From Student to Instructor:

A Personal Exploration of Outdoor Education,

Outdoor Ethics, and the Responsibilities

of Outdoor Educators

 

 

 

Lindsay Watkins

 

Professor Baer

 

Natural Resources 407

 

Religion, Ethics, and the Environment

 

Greg Hitzhusen- Thursday 11:10

 

November 14, 2003

 

            The first conscious notions of what I consider to be my personal outdoor ethics came to me while in a state of complete exhaustion, sitting on a soccer ball-sized rock in the early morning sunlight somewhere in the middle Kings Canyon National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada.  Just moments before, I had jarred myself out of a semi-sleep as I felt the weight of my pack, which I hadn’t bothered to take off when I sat down, starting to tip me over. 

            A few feet in front of me, Bubbs Creek rushed gently over granite boulders, splashing into clear, cold pools.  Beyond the creek, small shrubby plants and clumps of Lodgepole Pine covered the rocky ground, which sloped upward to meet the steep, smooth faces of the surrounding peaks.  Behind me, the narrow trail was a dusty band leading, in one direction, back up a steep set of switchbacks to a talus field and in the other, down further into the valley into the shade of Jeffery Pines, Sequoias, and cherries. 

            In the few short minutes I spent on the rock, the valley underwent a complete transformation.  When I sat down, the stark granite faces of the mountains had been a pale gray against a nearly white dawn sky, and the vegetation below, a dark, shadowy green and brown.  But as the earth continued to rotate, sunlight seeped over the mountains behind me and bathed the entire landscape in brilliant shades of orange, red, yellow, and green.  The gurgling stream sparkled against the backdrop of granite, which looked slightly pink. 

            As I squinted into the light, I began to feel myself wake up.  I was conscious of my stomach—unfed for hours except for a handful of granola—telling me that I was hungry, but I was even more aware of a slightly deeper ache, one that felt something like homesickness, sadness, and joy all tied into one knot.  If I’d been able to the put the feeling into words then, I lost my chance because we soon dragged ourselves to our feet and continued down the trail.  Catching up in my journal on the bus back to Fresno a few days later, I could recall the feeling, but not entirely describe it.  The closest I could come was to write, “Sitting there and looking around, the magnitude and beauty of where I was really hit me.  I realized how important it is to protect the natural areas that we still have, and I realized how much this trip is going to affect the rest of my life—I’m not exactly sure how, but it will.  I think I felt homesick knowing that I’d be leaving the mountains behind in a few days.”[1]

            The trip was a three-week Outward Bound mountaineering course, my high school graduation present from my parents and one of the defining experiences of my life so far.  The morning I almost fell asleep sitting on the rock with my pack still on, my five remaining fellow students (we’d started with 10 of us, five girls and five guys, but the other four girls had left after the first week for various reasons), two instructors, and I had just hiked for 21 hours with only an hour break at two in the morning for a nap.  We’d summitted the most challenging peak of the trip—the 13,641-foot Mt. Milestone—two days before, then begun the hike out to Road’s End the next morning.  We’d expected the day to be a long one, but when a trail over Harrison Pass proved to be non-existent and the “pass” required a long rappel into a snowfield that took until dusk, the reality of our situation set in.  We were effectively out of food, and though we’d enjoyed an impromptu lunch of fried mountain trout that we caught with our hands, we were all getting hungry.  Only three of us had headlamps with any battery power remaining, and we still had to navigate our way through talus and scree, searching for the trail in the dark. 

            For the next few hours, my attitude, along with the overall group morale, hit a low for the trip.  We snapped at each other in simple disagreements over compass bearings and cursed as we slid down scree fields, trying not to twist our ankles under the weight of our packs.  Somehow though, the realization that we were in for an all-night hike eventually brought back the spirit of adventure and we were able to laugh at ourselves for having eaten all of our food and trying to take a shortcut on an uncertain trail.   Even after getting thoroughly soaked crossing a rushing creek in the dark, then collapsing next to the trail in the middle of bear country for an hour long nap on top of our packs, which contained a week’s worth of trash and food scraps, we were still pretty happy to be out there, feeling our way along the trail in our soggy boots.  While reaching the summit of Milestone had been the high point of the trip, it was those 21 hours of hiking that truly defined it.  And if any single life experience has come to define how I feel about nature and my personal outdoor ethics—and now my feelings about outdoor education—that trip was it.

