In comparison with among the lengthy, extra strenuous hikes at Yosemite Nationwide Park in California, the enterprise up the granite outcrop at Olmsted Level is brief if a little bit steep. However an epic view awaits the 18 College of Georgia college students who make the climb.
Excessive above Yosemite Valley, they gaze westward to make out Half Dome within the distance. Different peaks of varied shapes and options stretch on endlessly.
After snapping a number of images with their telephones, the scholars discover a seat on the stone slab and take out their orange novella-sized notebooks and pencils.
Class is now in session.
A SINGULAR OPPORTUNITY
Immediately’s lesson covers the sweeping historical past of the Ansel Adams-worthy panorama earlier than them. And never simply human historical past. The primary lesson explains the geological options and the prehistoric phenomena that solid them.
“You’re sitting on granite that when fed a volcano,” says Deb Dooley PhD ’95, an teacher in UGA’s Interdisciplinary Subject Program.
Dooley pauses for impact, then exclaims, “Whoa!”
College students be taught the chemical and organic processes that decide the wildlife that reside right here. And at last, Jenn Thompson, affiliate analysis scientist in UGA’s Division of Crop and Soil Sciences and adjunct professor in anthropology, weaves the human story of Yosemite, relationship again to the indigenous Ahwahnechee, who as soon as referred to as this majestic place house.
Olmsted Level is only one cease on the Interdisciplinary Subject Program, a 60-day expertise that takes college students from Sapelo Island, Georgia, all the best way to the Pacific Ocean.
They journey by way of 20 states and to 23 nationwide parks and monuments—together with the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, Mount Saint Helens, and Yellowstone Nationwide Park—and log almost 12,000 miles on the highway, after which tack on one other 100 miles or so mountaineering on foot.
For adventurous college students, it’s a singular alternative.
“I’d by no means be capable of do all this alone regardless of how onerous I attempted,” says Ava Macie, a second-year ecology main. “I couldn’t hit all these parks in a complete lifetime. This journey supplied every part in a single go.”
The journey, nevertheless, is rather more than a sightseeing highway journey. A rotating cadre of UGA school and educating assistants leads this system. And at each cease, the vacationers get a lesson in regards to the panorama, the atmosphere, and the human features of their location. Piece by piece, they develop a extra holistic sense of America’s pure world, its historical past, its society, and maybe its future.
EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING
This system begins with a weeklong “boot camp” at UGA’s Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, the place instructors drill the fundamentals of geology, ecology, and anthropology into the scholars. Lab work and excursions on the principally undeveloped barrier island break up the category periods. Boot camp ends with an examination to make sure college students have a baseline understanding of those disciplines earlier than the touring begins.
After which, the crew heads West.
The caravan consists of three white 12-passenger vans and a 15-foot field truck to lug duffels, tenting gear, and cooking provides. On prime of scholars and instructors, the vacationers embrace a handful of pupil staffers and two program cooks.
They cross by way of the South and Southwest towards California earlier than heading to the Pacific Northwest after which across the Nice Plains.
The group will cease at one location for a number of days to camp (no resort rooms on this journey) and to discover surrounding options earlier than shifting on to the subsequent. Even on the lengthy journey days, school construct in stops for mini classes at, say, a mineral outcrop on the freeway, a fruit stand, or a museum.
College students have an task to finish at most areas, from making a geological map of an space to sketching ecological patterns throughout a panorama. Assignments are etched into their orange subject books; college students will cycle by way of two or three of them on their journey. After which each couple weeks, college students take exams at their campsites.
“There may be plenty of enjoyable concerned within the journey, and the scholars positively have an journey, however the tutorial and studying part is so baked into the day-to-day that it by no means will get misplaced alongside the best way,” says Kait Farrell PhD ’17, a lecturer within the Odum Faculty of Ecology and UGA’s director of home subject examine.
Ava Macie places it one other means.
“I’ve by no means realized this a lot this quick in my complete life,” she says.
DAY IN THE LIFE
Usually, everybody wakes up as daybreak breaks.
Breakfast (oatmeal, cereal, bagels) and sizzling espresso are served by 6:30.
The scholars might need a short lecture at camp earlier than starting the day’s actions, which might embrace a hike, soil composition sampling, or water testing. There’s one thing completely different day-after-day, and, often, a number of stops fill the agenda.
After exhausting days within the subject, the scholars have one thing comforting to look ahead to: a sizzling connoisseur meal.
Brothers Greg BSES ’17, MS ’21 and Eric Zock have been this system’s cooks since 2018. They usually take their job critically.
With the help of workers and college students, the Zock brothers whip up some new, tasty meals each night time. Spectacular, contemplating dinners are ready on a few picnic tables and a campfire.
