Imagine you are standing on a cliff. A rope swings in front of you. You have to get your whole team to the other side. Swing, swing, swing. Noooo! You fall off the cliff to your doom. I experienced that at the Bedford Ropes course. Not the cliff though. Anyway, my class just went there! It is a tough rope and wire course, with five challenges. There is the “Mowhawk Walk”, the “Indiana Jones Challenge”, the Rope Swing Challenge, “Lava Island”, and the Rope bridge challenge as the 5 very hard challenges. I started off thinking, this is pretty easy! In reality, it was pretty hard. Can you do it? 

My favorite challenge was the Indiana Jones challenge. First, you had to walk on a bunch of wooden beams that led up to a tree. Then you got down and had to walk on four series of wires. The first was a rope that you could hold on to and a wire. Then, there were two intertwining wires. Next, there was just a tightrope. Finally, there were two metal wires with two ropes attached to it. All of them were hard. But that is not it! You had to walk across another wire, and then step on swings to get to a wooden beam, but before you got there, there was a rope to swing across.  The Mohawk Walk was my second favorite. I just had to go across wires to get to a pad. It seems easy, but it is challenging.  Logan said, “If we scoot, we don’t touch the floor, and we can move across!” That was the only way I got across, and that hurt a lot too! A frustrating challenge was the rope swing challenge. You had a rope swinging from above, and you had to use it to get everyone across to the other platform! Those were the challenges that I enjoyed.

I learned that I should not just go rushing in by myself, and instead help others. I also realized that Logan was very strategic. He had a plan for the rope swing challenge: climb very high. We tried it, but it failed the first time, but then the second time, someone climbed high and then dropped on the platform. It worked! Also, he swung off the rope and hung on to it, which was a good plan for the rope bridge challenge. I learned that teamwork is very important, especially for the rope swing, because when we were climbing high, a ton of people had to hold on to the rope so that the person up high wouldn’t just swing off. Another example was when we did the lava island. Everyone had to step on the plank so the person jumping to the following platform didn’t make the plank touch the “lava”, so we had to work together. Then, we had to work together to make a plan for the Mohawk Walk, and first when we didn’t, well, we just flipped upside down and fell. I thought, “That was hilarious!” I learned a lot about teamwork that way.

I think this trip was very fun. The two challenges I enjoyed were the “Indiana Jones Challenge”, and the “Mowhawk Walk”. One that was frustrating was the rope swing. As you know, teamwork is essential for Bedford Ropes. Now that you’ve heard about it, would you want to go? And how would you deal with the challenges?

     -Grade photo           Rope swing challenge-