PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 16, March 2, 2006

Learning outside the classroom … really outside

By Craig Chamberlain, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-2894; cdchambe@illinois.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by L. Brian Stauffer Fearless leader Bob McGrew has directed the Outdoor Adventures program since it began in 1982. The Outdoor Center rents equipment and offers training. McGrew plans and leads most of the trips, which include school-break and summer trips as well as weekend and day trips closer to home. McGrew is known for his thorough preparation and vast knowledge.

To the average person, “outdoor adventure” might conjure up visions of wilderness, mountains or swift-flowing streams, and none of those are within sight of Champaign-Urbana.

But tucked away on the west side of the UI’s prairieland campus is a handy portal for getting to those places – or just finding a short-term means of outdoor escape.

The Outdoor Adventures program, located in the Outdoor Center just a half-block west of the residence halls on Gregory Drive, routinely offers school-break and summer backpacking trips to destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains and Big Bend national parks.

Other trips head to the Florida Everglades or the Green River in Utah for canoeing, and sometimes to Canada for cross-country skiing. Weekend trips might head to the Shawnee or Hoosier national forests, or the Current River in Missouri, and there are day trips to cross-country ski, canoe or scuba dive.

In between are numerous opportunities to get an outdoor recreation education: lunch discussions and clinics on everything from backpacking, trip planning and bicycle maintenance to in-line skating, kayaking and horseback riding. And don’t forget the occasional opportunity to play wild-water kayak polo in the Freer Hall pool.

For those who just want to head off on their own for a few hours or a weekend, the Outdoor Center also is stocked with rentals: about 50 pairs each of in-line skates and cross-country skis, 12 kayaks, 14 canoes, 30 life jackets, 70 tents of various sizes, 90 sleeping bags, 80 sleeping pads, 60 backpacks, 10 pairs of showshoes, eight bikes, a dozen coolers and a few cook stoves and kits.

Also available along with the rentals are information handouts on everything from how to set up a tent to where to go rock climbing.

The program is available to students, Campus Rec members and the community.

Students appear to be well aware of Campus Recreation and its fitness facilities and intramural programs. The Outdoor Adventures program, however, which is part of Campus Recreation, often escapes notice, says Bob McGrew, who has directed the program since its start in 1982.

“It doesn’t seem like it goes in people’s heads that there’s an outdoor program,” McGrew said. “A lot of times we get juniors or even seniors in who finally find out about us and go on a trip, and then they wish they had found out when they were freshmen, so they could do more.”

Roenen Ben-Ami, a junior in psychology from Morton Grove, Ill., received an Outdoor Adventures flier as a resident assistant in Babcock Hall during the spring semester last year. Although their spring break trip plans didn’t happen, Ben-Ami thought the Grand Canyon backpacking trip at the end of the school year “would be even more fun and a great way to bond.” The 12-day trip in May would involve a drive to and from the national park, and six days hiking into and out of the canyon.

He and two of his friends from the floor signed up; one was Chris Leon, a political science major from Bethesda, Md., now a sophomore.

Seeing the Grand Canyon this way was something Ben-Ami said he had dreamed about doing, but thought it beyond his experience and not something he could plan or execute on his own. “But Bob (McGrew) really knows his stuff. … You just sign up and he does everything for you.”

“There are so many little things that definitely would have been overlooked without somebody like him,” said Leon, who described his experience at the Grand Canyon as “unbelievably jaw-dropping.”

Jennifer Morrison, a sophomore in business administration from Springfield, Ill., also was thinking about spring break last year when she came across the Outdoor Adventures Web page. She found there was a spring break trip planned for backpacking in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas and went to a meeting to find out more about it.

“I thrive on meeting new people and being immersed in new experiences,” Morrison said. That made the trip ideal, since many of those who sign up are coming as individuals and not with friends, and international and graduate students are often a significant part of the mix. (One graduate student from Taiwan took at least 15 trips during his time at Illinois, according to McGrew.)

McGrew came to his job by way of graduate studies at Illinois, following a bachelor’s degree in outdoor recreation and education at Indiana University. He came to the field somewhat by accident, he said, having started out in elementary education and discovering the major after taking a recreation class.

He got some experience at a YMCA, where he organized a few trips, before coming to Illinois. As a graduate student, he found he didn’t really enjoy research and started helping another graduate student with the camping equipment rental room, then in the basement of the Intramural-Physical Education Building. (The Outdoor Center building was completed in 1996.)

They proceeded to teach a few classes, such as cross-country skiing and canoeing, then decided to do some trips. That’s when McGrew led his first UI trips to the Everglades, during spring break, and the Grand Canyon, in May, both of which have become annual affairs. He has been to each place now more than two dozen times.

Morrison, who was hired by McGrew as a student worker after her first trip, thought she had “never seen somebody so connected, and so in love and in tune, with nature.”

For McGrew, part of the satisfaction comes in just getting away and out into nature, but he also enjoys taking first-timers through the process. On the Grand Canyon trip, for example, “everybody’s afraid at the beginning, and don’t think they can make it that first day,” he said. The combination of heat, altitude, difficulty of the trail and other factors has many doubting their abilities. “A lot of it is mental, I tell them. … It looks harder than it actually is.”

After the first or second day, McGrew sees them gaining confidence, and even the eventual climb back out of the canyon is not as hard as they thought it would be. “All of them are really happy when they get to the top,” he said. “They’re surprised at how tough they are, at the end, that they actually did make it.”

Part of the process for McGrew is also educating the participants on what they need to know to live in the backcountry and to leave behind the smallest impact on nature, following principles of a national program called “Leave No Trace.” Before and during the trip, participants learn about everything from how to pack, to how to prepare and protect their food, to how they should dispose of waste.

The cost of the trips varies, based on destination and the number of days. Day trips run $15 to $25 and weekend trips are usually $50. The longer trips will run from $360 for a spring break trip to the Smoky Mountains to $550 for an August canoe trip to the Green River in Utah.

The people on the trip, and the relationships that develop, can often end up being as important as the education or the experience, McGrew and the students said. With the time and the need to work together, “you do build a certain camaraderie,” Leon said.

McGrew knows of many instances where American students met European students on one of the trips, then would later go to Europe on a vacation or study abroad, and have a friend to show them around.

Ben-Ami could think of many instances during his Grand Canyon trip when he was reminded how little he knew and the trouble he could get himself into without expert guidance. But he said he now has the confidence to think about planning an outdoor trip of his own with friends or family – maybe in the Rockies this summer. 

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