in PLP has shown me I have both the skills and the capability to be one. More on that later.
The Pan-abode was a large building with a low roof, and its here that we did most of the learning that wasn’t in the woods. It wasn’t really that special a building, and honestly I think it would have been better in the dining hall, but there was a lot of privacy which was nice ( and would be helpful on night 3.. )
Two more things we did that I’ll try to be brief about. The first was a poster that we would continue to work on throughout the first three days. This poster was meant to be a piece that personalized yourself, anything could be on it, and most importantly it was a place where anyone could write their encouragements, something they noticed that day, or really anything else as long as it was positive. We were regularly encouraged to return to these. Oh yeah, the posters also had to include a quote we found. Mine is: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
The second thing I want to quickly touch on before moving on is an activity we did with a partner. It was simple, the first person asks what the other loves, the second responds, repeat, repeat, repeat until you’ve filled in the chart. My partner was Zach, and his handwriting was truly awful. If you can read it, I’ve attached a picture of my chart of things I love below.
Moving on. The next notable activity I enjoyed was the low ropes course ( not to be confused with the large ropes course ). This was a series of balance beams and tightropes, which required the utmost balance and focus to complete. The first part was individual; everyone needed a realistic goal and a crazy goal. For example, my realistic goal was to make it halfway there. My crazy goal was to make it all the way there. I nearly made it to the end. Jono even complimented my abilities (“are you an athlete?” ). that alone made my day. the next part of the low ropes course was a team activity. We had to traverse a longer, trickier course with only three people being allowed on any given rope at one time. For comparison, there were probably 15 of us in the group. It took a while but eventually we all made it across. This was a classic teamwork activity and we’ve done stuff like this a million times in PLP, but it still felt rewarding when we succeeded.
This year we stayed in the cabins by the lake instead of the Arbus’s and Cedar cabins ( I hope I got the names right ). These cabins were unexpectedly nice. Pretty much everyone was under the same roof, with all the guys on one wing of the cabin and all the girls on the other. The guys rooms had a common area that connected the two. The rooms themselves were large and empty, aside from bunk beds on the walls. I shared a room with Declan, Mateo, Max R., Sepaus, and Zach. We were all very well behaved, and went to bed on time every night.
Of course the food was still amazing from the last time we visited. ( Pretty much ) Every meal was amazing, though unfortunately we were never blessed with Lasagna/Caesar like last time. The one complaint I had with the food situation is that breakfast was too early, lunch too sparse, and dinner too soon so there was a lot of room in between meals to be hungry. Our cabin resorted to fruit and vegetable theft like the Neanderthals we are, and soon enough we had a pretty big stash of produce in our cabin. With how busy our schedule was at Loon Lake I guess I should be grateful we got fed at all.
The dining hall was a large, modern building. Aside from eating in here, we also did an activity on day two ( or maybe it was three? ) that was familiar to everyone who did DI. It was a simple task: make a freestanding structure as tall as possible, using only what you’ve been given. My group was my aforementioned cabin group, and we did not do very well. So bad in fact we didn’t even get off the ground. But as much as I would love to write more about our groups failures, what Jono showed us afterwards was more interesting. It was a chart that showed which demographics ( businesspeople, CEOs, etc. ) typically made the highest tower. Businesspeople had around 28 cm, CEOs had around 30 cm, architects and engineers had around 38, but most interestingly children aged under five built towers typically taller than businesspeople ( no I can’t remember the exact height, the other heights are from memory ).
According to Jono it’s because children aren’t afraid to try new things, and they aren’t weighed down by the thought of failing. I thought this was really interesting, because how different would it be if no one was afraid to fail in something like DI? I feel like teammates would be more cooperative, more ideas would get bounced around, and there would be more focus on a solution.
The high ropes course and the climbing wall are two activities we did on days two and three. The high ropes course was awesome. It was shorter than I expected, but it was crazy being 30 feet in the air with just a rope to support you. Honestly, its crazy how different it is to look up at someone up in the air, than to be the person in the air.
