Contents
Departments
Features
5 Field Notes: Applying NOLS lessons to life in the big apple
10 NOLS Lessons “In God’s Country”
6 Issue Room: Wyoming conservation is far from resolved 7
NOLS orients Wyoming Catholic College students to the great outdoors
Q&A: Why row solo across the Atlantic?
8 Alumni in Action: A curriculum to make a difference
Who Is This? Recognize this person? The first 10 people to contact us with the correct answer will receive a free NOLS Leadership Week t-shirt. Call NOLS Alumni at (800) 3324280 or email alumni@nols.edu. The answer to last issue’s “Who’s This” is Skip Shoutis, former NOLS instructor and assistant director under Paul Petzoldt 1971–1976.
9 Alumni profile: Green spotlight on Reverb
12 WMI Breaks Ground on Campus
20 Alumni Trips: Check out the perks you can get now!
Golden shovels scooped the first piles of red dirt at the site of the new campus in September.
21 Reviews: Keep these books on hand for snow days 22 Gear Room: Featuring iconic NOLS gear starting this issue 23 Get Out There: Alumni Adventures! A new section by you 24 Recipe Box: Going lightweight? Take this staple for energy 25 Jabberwocky: Catch up on your coursemates’ lives 26 Branch Notes: Insider news from a few of our branches 27 Medicine in the wild: Winter means cold and frostbite 27 Real Life Drama: “Unanticipated” NOLS lessons 28 Giving: On pace for NOLS scholarships 28 Sustainability Update: What we do, and what you can do 30 Belay off: After a fall and recovery, John Hovey reflects 32 Traverses: A creative take on the NOLS experience
13 Campaign NOLS, One year in NOLS rises to the challenge issued by Board members, but fundraising work remains
14 The World Tri Adventure:
Charlie Wittmack takes us inside the first stage of the World Triathlon and gives us a glimpse into the mind of the man who dreamed it up.
Photos this page: contributors courtesy of writers; “Who’s This?” from NOLS Archives; opposite page: Brad Christensen
Contributors
Howard Tomb Field Notes, pg 5
Charlie Wittmack cover article
Steven Cutting Real Life Drama, pg 23
John Hovey Belay Off, pg 30
Kumari Ratnayake Traverses, back cover
Tomb completed his wilderness course in the Winds in 1976 and advanced rock climbing the next year. Tomb climbed Mt. McKinley in 1982 with NOLS alumni Scott Fisher and Mike Allison and joined Allison again in 1988 to summit Mt. Elbrus. Tomb’s seven humorous phrasebooks, including “Wicked French,” have sold more than 1.3 million copies. His guide to dangerous sports, “The Cool of the Wild,” has sold about a hundred copies, mostly to NOLS instructors who quote from its pages on proper expedition behavior. He works in the forbidding canyons of Wall Street.
Wittmack is an attorney and adventurer who lives in Charlotte, N.C. and a 1995 graduate of NOLS Semester in East Africa. He leverages his expeditions to complete a variety of humanitarian projects. He is an ambassador for Save The Children and operates maternal health programs in Nepal. He is also an advocate for cancer survivors and leads adventurebased survivorship programs on five continents. Charlie has been featured in
Cutting holds a B.A. in Russian and a M.A. in English language / linguistics from the University of ARI. He has lived much of the past 20 years overseas, starting with a year in Moscow in the exciting times just after the fall of communism, followed by two years teaching English in Korea. Since 1999, he has made Japan home, teaching at Kanda University of International Studies, then Tokai University. For the last eight years, he has been working with the Rural Leaders Training Program at the Asian Rural Institute in Northern Japan, where he lives with his wife Miki and daughters Sarah (7) and Ellie (4).
Hovey teaches more-or-less full-time for the Wilderness Medicine Institute (WMI) of NOLS. Though he has now been part of the NOLS community for over six years, Hovey's path to NOLS was anything but direct. He studied film and mechanical engineering, bartended, and served as a Marine Corps captain before completing Rocky Mountain and WMI instructor courses in 2005. Hovey now lives in Portland, Ore., where he is engineering a three-year escape to Barcelona to get some sun, study bullfighting, and learn the finer points of Spanish wine.
Ratnayake was the 2010 winner of the NOLS Dream Expedition Video Contest (nols.edu/ contest/), and her prize was an OECW course this summer. From her course, she sent an illustration of her experience to NOLS Headquarters, which is a perfect fit for a new department in The Leader: Traverses. Ratnayake has since been focusing on work as interpretation supervisor at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. She has been staying in touch with the outdoors and getting closer to her dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail. In the meantime, she has wrapped up a complete illustration of her course.
media outlets across the globe including Nightline, CNN, ESPN, Outside Magazine, Mens Journal, and Triathlete.
Fall 2011
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