You can go your own way.

“Why the f*** do we have to do this, this is f***ing s**t.” These words hit me as I opened the door to the bus to greet my group, the young people I would be teaching for the next two days, imparting my knowledge to empower them to complete their own, self managed expedition in a few weeks time. Or so I hoped.

Grumbling away, the eight teenagers on their Bronze Duke of Edinburgh training finally got off the minibus and completely ignored the two of us who were training them. Somehow we got them separated into their two groups and I began to talk to my four; teenage girls who were completely disinterested in what I had to say. They held their own conversations, they looked at their phones and two disappeared to the toilets.

It took us far too long to get them to show even a modicum of interest, and to consider that they might actually have to go for a walk. When we reached this crucial part, they raised a question that had clearly been bothering them.

“How long do we have to walk for?” one asked.

“We’ll probably be going for about five hours today,” I responded.

“F*** off,” the abrupt response hit me pretty hard.

I’ve worked with groups from all over in my time leading expeditons. Some are overly enthusiastic, showing up with gear which puts mine to shame, compasses round their neck, another on their whistle, spare paracord in a bracelet round their wrist, a bracelet which also doubles as a flint and steel, a whistle, an emergency beacon and a kitchen sink. Others are less into it all, borrowed gear and bin bags are their waterproofing materials of choice, sleeping bags in hand, struggling in a lacklustre manner to fit it all in and plan their route.

These girls were a step away from what even I had encountered. There wasn’t even a mild attempt. They sported leather jackets, tube tops and tracksuit bottoms, two of them had found some walking boots which they wore begrudgingly, commenting on their lack of aesthetic qualities. A carrier bag of food was slung unceremoniously in the middle of the table we were trying to plan at, sleeping bags were forced into rucksacks. Having not met the girls before, I explained as usual what they would need for the next two days, the changes of clothes which would actually be necessary, and the five which wouldn’t be, the food we would have to take, the camping kit and the safety equipment.

When we finally got ourselves moving, a mere two hours after getting off the bus, I decided to forego planning at this stage in favour of just getting on the go. I was worried that any planning sessions might mean we would be camping in the car park for the night.

Almost immediately I was stopped in my tracks by a scream, and a cry of “what the f*** is that?”

“Are you pointing at that horse?” I asked.

“Yeah, what’s it doing there, shouldn’t it be on a farm?” “Well, it is,” I replied, suppressing a smirk.

“Tha’s pure heavy mad, we’re in the countryside and tha’ thing can jus’ cut about here,” they all seemed genuinely amazed at a horse that was hemmed in by a fence and clearly a domestic animal (for non Scottish readers, “pure heavy” means “really” and “cut about” is a colloquialism for hanging around).

The pace was extraordinarily slow, and any attempts I made to teach the girls any navigation were falling on deaf ears. They weren’t interested, they were sending Snapchats, they phoned home, they listened to their music. It was all starting to take its toll on me emotionally, these young people were meant to be here through choice, engaging in the outdoors, learning and developing as part of the award. Why were they even here if they were so obviously disinterested? Through the woods we crawled, barely covering two kilometres an hour.

“If you walk for thirty minutes, we can take a ten minute break,” I bargained. They managed ten before stopping, dropping their bags without a care for the contents, sitting down for thirty. They had completely reversed the terms of the bargain and were not for moving, not until they had worked their way through a bag of haribo and a couple of albums.

We eventually got into camp, much later than I had anticipated. The other group had experienced similar difficulties and were even later than we were. The tents were a painful experience to get up. We had hoped to help them with the first couple and then give them increasing freedom, getting them used to putting them up alone. As it was, we had to pretty much put the tents up ourselves for them. They weren’t interested, and their way of getting us involved was by being so careless with the equipment we thought it might break, we had no choice but to step in. It was really grinding on me, I was barely controlling my urges to snap, to give them a blunt talking to, but I knew that it would do no good. They would just label me as another disinterested authoritarian figure who didn’t understand them, and who they would no longer give a damn about.

