As my watch alarm wakes me from my intermittent slumber, I slowly lift my head from my sleeping bag to confront the cold morning air. It is now early November, almost two months into my semester with the Wild Rockies Field Institute, and the canyon country is being greeted with the first signs of winter.

As the first gentle hue of daylight blends with the few stars left over from a chilly night, our fearless leader of the day opens their eyes. They stumble blindly into our outdoor kitchen, bring fresh water from a trickling seep to a boil and wake their sleepy classmates from an undisturbed slumber. Another day

Overlooking the valley that shows open wounds and old scars induced by 100 years of various mining operations, a wave of grief surges through me. Two black rectangular “portals” to the mine allow my mind to drift into the destruction hidden from my field of view. Thousands of feet below me, the earth is chiseled,

I have seen where stars come from. They rise, tiny specks of light born from an equally illuminated world. Festering underneath furled logs, laying in wait until their home is disturbed, probed by the caress of a fellow branch, these specks burst outward in a fury of light and heat. I am one with the

“So what are you guys doing in town?” We get asked this question every day in the front country, in some form or another. “We’re a college course based out of Missoula,” we answer. “We’re learning about people’s relationships with the land in Montana.” “Oh, so is that just a field trip then?” “No, we’re

The morning is cool but not cold. Spared from the wind, I easily boil a pot of water to wake my comrades with. Everyone is asleep under the vast desert sky, their snores echoing off the walls of the three shallow canyons just beyond camp. Though the urgent need for coffee usually rouses them in

Rocks are lively, dynamic, and bearers of history. This was certainly never a thought that crossed my mind until I abandoned old perspectives and simply sat among them. With my college education rooted deeply in Western science, and working toward a degree in Fisheries and Wildlife Management, unbeknownst to me, my mind became rooted in

  Every step that I take my foot gets engulfed into inches of quicksand. You’d think that river hiking would be a breeze, and that might be if you could see where the bottom was but that’s not the case with the Dirty Devil River with its water similar to chocolate milk out here in

As we paddled down the Upper River Breaks National Monument, I was constantly reminded of the Corps of Discovery’s observations recorded by Lewis and Clark regarding the presumably untouched wilderness. These documented observations are found plastered on papers, posters, and plaques along the Upper Missouri river bottom, in “baseline of wilderness statements” in our course

During my first couple of weeks out here in the desert I felt like I was on a different planet. There are no forests, very few leaves are changing color for fall, and most drastically there’s not a lake I can visit every day. I study at Northern Michigan University, which lays on the shore