In the following weeks, I wrote some of my thoughts on outdoor ethics in my journal: “Places like that, in the mountains beyond the trails, are important and should be preserved in as close to a natural state as possible.  There should be places where people should only be able to go if they get there on their own two feet, and anyone who wants to go there should be held responsible for leaving as little an impact on the environment as possible.  As much as possible, people who want to should somehow have the opportunity to learn how to be safe and enjoy living in the backcountry, but screwing up can teach you a lot too.  I’d like to someday be an Outward Bound instructor.”[2] 

In addition to helping to define my philosophy about the outdoors, that trip and the time I’ve continued to spend outdoors inspired some changes in my behavior that continue to this day.  When I first got home from California, I found myself thinking more about things I’d previously taken for granted—after spending almost a month having to either “eat it or carry it out,” I wasted less food at meals, and after learning to adapt to a wide range of weather conditions, I became more tolerant of slight discomfort and even asked my mom to turn the air conditioning off in our house to conserve energy.  Having essentially worn the same clothes and bathed in streams for three weeks, I learned that I could take fewer showers and create less laundry (consequently using less water), and having eaten entirely vegetarian meals throughout the trip, I stopped consuming so much meat.  Overall, I became more conscious of my actions, and I started paying attention to environmental and land management issues, particularly any involving the National Parks.  For the first time, I thought of myself as somewhat environmentally conscious, and had someone asked, I think I could have offered a pretty good explanation of my personal outdoor ethics.  

            As a kid, I wanted to be an environmentalist.  I read 50 Simple Things Kids Can do to Save the Earth, wore t-shirts with pictures of endangered species on them, and tried to start an environmental club during recess at my elementary school.  I made my parents recycle, and I wailed for days when they decided to cut down the “woods” in our backyard, admonishing them for contributing to worldwide deforestation.   My intentions, I suppose, were good, but in reality, I had no idea what I was talking about and no experience to base my reasoning on.  It wasn’t until I began going camping and backpacking and really had the opportunity to be a student in the outdoors that I truly began to be able to define my feelings about the environment.   Because so many of my formative outdoor experiences were in educational settings, my personal outdoor ethics and my feelings about outdoor education are closely intertwined. 

            I was first exposed to the outdoors and camping as a Girl Scout, though I didn’t really experience primitive camping until around the of middle school, when I took my first “extended” outdoor trip through a United Methodist Church camp.  Canoeing on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania for a week without a flush toilet or shower or a lodge to run to in a thunderstorm was a big step from the canvas tent and pit toilet experiences I’d had at Girl Scout camp, and I was almost immediately taken by the idea of living out of a backpack for days at a time.  Looking for a way to get outside even more in high school, I joined Ventures, a co-ed scouting group affiliated with Boy Scouts, and started going on backpacking trips, where I was first exposed to the idea of Leave-No-Trace wilderness ethics.  I went back to church camp again after ninth grade—this time to a rock climbing camp—and after tenth grade, my family took a three-week trip to the National Parks of the southwest, where Arches, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon redefined my perceptions of “wilderness.”  We did the usual tourist things—took horseback and mule rides into the canyons, went on a guided whitewater rafting trip, hiked the interpretive trails, and stayed in the big lodges or at park campsites. 

            By the time I graduated from high school, I had developed a view of the natural world that was shaped by a diverse range of influences, from the religious views about nature presented at church camp, the decidedly Boy Scout influenced, often goal-oriented ideas about backpacking I experienced as a Venture, a view of National Parks from touristy National Park Service pamphlets and guided hikes, and what I like to think of as the “Outside magazine” view of the wilderness as a beautiful place filled with cool people with expensive toys.  I was starting to accumulate a pretty good collection of those toys myself, and I was eager to get out into the “real” wilderness, test my gear and my skills, and become one of those cool people myself. 

            During the course of my Outward Bound trip, almost all of my previous perceptions of the wilderness and how to act there were questioned and changed.  There were more than a few moments that were far less glamorous than the scenes depicted in Outside, but it was those moments that made the experience so rewarding and so real.  I learned that being comfortable in any conditions takes more than Gore-Tex and fleece layers, and that Leave-No-Trace is more than just a set of rules to follow—it’s a philosophy for living in the wilderness that requires constant awareness of what actions might negatively affect the surrounding landscape.  I also learned that there is far more to mountaineering than what one can read about in books, and there’s far more to the National Parks than what can be seen from the back of a mule or on a guided hike.