The food was brought out from bags, super noodles and packet pasta all around. Despite having chosen their food, almost all bemoaned what they had been given (by their school) and it was a struggle for us to persuade them to eat even half of it. Almost immediately after dinner they all dispersed to their tents, then to other tents, then all to the same tent, then to different tents. This continued for hours.

I took a short walk to clear my head and get five minutes of space and was treated to one of the most superb sunsets I have ever seen, reflecting off Loch Ard, all purple orange and red. Magnificent. I went back to the group and told them about it. They weren’t interested.

We finally got them out of their tents and sitting around for a while, chatting away and finding out about their home lives. We had a teacher with us, from whom I had got some insight into their life in Glasgow, and I was interested to hear from the group, but they weren’t particularly forthcoming with any information.

“What sort of things do you usually get up to?” I asked, hoping to find out something interesting.

“Not a lot,” they all replied, clearly not playing the game.

Eventually, I found out that some of them were hip-hop dancers, and some of the boys from the other group were footballers, one even captained his team and they were flying in the league. Others with less physical interests were into reading or music. It wasn’t a lot, but I went to bed feeling as though I had chipped away at the very outermost layers of their defences. I had found out something about each of them. It was progress. It was baby steps, if that, but progress nonetheless.

Day two, we woke up and all that progress had gone. The magic of sitting about under the stars after a day of walking had evaporated. They knew they were going home, that was what mattered. My girls set off at a rate hitherto unseen, still with absolutely no regard for the map or compass, taking random turns at each junction, disinterested in my attempts to use these wrong turns as learning points. At one point I let them go the wrong way, only briefly, hoping that retracing their steps might teach them a lesson. It didn’t, they just called me all the names they could think of as they stomped back to where they had been minutes before.

Near the end, we met up with the other group. Well, we met up with half of the other group. It transpired that when one of the girls in their group had twisted their knee and slowed down, the boys had decided enough was enough and set off at their own rate. Going off the navigation I had seen, they could be anywhere by now.

I left the other supervisor and the teacher who was accompanying us with my group of four and his now two, with just a kilometre left to get to the van, and set off in search of two boys who could be anywhere by now. I had their phone numbers, but the signal was patchy at best and no calls were connecting. A text message made it to each of them, and I got some vague, slightly broken description of where they were.

“We’re by some fields, on a track, there’s loads of trees.” It started to rain. I had never lost anyone before. Technically, I guess, I hadn’t lost these two, but it was my job to find them.

“Did you get to a crossroads by a car park?” I got through to them.

“Yeah, we went towards the van.”

“Did you go through a gate?” “Yeah.”

“Turn around and follow that track back the way you came, I’ll see you at the gate.”

I hoped against hope that I had deduced correctly where they were. As the rain thundered on my hood, I stood forever by the gate, staring hopefully down a completely empty track. What if I had got it wrong? The seeds of doubt were being sewn in my mind, I could have sent them anywhere if I had misinterpreted where they were.

Eventually, after a million scenarios ran through my mind, they re-appeared. They must have been at almost a run to get that far away, and the rain had slowed them down. They were soaked, having not bothered to put waterproofs on. They looked absolutely livid.

We only had a short way to the bus, and we set off in silence down the track, the right way this time. About halfway, I broke the deadlock. “Well done for staying together and looking after each other.” They looked shocked.

“Er, aren’t you really pi**ed off with us?” They were clearly expecting a telling off.

“I’m not thrilled that you left your group behind and added about an hour onto everyone’s day, but it’s happened now, so we’d best just get on with it really,” I said.

“Sorry,” they replied sheepishly “we didn’t really mean to, we just got walking then realised they weren’t behind us, so just kept going.”

“That was probably a point where you should have stopped, eh.” “Yeah, sorry.”

When we got back to the bus, everyone was waiting. “ “Where the f*** have you been you t***s,” they were greeted with.

All abashment vanished the moment they were back with their peers.

“F*** off, you lot were well slow,” they replied, leaping onto the bus and slamming the door behind them. The teacher wound down the window, checked that everything was okay, and rolled off back toward Glasgow, the group didn’t even give us a backward look.

