Last week, as assistant athletic director Trish Austin ‘01 was cleaning out the athletic storage area in anticipation of construction starting on Phase 4 of the Farrell Field House project, she came across a Proctor Woodlands Trail map from the mid-1980s.
Over the next week we will honor the Proctor Woodlands through a series of activities, videos, hikes, live classes, and messages from members of the Proctor community. Kicking off with today’s global celebration of Earth Day and culminating on Proctor’s celebration of Earth Day on April 29, this weeklong Woodlands Challenge will celebrate our connection to land, while generating support for a new educational center that will serve as a gateway to Proctor’s 2,500 acres of land.
After an exhilarating first week of exploration and acclimation, we found ourselves preparing for our first expedition in Utah at Coyote Gulch. The day leading up to this journey was filled with much excitement and organization. Before we were to head out, we had to pack up our backpacks with a variety of basic essentials, among them, group gear, clothing, a week’s worth of meals and WAG bags.
Students in Proctor’s AP Environmental Science course recently visited the Town of Andover Transfer Station as they learned about the waste cycle, trash, and the reality of recycling systems in small town America. Read more about this on-campus example of proximate learning through the eyes of senior Jaimes Southworth, a local Andover resident and four-year Proctor student, in her AP Environmental Science blog below!
As the Proctor community swings back to in-person learning this week, as the dorm pods loosen and disperse, the interconnectedness of all that is Proctor, the mycelium underneath, reveals itself. Coming back to in-person gets the network humming. Yes, we can do a lot remotely, but we get to the “it “ of learning by being in the landscape, not simply observing it from the outside.
Temperatures will plummet overnight as we bid farewell to a mild first half of December and anxiously await what Winter Storm Gail will bring Wednesday evening into Thursday. As the winter winds shift, we each have a choice to make: retreat indoors and curse the cold, snowy winter ahead or embrace the amazing outdoor recreation opportunities available to us in rural New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. At Proctor, we choose the latter.
Stumbling upon a wolf pine in the midst of Proctor’s vast woodlands, its wide arms spread wide over the new growth forest below it, reminds us of the slower pace to the life of trees. These relics and their sturdy presence steadies us as we navigate change and look for direction.
It’s been the kind of weather week the poet Robert Frost captures in Two Tramps in Mud Time, the kind of week that brings bone chilling winds off the shoulder of Ragged Mountain followed by pockets of sunshine that carry the promise of jacketless days. Grass looks almost mower ready, then snow swirls and grabs hold of Carr Field as it did earlier this week. And now I am informed by the Weather Channel that tomorrow will be a gorgeous day with temperatures near 60, only to be followed by 3-5” of snow Sunday night. It’s been a this and that, two tramps week for sure.
