May 2021

Preparing backcountry meals and focusing on trail nutrition is important when planning meals for your next outdoor adventure. Whether you’re organizing a day hike, overnight camping trip, or multi-day backcountry adventure, maintaining good nutrition while exploring the outdoors is key to have a good time on your next adventure.

First on the list? Be sure to start your day off right with a good breakfast. That’s the meal that will set the tone for your day and jumpstart your metabolism. Throughout the day, that morning meal will help you maintain good blood sugar levels and energy.

Planning a Backcountry Menu

Here’s the deal when it comes to planning a backcountry menu: You need to find a balance between getting enough food (calories) to sustain yourself and stay well fed and warm, while not overdoing it and ending up hauling an unnecessary amount of weight on your back.

Depending on the weather, mileage, pack weight, activity, incline of the trail, and other factors, you’ll want to consider your group’s necessary daily calorie intake. Common sense tells us that if you’re planning to be more active than usual, you’ll burn through more calories.

For a multi-day backpacking trip, a good average is 3,500 calories a day per person. A good baseline is a limit of 1.5 pounds to 2.5 pounds of food per person, based on how strenuous you expect your trip to be.

Getting your child or teen to look up from their smartphone, put down their Xbox controllers, or step away from the TV can be a chore — and that’s just when you’re calling them to dinner.

Mention taking a walk around the block or joining the family on a picnic a local park and witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

If you look at our nation’s history since the end of World War II, you see that service men and women returned to the United States and began to grow families. These households scrimped and saved to purchase such luxuries as high-fidelity stereo systems, black and white television sets, and a second car. Most of these new items enabled folks to enjoy life indoors, or drive to the drugstore instead of walking.

Fast forward 75 years and we find that families — and especially teens — have dozens of electronics devices at hand, each able to deliver entertainment from the comfort of their couch or bedroom.

So, how do we as families, let alone as a nation, compete with all these shiny handheld toys and devices, and get our kids out of the house and into the outdoors? When I was young, I was tossed out of the house early in the morning. I would jump on a skateboard or bike and search out the wild side of urban landscapes.

Not so today. Below, I’ve listed four action verbs that can get the ball rolling toward get kids interested in exiting their indoor surroundings.

Intensive is one of those words that, when you say it out loud or write it down, sounds foreboding or, as the word itself suggests, promotes a feeling of tenseness. However, when we talk about completing an intensive EMT training course here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), the word is not meant to scare you off.

Instead, it’s intent is to communicate the level of dedication you’re capable of putting into such a program, given the brief timeframe allotted for the program. And by brief, consider this: You can complete a high school EMT program in about a year. A university college course typically takes about six months to complete, and a community college course normally takes a semester.

However, to complete an intensive EMT course, such as those offered here at NCOAE, the work can be completed in just 21 days. That’s three short weeks. Boom! Done! Let me take the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (NREMT) exam!

Benefits of the Intensive Approach to EMT Training

Know this: With an intensive program, you’re going to learn everything you need to know to take and pass the NREMT exam, and you’re going to learn it quickly. Just be prepared to take in a lot of information in a short amount of time. Here are a few of the advantages of intensive learning: (more…)