Civil Air Patrol

HMRS 2004
Hawk Mountain Ranger School 2004, sqdrn Charlie, team two... that was my 'address' for nine days this summer:-). CAP has a large section of land on Hawk Mountain that we use for SAR (search and rescue) training several weekends a year, and then for a longer nine day school in the summer. During this time that side of the mountain is covered by cadets in their BDU's and orange hard-hats learning how to 'save lives, aid the injured, and protect property'. Saving lives starts with being able to save yours and your buddies, and cadets that go to Summer Hawk for nine days of extensive training hopefully come away with all the skills that they need. For the first three or four days we had lots of classes, ranging from how to set traps and build fires to fire-arms safety and how to tie an injured patient into a stretcher and then get them out of the woods as quickly and safely as possible. After all of our classes we go out and put the 'to the test' on a three day hike. we go up the mountain and along the Appalachion trail for a while, staying at different places for two nights, then come back down to base. This year we had perfect Hawk Mountain weather... rain almost every day! Luckily, it wasn't all day long ever, but still on the FTX (the three day hike) there were a number of cases of trench foot and other problems.
The last few days consisted of testing for our ranger grades. Almost everyone left as an R2 (ranger second class); myself included. The kinds of things we were tested on included fire building (two matches, you had to gather the wood locally, and the instructor had to stomp on it and you had to be able to get it burning again w/out any matches), map and compass familiarity, pace count, knots, knife/etc safety, and medical (identify and explain how to treat/prevent different problems).
If you are in CAP and interested, I recommend going... I had a great time and learned an awful lot!