By: Blonde Two
The Two Blondes were late home yesterday but we aren’t complaining as we were working with our Gold Duke of Edinburgh group on some of the many, many routes that they need to write for their summer of expeditions.
We tried to count the number of routes that needed to be written but failed miserably. Once written, they have to be sent off to important people and then possibly (hopefully not) rewritten before the expeditions can start. The number was somewhere in between “quite a lot” and “oh my goodness that is impossible”.
Last night, we were working on routes for Exmoor (three days) and the Isle of Man (four days). It was going well until the mapping software (Blonde boffins) showed the height gain for two of the days to be way over the acceptable limit. HRH, it would appear has lots of rules and one of them is that young people shouldn’t climb too many hills in a day.
You would imagine that this problem would have been quite easy to fix but Exmoor, unlike Dartmoor which is made of granite, is mostly made of contour lines. Our main problem was that most campsites (quite understandably) are in pretty little shaded valleys. Unfortunately this also means that they are mostly at the bottom of horrid, winding, steep lanes. The height gain allocation for whole days was being swallowed up by getting our poor (don’t feel sorry for them, they are much fitter than us) kids out of the valleys and onto the hills.
Even the combination of Blonde persistence and DofE stickability took a while to solve the problem but teamwork prevailed and we now have three route cards for three Exmoor days. You would think that would be enough but we haven’t even started on the poor weather routes yet!
What was the solution in the end?
We rewrote some sections and just about got in by the skin of our altimeters. Took a long time though and a bit frustrating as we know that the youngsters are up to it.
Height gain can be taken with a pinch of salt if you’re confident with the group, as the DofE FAQ says ‘It is up to the team, Supervisor and Assessor to agree the team’s route which the participants create. Between them they may agree that based on a team’s experience, training and ability, they might plan to complete a more challenging expedition which includes more height gain’.
No way my Gold expedition would have passed the 500m rule for sure!
It’s tricky – the issue is that we won’t have time to re-write routes later in the year if they aren’t approved.
if you have a database with all the possible route sectors with all their associated ‘metadata’, you could adjust routes, or even create entirely new ones, at the click of a mouse, after entering a few criteria like party numbers, experience and reasons for rejection of the original. What you do when you find the computer has jumped a sector will have to be left to traditional skills!
I had no idea that the DoE schemes involved such planning, paperwork and prescription: has it always been thus or has this crept up along with general H&S complexity (I won’t use the ‘p’ word) ?
I don’t know if Scouts’ activities require such these days, but if so, no wonder it is hard to find leaders, and makes one’s admiration for them (and yours, of course) all the greater. Maybe Scout Masters of yore did all this without batting an eye, shielding we beneficiaries from the efforts, but I suspect it was a lot easier then. We’d never have built an empire that way – although some of your commenters will rejoice at that, of course, I met many who were genuinely grateful for the enduring legacies of British rule and many more who wished that their countries had been under our, rather than others, sway – or, what seems to have been worse, none at all! And they volunteered these thoughts – whilst quite sober.
The amount of paperwork and h&s covering exercises involved in taking kids out on the hills would astound most people. Weeks of our Blonde lives have disappeared into the discussions and problem solving that precedes any expedition. All designed to do good but not for the faint-hearted.
I was a Scout Leader before the role I have now. There were lots of rules then too but it all seemed to be covered by a big blanket of’ “It will all be ok.”
What is the 500 metre rule? Surely that can’t be the maximum height gain? Even I can do more than that (albeit VERY slowly.) (VERY VERY SLOWLY.)
Our kids can climb it very, very quickly but because DofE expeditions are about the experience, they are not allowed to go too quickly or gain too much height and have to complete an “aim” on the way. There is no height restriction on the pile of paperwork!
Or was that the maximum thickness of paperwork permitted?