I was blown away by how far into the wilderness we traveled—with the exception of the beginning and end of the trip and our two resupply days, we never saw another person or any sign of human presence, except for an occasional trail.  At the end of the course, we had a six-mile “challenge run” from the parking lot at Road’s End to Cedar Grove campsite a few miles down the road.  The feeling of pavement under my feet took a mile or two to get used to, and watching visitors drive by in their SUVs, stop for a few minutes at the pull-offs along the side of the road, then get back into their air-conditioned microclimate and continue driving struck me as kind of sad in a way.  I’d experienced Rocky Mountain National Park in much the same way several years ago and thought it was beautiful, but how much had I missed?  I wanted to yell to the people in the cars, “Get out! Go hiking!  You have no idea how many amazingly beautiful things you can’t see from the road!”

            Reading Joseph Sax’s Mountains Without Handrails[3] for the first time a few months ago, I was struck by how many of his points I agreed with and how often I said to myself, “Wow!  I was thinking that exact same thing when….”  With the ability to put into words ideas I had only pondered, Sax argues for the preservation of National Parks as a place for the pursuit of “contemplative recreation.”[4]  Throughout chapter three, he gives examples of fishing, backpacking, and mountain climbing as this type of recreation—activities that seem to require the full attention of the participant to the process, with less of a focus on the outcome. 

            Sax goes on to discuss how easy it is for National Park visitors to become “effectively insulated from settings unfamiliar to them,”[5] with the availability of hotels, shops, guided tours and hikes, and interpretive scenic drives.  He argues that activities that can be pursued elsewhere—eating in fancy restaurants, shopping, enjoying a “ski resort experience”—should not have a place in the National Parks, and he feels that the use of vehicles should be discouraged because “Intensity of concentration on the natural scene and attentiveness to detail are simply less likely to occur at forty miles an hour.”[6]  While some might suggest that Sax’s policy is somewhat elitist, prohibiting those who might not be physically capable from experiencing all that the parks have to offer, he argues that not every place should be accessible to everyone, and instead we should ensure that places that are available to everyone are not so degraded that contemplative enjoyment is impossible.[7] 

            Having experienced natural areas as both an “insulated tourist” and as a backpacker and climber, I fully agree with Sax that it takes a certain kind of effort to get the intensity of experience that I have only felt when I’m miles from a road cooking over a sputtering gas stove in –30 degree temperatures, or 200 feet above the ground trying to manage a pile of rope on a tiny ledge.  Still, after reading Mountains Without Handrails, I was left wondering how many of my experiences—particularly on my Outward Bound trip—might have been different from the ideal ones he describes because I was in an educational setting.  Sax’s value of preserving certain areas for contemplative recreation where one loses the ability to become insulated seems to be very closely aligned with my own ideas about wilderness use, but is contemplative recreation compatible with outdoor education?

By the end of high school, I’d reached the point where I could have been comfortable for several days alone on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, but I still hadn’t acquired the skills—or the mental strength—that I would have needed for a three-week mountaineering trip on my own.  Even with instructors to encourage me, there were certainly rough moments during the first few days of my Outward Bound trip when I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there the whole time, and had I been out there on my own, chances are I’d have given up and missed out on the amazing experiences that I had.  Still, I sometimes wonder whether the experience of hiking for 21 hours should feel less meaningful because I was there in a “controlled” setting with instructors who ideally knew the answer to every question and the solution to every problem.  Did having them there somehow create the same kind of insulated experience that Sax describes?

Looking back on the experience, I don’t think it did.  My instructors were as surprised as anyone to struggle up Harrison Pass only to find a technical descent and a disappearing trail.  They shared in our frustration, uncertainty, hunger and finally, exhilaration at hiking through the night to get to our endpoint.  Now, from having been in their hiking boots in even less trying circumstances, I also realize that instructors don’t always have all the answers, and that no one can have total control over every situation.  Even when they might have had more of a handle on the situation, my instructors were amazingly effective at “leading from behind”—letting us make decisions and realize the consequences on our own, and only stepping in when absolutely necessary.  Instead of separating themselves from us by the fact that they were ultimately responsible for us, our instructors were part of a cohesive group that collectively took responsibility for decisions.  Though Sax doesn’t discuss traveling with a group in the wilderness, I find the process of living and learning in the wilderness with several other people to be just as valuable as spending time outside alone, and I think we can all learn as much about ourselves by how we interact with others as we can from intense introspection. 

