An Academic Road Trip Around the American West.

During the Fall 2021 semester, 16 Westminster College students, led by a program assistant and faculty members Jeff Nichols (history professor) and Brent Olson (environmental studies associate professor), will load books, camping gear, and themselves into a couple of vans and hit the road for a semester-long tour of the American West.

This prolonged journey into the field will allow students to learn directly from landscapes and ecosystems, as well as from the people who live, work, and study in those places. Together, you will build a cohort of impassioned scholars with a particular breadth and depth of experiential knowledge that is equipped to build a better future for the West.

Students earn 16 credits through courses while visiting iconic, protected sites like Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, contentious places like the Little Bighorn and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, working landscapes like the Butte Copper Mines, and communities from present-day Native nations to “New West” towns like Bend, Twisp, and Moab.

The ability to see and examine iconic Western landscapes and link historical change to the current political and environmental debates in person is irreplaceable. “I hope they can learn about a landscape by living in it,” says Olson. “And perhaps most importantly, we want to give students a chance to indulge their curiosity while building a roaming community of young scholars.” — This is not Your Average College Road Trip — The Adventure Journal

The Route

The route consists of 2 large loops, one headed northwest from Salt Lake City, and the other headed south. The stops of the expedition were selected for their potential to teach profound lessons about humanity’s relationship to the environments of the West and the chance a stop provides to meet people who can teach students to live in the landscape in new ways.

Course-related stops include:

• Sites of environmental/cultural conflict or cooperation like the Holden Mine; Klamath River dams; the Berkeley Pit, Coeur d’Alene, the border with Mexico, and Los Alamos
• National parks and monuments like Yellowstone, North Cascades, Glacier, Organ Pipe, Great Basin, Mesa Verde, and Bears Ears
• Wilderness areas like Bob Marshall and Glacier Peak
• Native nations and sites like Burns Paiute, The Dalles, the Nez Perce trail, and Hopi
• Dam sites like Teton, Grand Coulee, Hoover, Snake River
• Relevant towns/cities like Winthrop, Bozeman, Bend, Cody, Moab, Winthrop, Page, and Flagstaff

Meet the Faculty and Staff

Brent Olson: Brent grew up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, but it wasn’t until he spent a year and a half volunteering at a retreat center deep in the North Cascades that he truly fell in love with the outdoors. Since then, he has explored the Rockies, Adirondacks, Central Cascades, Southern Ghats, Pyrenees, Andes, the Scottish Highlands, and the fjords of Iceland, always returning to his beloved home mountains in the Wasatch. Brent has spent his career researching political ecology, resource geography, environmental history, and cultural landscapes. When he’s not teaching, reading, or writing, he’s most likely taking photos or exploring the world on a bike or a snowboard.

Jeff Nichols: Jeff is a native of upstate New York, but Utah’s wild mountains, red rock canyons, and snowy slopes have made him a permanent transplant. After serving as an antisubmarine warfare officer in the US Navy, Jeff earned his PhD in history, studying environmental, western, cultural, and Utah history. He lives with his wife on the bank of Gordon Creek at the foot of Strawberry Peak, where they share a house with their dog, cats, and a parrot.