Outdoor Odyssey

About:

Founded by Major General T.S. Jones, USMC (Ret.), Outdoor Odyssey in Western Pennsylvania pairs area youth with high school mentors, providing these teams with a unique wilderness experience. Incorporating leadership skills, high adventure, and team-building, Outdoor Odyssey sets the stage for a year of follow-on activity between the mentors and their teams. Individual and team resiliency lies at the core of everything they do.

Midshipmen spend the first week leading Florida high schoolers, serving as counselors and platoon commanders, concluding with a military-style Crucible experience. The remainder of the time is dedicated to training high school seniors to be mentors for younger at-risk middle schoolers who spend summer days at the camp.

Midshipmen Experiences:

“Outdoor Odyssey helped me reflect on what type of officer I want to be and taught me that leadership is all about relationships with others. It showed me the importance of humility and genuine concern, which create respectful and caring leader-follower relationships. I also learned how contagious energy can be and how that reflected back to my campers.”  -Nicole Rosenfeld, Class of 2025

“Outdoor Odyssey not only armed me with a multitude of leadership tools, but it also gave me the opportunity to practice using them immediately. I still use many of the philosophies that I learned at camp in my daily life and teach them to every single unit that I have had the opportunity to lead at the Academy.”   -Jordan Corpuz, Class of 2024