Wilderness Drum > Wilderness Writings > Team Building

Team Building in the Wilderness
Steve Beyer

Introduction
Campfires
Conflicts
Confrontation
Cooking
Council
Darkness
Decisionmaking
Development
Drumming
Followership
Leadership
Meetings
Stress
Trust
Wilderness Ethics

Cooking

Food is very important in the wilderness, and not simply because without it you will, eventually, die. Food represents social interaction, comfort, and the temporal organization of the day. When I am out by myself, I am perfectly happy to subsist on dried food whose primary virtue is light weight and simple preparation. But it is remarkable how quickly, in a wilderness group, food becomes a focus of attention, both positive and negative.

Just as a basic matter, bad food in the wilderness can quickly lead to bickering, accusations, and bad tempers. More important, food acquisition and preparation can be used to enhance group cohesiveness and team building. It should be remembered that food in the wilderness includes a number of steps – planning the menu; purchasing the food; packing the food; gathering and packing food preparation tools, such as cookstoves, fuel, pots, pans, and utensils; cooking the food; cleaning up; and disposing of garbage. The members of the group can be involved in all, some, or none of these activities.

There are several options for preparing food for a group in the wilderness. In some cases, such as high-end guided wilderness tours, there may in fact be a cook hired solely to prepare meals for the group. In some instances, such as a guided wilderness canoe fishing trip, where the primary goal of the participants is fishing rather than wilderness experience, the group leader or guide may prepare all the meals for the group. Or each group member may simply have responsibility for acquiring, packing, and preparing that individual's own food. While good cooking certainly enhances the wilderness experience, none of these alternatives actively promotes team building.

One way to inculcate individual responsibility for the group as a whole is to rotate assignments – that is, have each group member take turns at such tasks as cooking, helping, cleaning up, and disposing of garbage. Another way to inculcate cohesion is to form smaller cooking groups of, say, three people, who can then divide responsibilities among themselves as they see fit.

There are several variations on these themes. Each individual team member, for example, can be given the responsibility of planning, purchasing, and cooking one or more meals for the entire group. Or the group can meet as a whole before departure, plan menus, go shopping for food together, and collectively divide responsibility. Or the group leaders can purchase all the food ahead of time, and leave it to the team members to plan the meals using the food provided.

Which option is chosen depends on numerous factors – the size of the group, the experience of individual members, the expectations of group members, especially if they are paying to be guided somewhere, and the tolerance of the group leader for ambiguity and uncertainty. For example, more experienced wilderness travelers, given the responsibility of preparing a meal for the group, may well prepare, cook, and dehydrate most of the meal ahead of time, thus lightening their pack and minimizing cooking time, while less experienced group members may wind up carrying around packs full of bulky, heavy potatoes that require peeling and slicing before relatively lengthy cooking times.

In any event, the goal should be to provide a mechanism whereby the members of a particular wilderness team – given their age, experience, and motivation – can be not simply fed but brought together by the process of preparing food. Here, too, where appropriate, as in dealing with at-risk or adjudicated youth, lessons need not necessarily be belabored. If John is supposed to cook for the group, or wash dishes, or dispose of organic garbage, and John is lazy, or disorganized, or stubborn, then the immediate consequences are obvious both to John and to the team. On the other hand, the fact that Judy is miraculously able to conjure, in the middle of the wilderness, hot apple turnover for desert will not go unnoticed or unrewarded. But the key is not simply skill. The group will just as readily reward a member for helping out by scrubbing pots or burying potato peels.

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