LITTLE ROCK — Outward Bound, a wilderness-adventure school famous for fearless faith in human nature, has pitched a tent in Arkansas.
Janae Turner, project manager of Outward Bound Little Rock, is making the rounds of civic groups, schools and family court judges, explaining potential programs a new Outward Bound center could offer.
"We want to have some pilot courses in the spring," Turner says. What kind of adventures her catalog will include depends on what the people she's meeting tell her they will support.
But she already knows where all the center's courses will take place. "It will be in Arkansas," Turner says. Outward Bound Little Rock students won't travel to North Carolina or Colorado to brave the uncharted waters of their own hearts.
Founded in 1941, Outward Bound taught World War II sailors skills and perspective needed to survive disasters in the unforgiving North Sea. The first U.S. wilderness school opened in 1961, and the nonprofit gradually grew to a multi-state system of wilderness courses intended to "inspire character development and self-discovery in people of all ages and walks of life through challenge and adventure, and to impel them to achieve more than they ever thought possible, to show compassion for others and to actively engage in creating a better world" - as the brochure puts it.
Turner says Arkansas has wilderness woodlands that rival popular Outward Bound routes in Florida, Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere. "The White River, Buffalo River, there [are] so many state and national parks here."
She's undeterred by people who have told her the state's too hot in the summer for meaningful outdoor activity, because she's from Rogers. She knows about the seasons.
"And I've been doing canoe courses down in Florida," she says. "We've done it for a long time. It's really not that bad."
Turner earned a bachelor's degree in recreation from the University of Arkansas in 2002 and immediately went to work for Outward Bound in Florida as an intern. The Florida base specializes in court-ordered treks for youthful offenders. She became an instructor.
"I've worked there off and on about seven years," she says, "and I've also worked at the North Carolina Outward Bound school."
In Outward Bound parlance, "bases" like the one in Florida specialize in one type of program, but "centers" offer a variety. Centers offer team-building weekends as well as eight-, 14-, 30- or 50-day expeditions in which young people or adults - strangers, friends or co-workers - voluntarily take on backpacking, canoeing, rock climbing. Some classes are for schoolteachers. Some are for veterans.
Outward Bound also famously leads involuntary adventures: court-ordered treks designed to shake up teens who appear headed for a life or crime or who have already been convicted.
At first, "I think we will try to do some things with Boys and Girls Clubs and do smaller expeditions," Turner says.
Her office on the fifth floor of the Baptist Health office building at 904 Autumn Road in west Little Rock has a green view of hills far beyond busy Financial Centre Parkway; but it doesn't have room for piles of backpacks and climbing ropes, or more than one canoe, assuming you could cram one into an elevator, which you couldn't.
So for the first treks, "we'll probably borrow gear from an Outward Bound base that's in Alabama, because it's the closest," she says, adding, "I helped set up the base in Alabama. For a while we ran things out of a storage space with all of our gear in it. I think the idea is to grow slowly and then, eventually, have a building."
Instructors for the first courses will also come from out of state, but she says the center's eventual staff will be Arkansans who already know the land and resources.
She credits Little Rock Assistant City Manager Bryan Day for persuading Outward Bound to set up camp in the state.
She lists her board of advisers as Bob East, chief executive officer of East-Harding Construction; Steve Shepherd, chief operating officer of Orbea-USA; Leila Alston and Laura Singleton of Baptist Health; Jim Dailey of Flake & Kelley Commercial Real Estate; Khayyam Eddings of Friday, Eldridge and Clark; Carol Green of the Little Rock School District; Cathy Hagemeier of MidSouth Training Academy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and her husband, Mark Hagemeier, attorney for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; Lee J. Muldrow of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings; Little Rock Community Programs coordinator Barbara Osborne; Bill Steward, president of Mill & Mine Supply Co.; Sanford Tollette of Pfeifer Camp; and Scott Williams of Vista Health.
Turner's phone number is (501) 202-4375.
ActiveStyle, Pages 25, 30 on 08/31/2009