Ski Season

Ski season has started up, and SWEBOP is certainly excited. Our skiing/snowboarding/snow-tubing trips are the main focus of our winter-trip lineup, driving at least one van of students to a nearby ski resort every Friday. Our lift-tickets and gear rental is super-discounted so students can afford to indulge in a trip or two without breaking the bank. A diverse group of students take advantage of the ski trips so I'm sure there will be even more pictures later, but until then, I offer you some teasers:

Training Training and more training!

Hey friends! It's Berks here!

This is my first ever blog for SWEBOP so bare with me here =P

So some of you might be wondering what

SWEBOP is up to this semester, and if you're not, you should be, because it's gonna be awesome. Right now, all of the instructors are pretty much

booked every weekend with either trips or training. Every year we do a lot of the same

training to make sure it's still fresh in our minds. This past weekend we had Wilderness Rescue Training and American Red Cross CPR/First Aid training. CPR and first aid was mainly a refresher for most of us, and ended up being a lot of fun simulating fixing up hurt people and CPR. For Wilderne

ss Rescue training we learned lots of knots and how to beam people (move them without moving their spine, and all that fun stuff), AND the highlight of the day was the z-drag. The z-drag is a rope setup that we would use if we had to put someone in the litter (sort of like a stretcher but not really) and help them up the hill. For all you non-engineer type people out there it's a way for us to use a rope to hold the load instead of us! We didn't get too many pictures from this ev

ent (but we did get a lot of weird look

s from girls going to dinner) because we were all either on the litter team helping carry it and our patient or on the team who was working the ropes, but here's my favorite of the day:

Because it was a simulation, we picked KM to be in the litter and stuffed her in the litter pretty tightly. Laura told us it was themost padding she'd ever seen put in a litter! KM ha

d a lot of fun with it, though, as you can see from this picture. We had to stand her up, flip her over (things we wouldn't do in a real emergency- promise! We were just seeing how tightly she was in there!), lift her over the desk in the post office, then under it, and then around the lower quad to where we hooked her to the z-drag. Through this all KM talked to us and "threw up" meaning we had to tip her a lot. Though, she paid her dues when she got out and she and I had to put all the clothes we used to pack her in back into the gear room!

Here are a few more pictures from the day!

Speaking of the gear room coordinators (myself and KM), we found the extra manican we usually use for our window displays hiding in with the sleeping bags and decided he should be displayed as well so he didn't feel left out! Note: the creepy man shadow under him is actually the other manican in the window =P

I'm so excited for the trips this semester, and I hope that a lot of Sweet Briar woman are as well! As I'm writing this, I'm watching girls come in ready to go on our first ski/snowboarding trip at Wintergreen this semester! So exciting! Next weekend we have ice skating (which, I'm leading and am super excited about) And this coming weekend we have the Leadership Conference! (sorry for the absurd about of ! there, I got kinda overly excited)

Well that's all for now,

Berks =)

Whether its with the SWEBOP Spring Break Trip or just on our own, KM ’13 and I are hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail during Spring Break. To prepare, we’ve agreed to meet twice a week to walk with loaded packs, hopefully increasing our endurance and capacity to carry lots of stuff on our backs.

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Of course, to do this requires us to walk around campus with big backpacks on our backs…much to the chagrin of the other girls working out. KJ ’11 snagged a picture as she giggled at us:

Though not yet joining us to 'train', there are already a group of students committed and excited to hike the AT this spring. WE leaders are excited to see who else signs up and how the trip preparations pan-out