Classic Courses

Are you ready to take a journey that will change your life? You won’t look at day-to-day drama the same way after you’ve summited a high mountain ridge, or slept under the stars watching bats swoop overhead. Joining an Outward Bound expedition changes you. Your crew, your Instructor, your route and your adventures will have a profound and lasting impact on you as you rise to meet exhilarating natural challenges in some of the country’s wildest places.

• Build skills, form connections:Learn and practice wilderness, teamwork and leadership skills. Find connections with your crewmates based on support and respect (and fun too!), and in the thick of challenges, discover there is more in you than you know.
• Value strengths and strengthen values: Uncover your unique character strengths, develop your leadership abilities and learn how to let compassion in to everyday life by pushing your own limits and working alongside your peers.
• Demonstrate mastery:As you gain confidence in new skills, take on more decision-making responsibilities. Work together to achieve team goals, solve problems and succeed both as individuals and as a group. At the end of course, you and your crew will undergo a Final Challenge Event.
• What you’ll learn:
  • For Middle School students, heading away from home means taking on new responsibilities and expectations with crewmates who are strangers when you first meet and trusted teammates by the end of your expedition. It’s all about confidence.
  • For High School students, the opportunities to carry more weight (literally and figuratively) and make impactful decisions with accompanying consequences fills the expedition as you go through numerous trials and triumphs. It’s all about independence.

After you come home, many of the character, leadership and service traits you uncovered on your expedition stay with you, helping you navigate your daily life with more resilience and success.

Backpacking

Backpacking is an ideal combination of team and individual elements. The mountains of Maine are jagged and densely wooded, and the trails are remote, narrow and often steep. Students travel on wilderness footpaths; navigating both on- and off-trail throughout the journey. When the weather cooperates, the group’s hard work is rewarded with spectacular views from glorious mountain tops – but the views in the forest understory are often just as spectacular and rewarding. Living and traveling with just a backpack is a simple existence, in which small choices can make deceptively great differences to the quality of one’s experience. The expedition skills learned on the sea kayaking section transfer well to backpacking, and the team will continue to build its resilience and connectedness on this section of the program, building up to their final expedition and Personal Challenge Event.

Rock Climbing

The mighty crags and rock faces of Maine and New Hampshire are a wonderful place to learn how to rock climb. Students learn to use climbing equipment, tie knots, climb and belay each other, while Instructors provide overall supervision of the site. Climbing hones and develops balance, coordination, flexibility, and grace on the rock and presents many individual challenges for students, while the team must work together to set systems up, communicate clearly and support each other throughout the climb.

Solo

The Solo experience provides an important break from the rigors of the expedition and gives students the opportunity to reflect on their Outward Bound experience. With sufficient food and equipment, students will set up camp at sites of their own, using the wilderness skills learned during the first half or two-thirds of the course. The time students spend on Solo depends on the length of the course – and will likely be one or two nights on this course, depending on various factors including weather, location and crew readiness.

Campsites are chosen to offer as much solitude as possible (yet be within emergency whistle-signaling distance of other group members). Most students spend their Solo time journaling, drawing, or just thinking and resting as they process lessons of the course to focus on their goals for the future. Instructors check on each participant at least daily and are within whistle-distance at all times.

Outcomes

Students return from their Outward Bound journey often ready to fully participate and positively engage at home, school and work, on teams and in their communities. An age-based curriculum and course length help to adapt the Outward Bound program to meet the needs of each developmental stage. Instructors work with each group to make sure that the balance of challenge and success matches the group's level of ability as much as they can, and they expect the students to work with them to do so.

While every course provides significant learning opportunities and high-impact outcomes, we encourage students to select the longest course that fits their schedule because the successes, rewards, learnings, and memories will be greatest.