The climbing wall was a bit different, but in my opinion way more difficult. We were led by a guy named Brendon, a climbing instructor and soldier who served in Antarctica chasing off Russians. Anyways, there were two climbing wall as we could choose from, the easy wall, or the more difficult wall. Me being the stubborn idiot I am decided to try the difficult wall first. I’ve done some indoor climbing in the past, but its nothing like climbing on a frozen wall in -4C temperature. It was smooth sailing for the first 15 seconds, and then I was stuck. I couldn’t really move, and my fingers were starting to go numb. I asked if I could give up and Brendon politely said I couldn’t until I had ‘proved myself’. I tried what seemed like a dozen times to grab onto a stable handhold, and I just couldn’t. I literally could not feel my fingers, and I’m not even going to lie I was on the verge of tears. My pattern-recognizing brain did eventually find a way to the top, but if it wasn’t for my classmates encouragement, Brendons encouragement and his insistence on not letting me down, I wouldn’t have made it. I genuinely think this is what I am proudest of during all my time at Loon Lake.
There is also the trust fall activity. Completely unexpected and I really did not want to do it at first. I don’t have many fears or things I’m afraid of in daily life, but heights are something I usually cant handle. Unfortunately for me, I would find myself falling off a folding chair haphazardly placed on a table. I really don’t want to explain it, so I’ve attached a video below of me, uh, falling.
For context, beforehand we had practised trust falls indoors with a partner and that was fine. it was a bit concerning that I was placing the safety of my skull in the hands of Sylas, so I was completely caught off guard when we moved outside to the table. What I said before I fell was my goal that I had made earlier that morning, which was: “Today I will try to be more confident by doing the ropes course, and by doing this ( trust fall activity )”. So Overall I was completely unprepared for this activity but I do feel like it helped re-establish some trust I might have previously lost in my classmates.
Before dinner on day two all the guys in our cabin watched the greatest film to ever grace this earth, Killer Bean Forever. It was awesome and I recommend you, the reader, stop reading and watch this amazing piece of cinema if you somehow haven’t already ( then please come back to reading this post ). Okay moving on.
The very last thing I’m going to talk about is night three. Night three was a typical teaching/activity night like the previous two nights. This is a good time to talk about credos. My credo is what I stand for. It’s who I am, what I need, and what I’m here to do. Summarized, my credo goes like this: “I value individuality over everything. I recognize my role and understand my value. I stay positive no matter what adversity I face.” During night three Jono gave us a chance to share our credos. I would have shared mine, but we ran out of time because it was time to move on to an activity called ‘crossing the line’. Jono would say a few situations, and you would cross the line on the floor if any of these situations applied to you. I cant really say much more about this activity because of verbal confidentiality agreements, but it was very eye-opening. I learned that it’s not just me who’s going through stuff in life. And that’s all I have to say about this. It was probably the highlight of my entire time at Loon Lake.
To wrap this up I will say that this Loon Lake experience has been infinitely better than the one in February. A few factors that contributed to this are: less PLP students went, management of our learning and activities was handled by Pinnacle Pursuits, and the schedule was more clear and concise. The main objectives of this trip was to understand leadership and teamwork skills, but did I really learn that? In terms of leadership, then yes I feel I did. There’s a lot of games and small things we did throughout our time here that I don’t think are necessary to include, but even small group activities have managed to bring out some leadership skills in me. Even the aforementioned failure tower; even though we were floundering around with ideas and opinions, I was trying to bring it together into something we could use. And when the tower collapsed, I encouraged everyone to try just one more time to see what we could salvage. I don’t like to give myself praise very often, but I cant help but feel like there were some things I assumed a leadership position in, and guided my team well.
this brings us to teamwork. Was this also a success? Well for starters I think I was able to connect with people I haven’t really talked to or worked with that often throughout the five days we were at the Lake. This allowed for better cooperation, and more good ideas to come from formerly reluctant people. Teamwork has always even one of PLP’s main practices and I honestly think there was a lot of it displayed in this trip. So yes, I think I accomplished an understanding of teamwork.
This trip was a lot of fun, and I cant believe I almost didn’t go. I learned a lot about myself and about others, even if I cant share some of how I did that. Jono and Pinnacle Pursuits did an amazing job of guiding PLP 10 through the first three days, and his impact on us was, and is, enormous. So I can say with confidence that this was a 10/10 trip.
