Wednesday, September 26th... the day after orientation is officially over, and the day before classes officially begin. If I had to pick one word to describe what I just experienced over the last 2.5 weeks of orientation, it would be UNFORGETTABLE (I thought about creating a word, like Amazcrediblyunforgettablyawesomefuntimes, but decided to keep it simple.)
Fellow bloggers Ayushman and Alejandra have touched on different aspects of orientation already, so this blog post is going to be focused on the ropes course. Odyssey is an organization that focuses on team building and leadership by putting teams through situations where they are forced to work together to achieve a goal. UCLA has a ropes course on campus, which is where our day long adventure took place.
(One of the co-founders, Lain, talking to the group and getting everyone ready to take some risks.)
They deliberately mix up the teams, which provides everyone a chance to meet people outside of their sections.
(Gold Team 8 represent!)
The activities were a mixture of brain teasers on the ground and ropes above the ground. Our team started out with one that sounded extremely simple. We divided into two teams, and each team had to lower a pipe to the ground. The pipe was positioned on our index fingers, and if a person took their finger off the pipe we had to start over.
Sounds easy right? The catch is...the pipe is SUPER light. As in, you can barely even feel it on your fingers.
We were supposed to start with the pipe at our waists, but as you can see, it quickly floated upward. Any slight nudge upward led to a chain reaction, where everyone was trying to keep their fingers touching the pipe and it continued going higher and higher.
After the pipe, we did two more activities on the ground. One involved crossing a "mine field" without being able to speak to your teammates (only pointing) and the other consisted of everyone being blindfolded, handed an obect, and determining which two objects we were missing as a group and what color the objects were (yes, color, while blindfolded.) I won't give away how we solved those two so you can enjoy the thrill during your own Anderson orientation!
On to the above ground activities...
Our first ropes activity was the "High V", so named because the two ropes start close together at one end, and get wider and wider as two people walk across to the other side while leaning in against each other.
(My name is Kyle Forrest, and I choose to climb. My partner for the activity was fellow blogger Gregory Paige.)
(After climbing to the top of the ladder, the hardest part is getting on the two ropes and balancing against your partner.)
(Then you start walking across... while trying to stay balanced and not look at the ground.)
((
(Whoever isn't climbing can serve on the belay team, keeping a watchful eye out on the climbers...)
(...or they can be supportive and cheer people on as they climb.)
(It can be very difficult to keep your balance, as shown above, but some partners were able to press back and keep progressing down the rope!)
Our second ropes activity was an individual climb up a pole, followed by a jump to a bar. It's a true test of overcoming any nervousness and anxiety, and trusting in your teammates' support to guide you safely back to the ground.
(The pole. From top to bottom, it's roughly 30 feet.)
(We were given the option of going up blindfolded, which I decided to do after teammate Mark Joshua trailblazed the way. His climb was made more challenging because he was wearing sandals.)
(Narissa also made the decision to climb up blindfolded...)
(...but shortly after making the top, she took her blindfold off to enjoy the view.)
It was a day of self-discovery. Everybody learned something about themselves and each other, as we were only able to successfully make it through the day by trusting ourselves and our teams. That trust may have led to some crazyness later in orientation... but that's for another blog post.
For now, I'll leave you with a video of my blindfolded climb!
Until next time,
~Kyle Forrest, follow on Twitter and follow UCLAMBA
