The new Camosun Outdoor Adventure Club may have started as just a class project, but third year Camosun Sport and Fitness Leadership student Sylvia Watkins has turned it into a functioning student club, taking her fellow students from the classroom to the fresh air for hikes and more.
“We had to do something in the community,” Watkins says of the class project, “so I decided I wanted to make a Camosun Outdoor Adventure Club, because Camosun didn’t really have a club like that.”
Being a brand new Camosun club, attracting new members and generating a buzz is presently on the member’s minds. Setting up a college student club is not an easy task, but everyone involved is excited for what the future brings.
“We’re still trying to work out logistics,” says Watkins, “but we’re hoping to get some other things other than hiking coming up in the future, especially in the winter. Because there are different things you can do, like indoor rock climbing.”
Club member Andrew McMillan, who is also a third-year Camosun Sport and Fitness Leadership student, loves being outdoors and jumped at Watkins’ idea for a student group that takes part in these sorts of activities.
“When Sylvia came to us with the idea of doing it, it was exciting for me,” he says. “I grew up on a farm, so being outdoors is second nature to me. I’m not from Victoria, so it’s something that intrigued me, and it obviously intrigued a lot of other people, so it’s been awesome.”
Having a club with a diverse group of students could potentially pose problems for communication. But the club’s group dynamics are going strong and are growing each time they meet, says McMillan.
“We have some really down-to-earth people,” he says. “We all sort of like the same things, so we’re all pretty similar personality-wise, and pretty similar interest-wise as well.”
Going out alone just doesn’t cut it for McMillan anymore: he says going on adventures with other Camosun students beats adventuring solo any day.
“It’s been awesome,” he says. “A lot of the stuff I can do on my own, but doing it with somebody else and doing it with other people in a group has been a lot of fun. You meet new people, and we have some exchange students that are involved, so it’s been kind of neat to network with them.”
If you’re looking to join the club, finding them on Facebook is the best way to track them down; hopefully you can catch them when they’re not embarking on an escapade in the great outdoors.
“If I wanted to go for a hike,” says Watkins, “I would post on the Facebook group saying, ‘I want to hike Mount Finlayson today! Who wants to join me?’ And we’d just go from there.”