The Buzz

February 9th marked the first day of our much anticipated solos. Our journey consisted of a four day and three night experience spent alone in a confined section of the Cascabel Hermitage in the San Pedro River watershed of Arizona. The Cascabel Conservation Association is the caretaker and protector of this land, preserving it to provide hermitage for a meditative retreat to the anyone who wants. These solos can last from two days up to 60 days. The land there is under significant threat from development and the reflections and testimonies of past Mountain Classroom students are important in justifying the conservation easements.

After a rainy adjunct weekend with Ross in Tucson, Arizona, we left the enormous cacti behind and headed back to New Mexico for a three night backpacking trip in the Gila National Forest.  After a day’s drive, we were welcomed by a much chillier camp ground in Silver City, NM. 

Proctor Academy Mountain Classroom arrived at the Annunciation House to begin our Border Awareness experience with hopes of improving our general immigration knowledge, completely unaware of the stories and bravery we would be shown.

Over the last seven days we have learned and grown a lot as a group during our canoeing expedition, led by our experienced river guide Jeff Renfro with Desert Sports. This trip was a true expedition, having to strap all we needed to live on into our canoes and set off into the isolation that is Big Bend National Park.

After the winter break, our group has begun to return to life on Mountain Classroom. We quickly jumped right back into our responsibilities without hesitation. The first few days we were reintroduced to our classes. We have to be able to manage our time wisely with our homework and our daily routine. Even though we have just gotten back we are pretty independent with the jobs that each of us are assigned every day. We take turns being cooks, who make the delicious meals, and being the leader of the day, who keeps track of the groups timeliness and makes sure the rest of the jobs get done without any problems. As our group grows closer and becomes more dependent on one other in these roles, we are also learning just how independent we can be. 

The theme that runs throughout the term on Mountain Classroom is borders: physical borders, emotional borders, cultural borders, ethical borders. Proctor's Mountain Classroom program enters its third week of the term after a recent trip to the Akwesasne Reservation in northern New York state bordering Canada. 

Mountain Classroom, Proctor's longest running off-campus program, began in 1974 when David Fowler, Chris Norris and others leading the school at the time were bold enough to augment Proctor's educational model (watch more about this evolution as a school). Forty years and hundreds of Mountain Classroom alums later, lives have been transformed by the experience, including those of current Mountain Classroom instructors Peter Logan '01 and Coco Loehr '08. Now it is their turn to transform lives!