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Experience Life in the Wild Rockies of Montana
Story by David Havlick
Collegian Travel & Adventure Magazine
Spring/Summer 2004 |
We all saw it. While paddling our kayaks down the Yellowstone River on a crisp October afternoon, a yearling deer bolted down a small gully heading straight at us. It sprinted headlong to the river's edge, bounced hard to its left across a gravel bar and then vanished into a stand of cottonwoods. Only then did we see the golden eagle, a rush of wings and talons, skimming the tops of the willows lining the gully. It veered at the river, then flapped heavily back towards the sage-covered uplands. A near miss for a Discovery Channel moment - the eagle had almost nailed Bambi.
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You never know exactly what you're going to find when you head outside for an extended time, but that's part of the point. That eagle bearing down on the deer was a clear reminder why I keep teaching field-based courses: more than the credits you earn, the people you meet, the skills you gain or places you explore - it's about living. Just ask that deer on the Yellowstone River that day.
My freshman year in college I wanted to study the natural world. I figured a major in biology would be just the trick - you learn about life, right? But all semester, I'd wake up in my 9 a.m. bio lecture to find my notes fading into blots of drool. There had to be a more engaging way to learn about the world around me.
In 1993, following graduate school at the University of Montana, two friends and I decided to blend our interests in education, environmental conservation, and spending weeks at a time in the outdoors. So we started Wild Rockies Field Institute (WRFI). For more than ten years now, WRFI has welcomed college students from all over the country to go beyond the world of classrooms, Powerpoint lectures, or drool-stained notes, and immerse themselves in the spectacular wildlands of the Western U.S.; Alaska, Canada, and Mexico. It's not for everyone - we're usually beyond the world of hot showers and cell phones, but for those who come along there's plenty to discover.
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Take, for example, the fall semester course, Montana Afoot and Afloat (where we saw the eagle chasing the deer). You don't just talk about Cowboys and Indians; you actually go out and meet them. You don't just read about the plants and animals; you get to study them first-hand.
The course begins with a two-week kayak expedition down the Wild and Scenic Missouri River - right through the White Cliffs and the Missouri Breaks that Lewis and Clark raved about two hundred years ago. Then it's on to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation for several days with the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes who live there. You learn about their fight against a cut-and-run gold mining operation, how they're restoring populations of prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets, how the return of bison to their lands is rejuvenating traditional culture, and how they're working to get their kids to graduate and stick around after high school. You come away realizing that Native Americans aren't just something historical, they're right here, alive.
After that, you backpack for a couple weeks in central Montana's remote island mountain ranges, meet with ranchers and forest rangers and environmentalists, all of whom have different views of how the land ought to be treated and how we ought to live on it. It's about life, remember?
That's the main goal of this course, in fact: to come up with an ethic for how you ought to live on the land. There's plenty of help along the way, as everyone you meet has her own opinion, or seems to have his own take on what's right and wrong about the world. By the course's end, it's up to you to decide what to write about your relationship to the land. You've got to earn your twelve credits, after all. |
| The final two weeks, paddling down the Yellowstone River, can feel warm and golden with cottonwoods on a sunny afternoon or shock you white with the year's first snows. Sometimes the two seasons land just a day apart. |
Wild Rockies Field Institute isn't the only organization that offers academic, field-based courses, but it's been around longer than most, has high academic standards, and some of the best teachers in the business. All of the instructors have graduate degrees, have racked up decades of backcountry adventures on their own, bring a mix of real-world experience as ecologists, activists, educators, writers, river guides, working for management agencies, or even suing agencies. You also get a chance to know them - with no more than ten students per course, it's hard to get lost in the crowd. And with courses ranging in length from one to nine weeks and in nearly every month of the year (many are during the summer), WRFI can fit almost any student's schedule.
Of course, a few things on a WRFI course may seem different than your average college class. You might be interrupted mid-sentence by a deer wandering nearby, or wake up at 3 a.m. to see the northern lights flickering across the October sky. You might feel cold or tired and wonder why you ever left the climate-controlled high-tech classroom where you took Intro 100. Or you might echo past students who describe WRFI courses as "a life changing event" and "by far the best thing that I could have done to further my education." Just make sure when you paddle around that bend in the Yellowstone River and come up to a certain gully that you don't look like a tasty little deer. |
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