AT the sound of guns firing and a fanfare of bugles, 2411 youngsters aged between 14 and 19 took part in the 56th Ten Tors Challenge on Dartmoor last weekend and were blessed with almost perfect weather conditions to undertake one of the biggest outdoors adventure events for young people anywhere is the UK.  

A further 300 youngsters with physical or educational needs and their families and friends took part in the Jubilee Challenge.

Although known as the ‘Ten Tors’, the event had another name and another purpose as it served as the backdrop for Exercise ARIES TOR, a high-level military resilience exercise led by the British Army’s Headquarters Southwest based in the heart of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The exercise involved almost a 1,000 reserve and regular armed forces personnel from across the region along with partner agencies such as the British Red Cross, Dartmoor National Park, Devon and Cornwall Police, local authorities and a whole host of volunteer organisations.

The weather promised to be warm as the teenagers trekked unaided over different 35, 45 or 55 mile routes encountering some of the wildest landscapes and highest peaks in Southern England. They had to rely on team work, navigational skills and sheer grit and determination to succeed. The rules state that there can be no mobile phones or adult intervention. However safety is at the heart of the event and each team was monitored in an operations room manned 24 hours by both military and civilian staff via a GPS tracker which not only gave their location, but also enabled them to contact the organisers in an emergency.

Col Toby Bridge Commander Headquarters South West and Ten Tors director said: ‘We have been extremely lucky, it has gone extremely well. We have been lucky because of the weather, lucky because of the volunteers and other colleagues with whom we have worked and lucky with all the participants. We give huge thanks to the Dartmoor National Park for enabling this to happen and a huge thanks for working with us to help lay on the event.

‘Running this event is beneficial to the army in three ways, we have to plan for it and go outside the army in order to find other agencies such as the Red Cross to assist. We are working with our colleagues down here in Devon such as the emergency services and other local agencies, and also setting up an operations room where we can test our co-ordination.

‘We facilitate an event that enables young people to achieve some of those values and standards which we set ourselves. In particular it offers them the opportunity to test themselves over a very demanding enterprise, 35 miles for a 14 years old is quite some distance to travel. It also means that if they have completed or attempted the course, they will have a degree of self confidence that they carry through the rest of their lives.’

The majority of the teams who entered Ten Tors were from schools and youth groups from across the South West. These included scout groups, sports and ramblers teams and armed forces cadet units, all of whom had prepared and trained hard since late last year.

The first of the Ten Tors Challenge teams started to cross the finish line at 8.30am on Sunday greeted by whoops of delight and congratulations from the crowd. The first team in were the Torbay Scouts, not far behind was Wellington School completing the 45 mile route and Colyton Grammar School was the first to finish 55 miles and all teams had returned to Okehampton by 5pm.

See this week’s Okehampton Times for three pages of Ten Tors action