The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Thanks to snow falling in the mountains again, Sisters Middle School was able to complete the winter retreat for eighth graders at Hoodoo Mountain Resort on Thursday, February 17.

The school offers a retreat each trimester, but with so little snow in the mountains where the winter retreat was to be held, the event was postponed for nearly a month in the hope that snow would deepen, allowing for the activities planned for the day.

As things turned out, the class spent a gloriously sunny winter day learning outdoor survival skills, cross country skiing, creating a wool pouch, and participating in team-building activities.

The purposes of the retreats, according to principal Lora Nordquist, are to build leadership skills, develop unity as a class, and to challenge students individually as they try new experiences.

“Doing this in the middle part of the year also served as a chance to check in with the kids in smaller groups and see how everybody is doing,” she said.

Volunteer coordinator Ann Jacobson did an amazing job working with Hoodoo and arranging for volunteer help, according to Nordquist.

“We’d be lost without Ann,” she said.

Nine Sisters High School students worked as group leaders for the day.

The theme that carried through the day was “The Balance of Life,” which focused on work, family, health, friends and spirit.

Brad Tisdel, who is contracted by the school district to help coordinate the retreats, led the students through the team-building portion of the day, which included an activity in which teams took turns pulling one member of the group at a time up or down a slight hill. At each end, students were given a famous quote to interpret and apply to real life before heading back with tube and passenger in tow.

Nordquist and her husband and some parent volunteers led students through a short lesson on Nordic skiing and everyone made a trek out on the groomed trails. For the majority of the students it was their first time on cross country skis.

Kit Stafford, Kim Dunaway, and Julie Patton worked in the lodge together where each student had theopportunity to sew together a felted wool pouch in which to store something important to them, such as a piece of writing, a picture, or a special object.

Paul Patton, Dave Glick and Greg Garretson covered practical measures people can take to survive outdoors during the winter including how to construct a shelter, recognition and prevention of hypothermia, how to build a fire.

“We got to do things our parents don’t let us do, like build fires,” said one student in a debriefing session at the end of the day.