Becoming An Outdoors Woman

For Valentines Day, Richard registered me for the most awesome thing - "The Becoming an Outdoors Woman Program" or BOW for short. Now, you may be thinking that I'm already quite the accomplished outdoorswoman, and you'd be right. But we all have lots more to learn about the outdoors - and how often do 130 adult women get together and learn without kids or husbands or chores distracting them?

Victory Bible Camp - in Chickaloon, Alaska. Very posh. Probably the nicest camp facility in all of Alaska.


Here I tried to learn fly fishing. I learned how to tie flies years ago, and because it's a lot like embroidery, I can still tie them easily. Getting the fly out into the middle of a stream... a little harder. I would like to try this class again when I could actually cast into water, instead of the frozen parking lot.

This was by far my favorite class - field dressing a caribou. In this case it was a reindeer from the commercial reindeer farm. Apparently no-one was naughty and illegally shot any caribou this winter! Caution - it's a bit graphic if you're not used to dead animals!

I have already processed an entire caribou that Rich brought home two years ago, and I'd like to bring in my own someday. The meat is just so good, and for a good meal I don't mind hunting. Trophy hunting I won't do though.

Look at us go - sawing away! The best part is that we cut all but a small amount of the meat off the carcass before we ever opened the gut sack. A really cool way to dress the animal and keep gut and ureaic fluids from tainting the meat.

Ahhh, field map and compass. This should have been an easy class, but our instructor was a bit confused. I did find the great big mountain though...hard to miss!

And then Karin and I went sledding, in the dark, on inner tubes, down a really steep hill. Yeah it was pretty darned awesome!!!!

Here we are going down the hill as a human chain!

And then later that night, at the cabin, someone broke out apples to apples and some licorice - and we had a blast. I haven't had this much fun since girl scout camp!

Cross Country skiing was wonderful. Even though I knew the basics I still learned a lot, and won the cool green neck gator you see here. The class instructor was a fabulous, world famous skiier, and she also happened to be a great beginner instructor.

Some other gals were ski-jorring circles around us...

And I ran into an old friend - Katrin from Fairbanks. Good times and lots of shenanigans!!!


This is Angela and Panther. She really love the mushing session. I may take this next year. It looked really, really fun!