Nomad Challenge: Outdoor Skills

July 2, 2024 – USA: The Fifth Weekly Challenge of the 2024 edition of the Nomad Overland Rally gave Teams a chance to test their knowledge about the “outdoors.” Questions covered some key wilderness skills, emergency survival and natural navigation concepts, as well as weather awareness. Competitors needed to show how well they understand their wilderness surroundings and demonstrate their ability to “read” nature’s signs.

During the course of the Rally most of the Teams have evolved their skills of observation and deepened their relationship to the environment they are journeying through. This Week’s Challenge pushes them to not just observe but to use what they see to maintain their situational awareness as they travel through the wilderness. It also reminds them to prioritize properly during a potential emergency via a series of bushcraft and survival scenario questions.

The Teams generally did quite well on it, but only three of them aced it — Team 114 Dolbow, Team 121 Rojas and Team 134 Fribley. The questions were not tricky, but required a breadth of knowledge about weather, nature and survival — and while there were links to the informational resources teams could use, they still had to “interpret” visual cues or scenarios to choose the correct answer.

We like this Challenge because it makes the Teams “think” more about their surroundings and perhaps be more aware as they continue the second half of their Rally adventures.

The Weekly Challenges are one of the four pillars of the event and competitors can earn up to 100 points each week for completing the Challenge questions online. The Challenges also provide a way for all the teams to stay engaged over the whole ten weeks, even when they are not out exploring on Overland Stages. Each Week’s Challenge focuses on a different aspect of overland travel or outdoor skills — sometimes the competitors will have to do something offline in order to answer the questions and other times they just need to respond to multiple choice knowledge-checks. The teams are always free to research answers or find tutorials to help them complete the tasks prior to submitting their Challenges and once each Challenge “closes” they can consult the “correct” answers and explanations — turning it into a defacto learning opportunity.