Earlier than embarking on their journey, the Zocks take requests, and all through the course of the journey, they fulfill each single order: Asian noodle bowl, lemon salmon and artichoke dip, seafood gumbo, even scorching steak fajitas and a chili apple crisp for Professor Aaron Thompson’s birthday. Vegan and gluten-free meals are at all times out there.
The Zocks maintain the menu contemporary and lift the eyebrows of native grocery cashiers by filling a number of buying carts each few days.
Luke Majors, a fourth-year biology and pre-med pupil, says it is likely to be the most effective he’s eaten in his life.
“I used to be anticipating after I signed up for a school highway journey, it was going to be principally sloppy Joes, sizzling canines over the fireplace, and PB&Js, however they actually prove for dinner,” he says.
As nightfall settles, there’s often a night lesson or pupil presentation. The day closes with a nightly campfire for dialog and music plucked from a guitar or performed from a violin earlier than all of it begins once more the subsequent morning.
35 YEARS AND COUNTING
The Interdisciplinary Subject Program began in 1988 as an Honors geology subject course. On the time, UGA didn’t supply many off-campus applications.
Jim Whitney, then the top of the geology division, conceived of this system as a novel means for non-geology majors to be taught his subject of examine. His tenet: “It’s rather more attention-grabbing to review within the nationwide parks the place you’re seeing all of those completely different settings.”
The inaugural journey included 10 college students who rode within the geology division’s 15-seat passenger van, their luggage strapped to the roof. Two cooks adopted alongside in a pickup truck. This system introduced two out-of-commission U-Haul trailers for towing cooking and tenting provides. Whitney joined a part of the journey along with his spouse, Sandy BS ’73, PhD ’92, now a retired UGA school member, who served as an unpaid educating assistant and de facto “program mother.” The Whitneys adopted behind of their household van together with their canine and two sons.
That first go-getter effort was profitable sufficient to maintain this system going.
Julie Cox BS ’90, MS ’97 first attended the journey in 1992 as a graduate pupil educating assistant. She and her husband, Doug Dvoracek PhD ’03, ran this system for a decade earlier than Dvoracek died in 2022 from pancreatic most cancers. Cox is now this system’s director and the chief drive behind organizing and maintaining this system working.
Over time, the Honors geology program morphed into its interdisciplinary kind, first including anthropology after which ecology because it grew to become clear that focusing strictly on the geology of a location was telling solely a sliver of the story. In its current kind, the Interdisciplinary Subject Program is the one of its type in greater schooling.
With UGA’s emphasis on experiential studying, President Jere W. Morehead JD ’80 has inspired extra place-based studying alternatives. The president funded a Home Subject Research Fellows program in 2023 to coach school on launching new applications, together with Dance in New York Metropolis and Writing and Neighborhood on the Georgia Coast.
‘WOW’ MOMENTS
College students on this 2024 journey attest to the facility of studying past the classroom.
The day after the lecture on Olmsted Level, college students launched into a 10-mile thru-hike on Panorama Path across the Yosemite Valley. Touring collectively, Emme McCumiskey, Caty Watts, and Chloe Dierkes chatted away till a break within the bushes revealed a jaw-dropping view of Nevada Fall, nonetheless miles forward.
McCumiskey interrupted her personal sentence to gawk. The environmental sources and ecology main says witnessing such spectacles makes a distinction in how she retains info and ideas.
“Having the ability to see it within the flesh and never simply in a textbook makes me really feel like I’m studying extra,” she says. “It’s sticking lots higher.”
It helps that school members are at all times round to reply questions or level out particulars that will in any other case go unnoticed.
“It’s fixed workplace hours,” McCumiskey says. “At any time when you may have a query about something, you simply go up and ask them.”
BIGGER LESSONS
All through the journey, college students gather T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and stickers from their visits.
In addition they go house with new views.
A recurring theme is the interaction between the pure world and human exercise. Even locations college students as soon as regarded as pristine wilderness, resembling Sapelo Island and Yosemite, have been influenced, even formed, by people for hundreds of years.
College students additionally come away with a clearer image of America.
Paul Schroeder, a geology professor and program co-director since 1992, says, “In a means, they really see extra cultural range— and particularly ecological range—on this program than they’d in a two-week journey to a overseas nation.”
College students additionally come away modified on a private stage.
The scholars work as a crew to perform each day chores and group assignments. They acquire confidence in studying, exploring, and sleeping outdoor. By journey’s finish, many college students forgo tents and sleep open-air in a hammock and sleeping bag the place they will search for on the stars at night time and get up with the solar.
Earlier than this summer time, Ava Macie had by no means been tenting. A number of weeks in, she by no means needed to sleep inside once more.
“I’m a very completely different individual,” she says. “The considered my darkish bed room at house sounds dreadful.”
Written by Aaron Hale MA ’16
Images by Peter Frey BFA ’94 & Chamberlain Smith ABJ ’18