            After such a positive Outward Bound experience, one of the things I was most looking forward to about coming to Cornell as a freshman was Cornell Outdoor Education (COE), one of the most comprehensive university-based outdoor education programs in the country.  I was excited by the seemingly endless possibilities for expanding my outdoor repertoire, and though I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be teaching for COE by the end of my freshman year, I’d been inspired enough by my Outward Bound instructors that when I realized I might be qualified, I didn’t even consider not applying. 

I’ve now taught several indoor and outdoor climbing courses, day hiking, and snowshoeing for COE, and I’ve led a trip and been a coordinator for Wilderness Reflections, Cornell’s student-run orientation program for incoming students, whose mission statement suggests “thoughtful use of the wilderness” as a way to discover the strength in each person and the potential of a group.[8]  While I’ve been working as an instructor for two years, I’ve also remained a student, taking courses, going on staff training trips, apprenticing more experienced instructors, and going on trips with friends.  I feel like I learn something every time I go outside and face a new situation, and my outdoor ethics and values about outdoor education—particularly the roles of instructors—are constantly being refined. 

One of the first things I learned about outdoor educators is that they’re not guides.  That there is any difference between guiding and instructing first vaguely occurred to me on a whitewater rafting trip I took with my family on the Green River in Utah, an almost identical trip to the oneSax describes in chapter seven of Mountains Without Handrails.[9]  We, along with several other families, piled into rafts rowed by four young river guides who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of Outside.  When we pulled ashore to camp, the guides did everything but put up our tents for us, unpacking the rafts and preparing—no kidding—a steak dinner.  Not having to help with camp chores seemed strange, and on the river I felt almost bored just sitting there watching the walls of the canyon go by.  I finally asked the guide to teach me to steer the raft, and while he let me take control of the oars, he definitely seemed surprised that I’d asked.  Although the trip was beautiful and I certainly had a good time, nothing about it sticks with me as having been challenging or personally fulfilling.  Sax compares similar river trips to “reading about great books so as to seem knowledgeable rather than reading the books themselves, or longing for adventure without giving up the desire for security.”[10] 

In many cases, river outfitters, climbing guides, and other guiding services offer, for a price that many adventurers are quite willing to pay, to provide the security that many are unwilling to give up.  Talking to my Outward Bound instructors later, I discovered that they both had strong feelings about the difference between education and guiding and saw guiding as, at its best, being able to provide clients with only a taste of the outdoor experience they’re seeking, and at its worst, being destructive to the experiences of others who wish to enjoy the same locations on their own.  After reading stories of mountaineering accidents involving inexperienced clients who paid huge amounts of money to guides to take them up Everest or other difficult peaks, I’ve found that, like Sax and my instructors, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the place of guiding in outdoor recreation.  Guides don’t have to teach and they don’t really even have to inspire their clients—they simply have to give their clients what they’re paying for, whether it’s a ride down a river or help to the summit of a mountain. 

In my mind, the line between guiding and instructing is clear, but across the field of outdoor education it seems to be becoming blurrier all the time.  Driven by risk management concerns and lawsuits, an increasing number of educational programs—including COE—are attempting to conform to the same “institutional standards” followed by many guiding companies.  While I agree that having a set of guidelines that generally define a safe and effective program could be useful, I worry that focusing too much on getting certifications from the American Canoe Association, the American Mountain Guides Association, and the like will result in instructors that have certain skill sets, but lack the ability to teach in an effective and inspirational way—essentially turning programs into guide services and taking away some of students’ opportunities for experiential learning. 

Even though I think I have a pretty good idea of what I think instructors should and shouldn’t do, in practice it’s still difficult to know when to step in and when to step aside.  I have to constantly balance my responsibilities to my students—helping them stay safe and reasonably comfortable and teaching them skills that will hopefully equip them to pursue the activity on their own—with giving them a chance to learn from their mistakes, which is a large part of the contemplative recreation experience that Sax describes and that I believe in. 