The two days had been exhausting, I didn’t feel as though I had got through in any way to them. I considered calling off their qualifying expedition, a small portion of me didn’t want to see the group again, but I knew the other supervisor was only doing the training, and they really needed some sort of consistency, so against everything I wanted I kept the date in my diary and tried to find a positive from the experience. The only one I could find was that brief hour under the stars, chatting away and really getting an insight.

I knew the group were from an impoverished area in the city, they weren’t outdoor people by nature and had struggled their way through the two days. Their kit was borrowed from the school, they had never worn waterproofs before, never carried a rucksack, slept in a tent, cooked on a stove. Some had never left the city. I felt sorry for them, in a way, but it was hard to keep that sympathy after two days of getting nothing in return. I had tried everything, or so it felt, and had got nothing back. I didn’t know where I had gone wrong, I felt as though I had failed them, but wondered whether there was really any winning.

This played on my mind the two weeks leading up to their next trip out, and it was with a slightly heavy heart that I saw the bus roll into the car park. I wasn’t looking forward to this trip.

“Hey, you came back! We thought you would have never wanted to see us again after last time,” was the almost cheerful greeting I got as the group got off the bus. I was taken aback, it was the last thing I was expecting.

“Sorry for last time,” the two boys said unprompted, “we won’t leave our group behind this time,” and they went off to join their new supervisor.

My girls were packed, they were dressed all in boots, in the right gear in fact. They had a route planned, they had a compass and even seemed to know how to use it. In under an hour we were ready to go. It wasn’t quick in the grand scheme of things, but compared to their training expedition it was extraordinary.

I didn’t need to say a word to them the entire day. They listened to their music, they rang home, they sent snapchats, but they navigated, they knew how long each leg would take, they managed their time properly and they took themselves up and over the hill into camp without a single trouble. Something had gotten through, they had been listening and learning, despite all their outward appearances.

Once in camp they put their tents up, they cooked their food and ate it without complaint. I was completely bewildered, were these the same girls?

That night, once again, we sat around under the stars and chatted away, the girls showed us their hip hop dancing, and the lad who had captained his football team all season rang home to see how they had got on. He had foregone the chance to lift the league trophy they would claim that day with a draw or a win, almost a foregone conclusion. Instead he was here, in a field, completely out of his comfort zone.

I found out more about the group that night than I had anticipated. They had listened through the training, and were genuinely grateful for everything we had taught them and the time we had taken, our patience and our attempts to get them to learn. It had all seeped through, or enough of it had at least. They had understood it all, but had been so far removed from their usual lives that their guard had been up, and they had been standoffish with us, relying on their disinterested facade to give nothing away, to show no weakness.

Like me, they had spent the two weeks reflecting on the practice expedition. The positives, the learning, the difficulties. They had chatted in school about them and broke them down one by one, as we did that night under the stars again. Attitudes were poles apart from what I had expected, and the layers that had been chipped slightly the last time were peeled away. I met the real young people in my group, dancers, footballers, writers; leaders, learners. This group had been my greatest challenge, and my most memorable success, not through any of my doing but through their opportunity to digest an experience, to relive an outdoor expedition and see their comfort grow.

We often, as outdoor people, either in a professional capacity or otherwise, try to define the way that people should enjoy what we consider our domain. The tranquility, the physical challenge, the mental disengagement, whatever it is that we take from being outside, it’s personal. Personal to a point of sermon. We preach our beliefs on how the outdoors benefits people, and how people should engage with it to learn or to enjoy it, as we enjoy it. But we don’t want people to enjoy it as we enjoy it, or at least, that shouldn’t be the ultimate aim.

These young people have life experiences that I could not even begin to imagine. They have seen things, overcome difficulties and endured hardships that I don’t know, as everyone has to their own extent. So why should I be so self-righteous to think they would engage with anything, let alone something so far removed from their everyday life, in the same way as me?

Let people enjoy the outdoors. If you allow them their own journey, they will succeed in a far more meaningful way than if they follow ours.