Explorer Courses

Explorer courses offer adventurous souls the opportunity to challenge themselves and explore specific topics or territories across Boulder Mountain, the Escalante River system, and the Kaiparowitz Plateau. Because each course offers a unique experience that can't quite be found on a Field, Skills or Training course, here's an overview of the current BOSS Explorer courses:

The Hunter Gatherer is BOSS's oldest Explorer course and offers students the rare opportunity to go off into the wilderness with only primitive items that you have made or prepared yourself. No blanket and poncho on this course. No knife, and no food, either. You and your coursemates will become a band of "hunter gatherers," seeking to provide for yourselves from the environment for up to 9 days in the field. In order to take the Hunter Gatherer course, a participant must have successfully completed a BOSS 14-Day or 28-Day Field course within the past 5 years.

The Desert Navigator is the ideal course for those who wish to focus on the art and science of navigation in the wilderness. Students who successfully master the skills on this course are given the ultimate (and rare) final challenge: a 3-day navigation through the wilderness... alone. But before that can happen, everyone learns about as much as can be taught within 10 days of hands-on lessons: map color & symbol significance, contour lines / intervals, scale, margins, trail selection, declination, magnetic fields, and UTM, Lat. & Long, and Township & Range coordinate systems. By the end of this course, you should be a proficient navigator.

The Survival Rescue course is built around a realistic survival situation in which something “unexpected” has happened to your group.  You and your coursemates must then prioritize your needs and determine how to take care of each priority. Your decisions and actions will likely affect your chances of survival. Challenges faced may include finding food and water, creating ways to stay warm, and signalling for rescue. Not much is divulged in advance to participants in this course, as the challenge revolves around your adapting to the unknown.

BOSS's newest Explorer course is the Pathfinder. Not for the faint of heart, this is the course for people who love to hike, love to explore and love to experience the challenges of hiking through unknown terrain. Like a BOSS Field course, you and your coursemates will ideally cover a lot of terrain on this course. However, on the Pathfinder course, there's no Impact, no Solo, and no Student Expedition phases. The goal is to hike together into terrain unfamiliar to BOSS, noting geographical features and exploring the terrain with an eye toward perhaps future expeditions.

For those who wish to learn about the landscape and journey through it with stories, consider BOSS's Ancestral Storytelling course. This is the perfect place to blend your love of nature and wisdom traditions with the art and science of telling captivating stories to a group. And there's certainly no landscape richer in trail wisdom than the Amerian Southwest, where previous inhabitants drew their stories on the canyon walls. No prior storytelling experience needed, but you should be comfortable hiking, camping "primitively" and contributing to the course experience.

Explorer courses next offered in 2012:

Love looking at the night sky? Wishing you new more of the constellations and how those celestial bodies interacted with our planet and solar system? BOSS's Desert Astronomer course offers you the chance to learn the mechanics of the solar system and celestial sphere as well as the mythology and practical uses of the stars as developed by various world cultures. We created this Explorer course specifically to help students gain more familiarity with the night sky and to appreciate the practical benefits of knowing its constellations, stories, and magic.