Outdoor education teaches people to know and care about the West
Spreading the gospel
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Salmon find a friend
Endangered Snake River salmon recently found a northern ally in their battle against Columbia River dams. Republican Gov. Tony Knowles of Alaska announced April 28 that his state had begun legal action to join a lawsuit brought by environmental and fishing groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service. The groups sued the agency this spring […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Operation bullsling
The Forest Service really slung the bull this time – eight tons of it. To improve the vegetation and watershed of the Ishi Wilderness in northeastern California, agency officials strapped 13 tranquilized bulls into helicopter cargo nets and flew them out at the end of a 40-foot cable. The cattle were the last of a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
On the fate of Hanford
Dear HCN, I appreciate your Hanford issue (HCN, 1/22/96) since I was born and raised in Othello, a small town to the northeast of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Our farm, which my brother still owns, lies a little more than a mile away from the northern border. Our father was also raised nearby, on a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Climbing ban makes sense
Dear HCN, I am a long-time climber and resident of Wyoming and have worked here as a professional mountain guide for the past five years. I would like to make it known that many climbers and guides of Wyoming support the voluntary closure of climbing at Devils Tower (HCN, 4/16/96). It is unfortunate that many […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Hearing stories, finding family, returning home
It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Heard around the West
The West has no shortage of strange juxtapositions: Gold prospectors and mountain bikers, Utah’s tabernacle and Nevada’s casinos, Denver International Airport and airplanes. But a new pair of strange bedfellows has recently sprung up: The Forest Service and Wal-Mart. The federal agency and the retail behemoth are going to spend the summer jointly promoting environmental […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
The rise and fall of Steve Cartisano
The controversial “godfather” of wilderness therapy, has left a trail of lawsuits behind him.
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Tough love proves too tough
Controversial “wilderness therapy programs” come under critical scrutiny – and lawsuits – after several teenagers die while in their care.
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
The big dogs: Outward Bound and NOLS hit their thirties
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel Instructors from the National Outdoor Leadership Schools (NOLS) and Outward Bound have a running joke: “NOLS is the place where you learn to stuff everything – even your feelings – in a backpack […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Acting for the environment
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel A man in an old-fashioned tuxedo knocks on the door of a first-grade Seattle classroom. The teacher ushers him in and he totters across the room and groans as he settles in a […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
An unsung army of students maintains our national parks
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel After wildfires raged through Yellowstone National Park in 1988, Park Service employees were overwhelmed: Trails and bridges had to be rebuilt, campsites restored and trees planted. The magnitude of the job was depressing. […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
The best guide knows how to let go
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel Roderick Nash, author of the still-selling book, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), likes to tell people he grew up in a New York apartment staring at a brick wall. A trip to […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
New life springs from tainted soil at a Denver school
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, in a special issue about outdoor education: Spreading the gospel DENVER, Colo. – Garden Place Academy stands in an aging Hispanic neighborhood, teeming with fast-food outlets and liquor stores. But inside, you wouldn’t know that an inch of top soil was removed from […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Getting outside all around the West
The following sidebar articles accompany this article, in a special issue about outdoor recreation: – New life springs from tainted soil at a Denver school – The best guide knows how to let go – An unsung army of students maintains our national parks – Acting for the environment – The big dogs: Outward Bound […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Salvage logging rider barrels into a shy seabird’s world
Even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 3.9 million acres of land along the Oregon and Washington coast as “critical habitat” for the marbled murrelet in late April, nothing changed for the Citizens Murrelet Survey Project. The members of the Corvallis, Ore.-based group continue their routine of getting up at 4:30 a.m. and […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Lawmakers say Colorado prisons are king
With some heavy lobbying from Governor Roy Romer, the Colorado Legislature passed a bill allowing the state Corrections Department to ignore local zoning when it wants to build or expand a prison. The legislation responds to contentious expansion plans for prisons in the rural West Slope communities of Delta and Rifle. Just days before the […]