Newsletter
of the Washington College Department of Business Management |
Spring
2000
Yukon
get there from here: Learning leadership in the great outdoors
Rob Savidge, a Washington College
junior and varsity swimmer who’s minoring in business management,
knows all about studying leadership in the classroom. In his
business courses he’s covered leadership styles, team-building,
trust, and communication. But last June, Rob, an environmental
studies major (at right in the photo), learned firsthand about
leadership in the raw and untamed setting of Canada’s Yukon
Territory.
Rob
earned Washington College internship credit by completing a month-long
course offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School. Wyoming-based
NOLS (www.nols.edu) runs a unique experiential learning program.
Over the last 35 years, more than 40,000 people of all ages have
learned leadership skills from NOLS by hiking, climbing, camping,
and just plain surviving in a variety of wilderness settings.
The NOLS program stresses not only wilderness skills and respect
for the environment but also teamwork, trust, and group communication.
The Yukon is a rugged, mountainous region abutting Alaska and
extending into the Arctic Circle. About 32,000 people are scattered
over its close to 200,000 square miles: about six square miles
per person. Rob’s group (five young men, five young women,
and two instructors) were flown into White Horse, the provincial
capital. From there they took a five-hour van ride over dirt
roads into the snowcapped Pelly Mountain Range, the heart of
the Yukon—their home for the next 32 days.
Rob and his group backpacked, hiked, forded rivers, climbed and
descended mountains, and located passes, all the while keeping
a sharp eye out for grizzly bears. NOLS grizzly survival tips
include singing and shouting as you hike, and doing everything—even
going to the bathroom—in groups of four.
The outdoor leadership course required mastering technical skills
like fording icy rivers and finding trails over mountains, but
for Rob the most demanding part of the course was learning to
work together as a group: “Out there in the wilderness you
rely on each other for survival. You need everybody to cooperate.
If you’re doing something serious like descending a mountain,
you can’t have conflicts causing problems.”
The program had its share of “routine” difficulties
and dangers. One of the instructors suffered a severe allergic
reaction, necessitating a fly-in of medicine. But as Rob reflects
on the experience, he thinks that what affected him the most
was not the challenges of surviving in the wilderness, but the
fact of being so alone and so small in the midst of such vast,
unspoiled immensity: “It’s very humbling—all you
want to do is preserve this setting, save it from those who don’t
appreciate it.”
For next summer, Rob Savidge is thinking of an internship in
a different kind of wilderness: the world inside the beltway,
where environmental policy is made. We’ll keep you posted
on what he learns. •
Rob Savidge can be reached at robert.savidge@washcoll.edu.