Spotlight on Trackers Earth
Community Partner Spotlight: Trackers Earth
By Heidi A. Nadel
“We work to reclaim that connection to nature with very unique teaching methods.”
If you have kids and you live in Sellwood/Moreland, you probably already know about Trackers Earth’s magical summer camps - the camps that kids go on and on about because they spent the day learning to make fire with sticks, carving with real knives or practicing stealth in the forest. You may have stopped your car on a summer morning as campers crossed Milwaukie Avenue to descend on Trackers’ Sellwood headquarters. Or maybe you’ve seen the buses and vans transporting kids from across Portland to the wilderness. Every summer, Trackers brings thousands of young campers back to the wonderment of nature and challenges them to use their imaginations, to test their boundaries and, yes, even to fail and try again.
It is no wonder that Trackers has become known for its camps that are “like nothing else in the known universe.”
But Trackers is also so much more.
Community And Connections With Purpose
In a time when we measure our connections by the “likes” or “friend requests” we receive on social media, Trackers has a different vision: real connections – to one another, to nature and all it offers, and to ourselves. Modern life can be isolating. Trackers reintroduces the concept of a community, of an extended village of connected individuals working together for the greater good and supporting each other in their lives, raising families, and deepening kinship to nature.
Back To Basics
Trackers programs focus on outdoor safety, nearly forgotten basic skills and navigating and preserving the wilderness. This includes what we think of as outdoor survival skills –making fire, gathering food and water, and finding or making shelter, as well as traditional trades and practices like carving, blacksmithing, archery and animal tracking. It also includes the often forgotten custom of storytelling, which gives context to the world and the creatures in it and is crucial to passing on knowledge.
The skills taught are important, but the most meaningful lessons may be in the experiences.
Wild Things
Trackers makes the natural world directly relevant to everyday life again by immersing kids and adults in nature and teaching them how to gather the basic necessities of life and the skills to survive there. This renews an appreciation for and a connection with nature. It also helps to overcome what Trackers refers to as “the blithe social indifference towards the wilderness” that comes with perceiving nature as only “a recreational luxury” and puts the need for preservation front and center.
Un-Bubble Wrapping Children, One Child At A Time
“When you give children trust, they rise to the occasion.”
Devin Clancy, Outreach Manager
Like many parents my age, I remember a childhood very different from what has become our society’s norm. I remember long summer days playing in the woods and riding bikes with friends across town with only the reminder to be home by dark. Parenting is now so focused on protecting children that we end up stifling the activities that help them express independence, creativity and confidence.
Trackers give kids a safe place to take risks, to stretch themselves and test boundaries, and to fail and bounce back. To develop resiliency. To believe in themselves. By trusting kids, Trackers helps kids learn to trust themselves.
We Are All In This Together
The four Trackers Guilds (Rangers, Wilders, Mariners, Artisans) focus on playing different roles in the community and developing the skills necessary for each role, but the overall emphasis is on working together, reciprocity and support. Trackers programs are designed to meet students where they are skills-wise, so they are accessible to people at different skill levels and foster peer learning and collaboration. It is also a good way to make friends.
You Can Do It
Being in nature in the context of survival requires us to look at problems through a different lens and to solve them in a hands-on way. Finding those solutions – even through multiple failed attempts – encourages creative thinking and helps kids and adults believe in themselves and their ability to tackle the next obstacle and the one after that.
Fun!
Trackers lets kids (and adults) have fun doing something new and different from what they do at school, in their jobs or at home.
All In The Family
Tony and Molly Deis founded Trackers in 2004 with the mission of creating “greater connection to community, nature, our heritage, and future.” Trackers describes itself as less a business and more a family and a Village that strives towards “the community promise of greater connection for all generations and the future.”
And this seems to resonate powerfully with the larger community.
Trackers’ exponential growth – from 40 kids in 2004, to approximately 18,000 kids expected to participate in Trackers summer camps alone in 2019 – speaks volumes about not only the merit of Trackers camps, classes and programs, but also about the tremendous need for them.
Something For Everyone
Trackers offers programs for everyone ages 4 and up in virtually all aspects of outdoor skills training and adventure, ranging from a few hours to full-time school and one-year immersion programs. There literally is something for everyone.
Summer Camps – Award-winning summer camps for ages 4 and up in everything from fairies, elves & dragons to wilderness survival, and even overnight camp options for kids in grades 5-12
After School Programs – Drop-off and transported-after-school educational courses in nature-based, traditional skills and crafts including archery, ceramics, martial arts, blacksmithing, and more.
No School Spring Break & Winter Break Camps – Engaging outdoor day camps when school is out.
Homeschool Programs – Outdoor skills and traditional crafts programs for homeschoolers.
Youth & Teen Apprenticeships – One weekend per month, school-year apprenticeships that teach outdoor leadership skills and allow kids and teens to discover connections to friends and nature.
Rovers Forest School – One-day-a-week nature immersion programs for pre-K and kindergarten-aged kids.
Forest School – Full-time for grades K-8 plus a micro high school that meets 3 days per week. The Forest School provides a "nature-first approach to education” that “cultivates life-long learning, resiliency, and in-depth academic study.
Adult Programs – From archery and blacksmithing to wilderness survival programs ranging from one day to one year
Community Events – Trackers opens its archery range to the public on most Thursday evenings and Saturdays and offers family archery training where parents attend for free. It also provides free Community Skills nights from January-May and September-November every third Thursday of the month
It Takes A Village
Trackers reminds us that we are all inextricably linked to one another and to nature, and offers the tools to thrive with that realization and the freedom to celebrate it in unique and interesting ways. As a parent of young kids, this is exactly what I want for them. As a community, this is exactly what we need – for all of us.
“This is an essential feeling of familiarity, of extended family. Our purpose is to help all children discover their own innate sense of belonging in the natural world. And with that same connected empathy, learn to create greater friendships in the human one.”
Tony Deis, Trackers co-Founder
Learn More
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*Heidi A. Nadel is a Sellwood/Moreland resident and mom who celebrates and writes about local businesses and events when she is not busy practicing law.