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From the Director
Leader
Generations of NOLS L ast month I spent part of my afternoon teaching and meeting with the students from two of our Fall Semesters in the Rockies. It was a lively exchange with students who were excited about their months of adventure, learning, and wilderness living. As we leave behind our boreal summer season and move to fall, winter, and spring, hundreds of students are with us on semester-length expeditions. It is a unique and amazing experience that for many is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Throughout the semester, they visit a wide variety of wilderness classrooms in changing seasons, which leads to diverse opportunities for developing wilderness skills and encountering a broad variety of natural history. Elevations change, methods of travel change, and the demands on leadership constantly adjust to the developing skills of the group. It is a powerful educational experience with constant feedback and learning moments as the months on the calendar pass. My last semester in college was a NOLS Semester in Africa. I had studied physics and math in a more traditional classroom setting for three and a half years, and in my final semester I was finishing my credits while hiking, climbing, and camping in Africa. I found the lessons from that semester were longer lasting, more powerful, and clearly more impactful than my previous semesters. In one semester living under the African skies, my views changed on education, the wilderness, my career path, my view of the world, and my place in it. I found it the most intense of my semesters and yet somehow the most comfortably paced. When I watch or interact with NOLS semester students today, it reminds me of the power of my own student experience. It is also a reminder of the change of seasons and the opportunity we have to educate in greater depth as we move into the next season. What are you doing with the next four months of your life? As you read through this issue of The Leader, I draw your attention to a couple of the articles. First off is the opening of the Wyss Wilderness Medicine Campus on page 10. By the time you read this issue, we will be teaching our first wilderness medicine courses on this new campus. The campus will allow us to grow our wilderness medicine offerings and will also offer other NOLS courses, especially semesters, an indoor classroom when they need one. This project was developed with great attention to our carbon footprint and environmental impact. It’s one we are excited to use for years to come. While NOLS is about the wilderness, at the end of courses it is also very clear it is about the people. As the NOLS community grows, we see many examples of NOLS spreading within families. We have many multi-generation grads from the same families and many relationships and marriages that had their foundation in the wilderness. On page 12, you will find in this issue an article about Tod and Dave Schimelpfenig working a course together this fall. Tod has worked at NOLS for decades, but this was the first course that he worked with his son. Once again, a sign of the growing NOLS family and community. Finally, you should read the article on page nine about Holly Allen. This summer, we enjoyed watching Holly compete as Miss Wyoming in the Miss USA contest—it is not every issue that includes an article on a beauty pageant contestant. Holly comes from a long line of NOLS students and employees. Many worked for us as horsepackers hauling rations into the mountains. For that matter, I am sure some of you were rationed by Holly, so here is a story on her other life.
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THE
John Gans, NOLS Executive Director
Leader
Casey Dean Editor Allison Jackson Designer Sam Baker Designer Jessica Halloran Design Intern Rich Brame Alumni Relations Director John Gans NOLS Executive Director November 2012 • Volume 28 • No.1 Published three times a year in March, July, and November.
Postmaster: Send address changes to National Outdoor Leadership School 284 Lincoln St. Lander, WY 82520 The Leader is a magazine for alumni of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), a nonprofit school focusing on wilderness skills, leadership, and environmental ethics. It is mailed to approximately 60,000 NOLS alumni and an additional 10,000 prospective students. NOLS graduates living in the U.S. receive a free subscription to The Leader for life. The Leader accepts paid advertising and welcomes article submissions and comments. Please address all correspondence to theleader@nols.edu or call (307) 332-8800. Alumni can direct address changes to alumni@nols.edu or (800) 332-4280. For the most up-to-date information on NOLS, visit nols.edu or e-mail admissions@nols.edu. The Leader is printed with soy-based inks in Portland, Ore., on paper using 30 percent post-consumer-recycled content. A paperless version of The Leader is available online at www.nols.edu/alumni/leader.
What are these boxes? They’re QR codes—two-dimensional barcodes that can be read by smartphone cameras. Search “QR code” to find a free app for your phone, then use it to read images of the QR codes in The Leader. Scan the code above to see the latest episode of The NOLS Cooking Show.