On what are possibly my two favorite pages of Mountains Without Handrails, Sax discusses backpacking, which he says “appears superficially to be a strangely unappealing activity” with insufficient rewards for “such extraordinary exertions.”[11]  He goes on to describe the misery often felt by the inexperienced backpacker, and the revelations that occur when one puts in the time and effort to learn how to adjust to such different surroundings. “The more known, the less needed.  Everything put in the head lessens what has to be carried on the shoulders.  The sense of frustration falls away and with it the fear that things will break down.  One knows how to adapt.  The pleasure of adaptation is considerable in itself because it is liberating.”[12] 

            Sax couldn’t have more perfectly summed up the evolution of my experiences backpacking.  Twenty minutes into my first trip—which was with friends and not in an educational setting—I had nasty blisters on both feet, and after hiking all day with too much in my pack, I was so sore and uncomfortable on the ground that I couldn’t sleep, and I spent the night wide awake and shivering, probably because I hadn’t realized that being dehydrated contributes to being cold, and I hadn’t had nearly enough to drink.  I was fortunate that on my next trip, I had the opportunity to get out in the woods with people who could help me learn how to be comfortable.  Even now, the more knowledge and skills I gain, the more fun I have, and the experience is liberating!

            Though none of the first recreational backpackers had the opportunity for any formal outdoor education and not everyone needs backcountry mentors to work beyond their initial mistakes, many others—myself included—could not have simply walked into the wilderness on our own and been able to learn enough from our first uncomfortable experiences to want to go back.   For those like us, outdoor education provides a chance for contemplative recreation under less intimidating circumstances, and can be a stepping-stone to even more intense, personal experiences.  While Sax doesn’t mention outdoor education at all in Mountains Without Handrails, I do think that education can be both a form of and an introduction to contemplative recreation.  With that in mind, I think many of the preservation concerns that Sax addresses should apply to outdoor education as well as to individuals seeking the intensity of wilderness recreation.   

That’s not to say that I don’t believe there should be a place in the outdoors for guided trips, resort skiing, and even activities like snowmobiling.  I agree with Sax that people who merely want to experience the fun of whitewater rafting (or climbing, skiing, or any other activity) should have the opportunity to do so.[13]  Not everyone wants to ski miles from the nearest road, and not everyone will want to take the oars of the raft and face the challenge of the river, and that’s fine, but if one person on a guided trip is inspired to pursue an activity more on their own, then all the better. 

One final question I’ve asked myself centers challenge that Sax discusses and one that the outdoor community continues to face: what happens when the interests of those who want guided trips or educational courses clash with the interests of those who want to be able to enjoy a place on their own?[14]  I wrote in my journal originally that the opportunity for outdoor education should be available to as many people as possible, but at what point does that mean bringing too many people into the wilderness and cheapening the experience for everyone? 

In many places there are definitely hard feelings between different interests, but with some creativity and compromise I believe there can be a way to accommodate everyone.  The most logical solution seems to be quota or permit systems, with the interests of individuals, guides, and educators in mind.  While some would argue—particularly on public land—that systems that limit use are unfair, I again find myself agreeing with Sax when he counters that “We need a willingness to value a certain kind of experience highly enough that we are prepared to have fewer opportunities for access in exchange for a different sort of experience when we do get access.”[15]

            As outdoor activities continue to explode in popularity, the outdoor industry as a whole will continue to change, bringing new challenges for everyone interested in using the wilderness for recreation.  With national programs like Outward Bound Outdoor and college-based programs like COE growing all the time, outdoor education has the potential to be an important catalyst in determining how future generations of outdoors-people approach the wilderness, meaning outdoor educators will have to give even more serious consideration to how they should teach. 

While teaching Cornell students about backpacking for a weekend on the Finger Lakes trail hardly exposes them to an experience as intense as a three week course in the Sierras, there is still much that can be learned and enjoyed from spending several days living out of a backpack at Connecticut Hill or Shindagin.  For both the students and the instructors, this kind of lower-intensity course can also act as a stepping-stone toward the more intense experiences that can provide the impetus for more intense contemplative experiences.  I try to do my best to encourage my COE students take their knowledge beyond the course so they can discover for themselves how much the wilderness has to offer, and hopefully, come to their own conclusions about the environment.  I still hope to become an Outward Bound instructor, and if I ever work a course in the Sierras and my students decide they want to do something like hike over Harrison Pass, I probably won’t stop them.  If I can give even a few students the kind of empowering experience that I had and put them in a situation to evaluate their beliefs and come to their own set of outdoor ethics, then I think I will have succeeded in giving them the best that outdoor education has to offer.