By Danny Packer
To help celebrate Spring Day of Giving on Wednesday, April 2, which honors 50 years of Bear Canyon and experiential education, former history teacher and Ex Ed leader Danny Packer reflects on his years guiding students through outdoor adventures. Click here to support Spring Day of Giving.
The Bear Canyon Project. The Bear Canyon Program. Experiential Education. Ex Ed. However you know it, the outdoor education program has been a required part of the Academy educational experience for 50 years.
Over the years, the program has evolved in ways large and small. Before I started in 1986, it included a week-long Outward Bound Adaptive Program element for 7th and 8th graders. This model shrunk the 30-day OB program to a week and included a 24-hour solo experience. (It also included lots of opportunities for sneaking in “contraband”—snacks and food we didn’t want you to bring!) Over the years, I have had the opportunity to cave, mountain bike, road bike, cross-country ski, snowshoe, snow camp, hike, backpack, bird, explore ruins, build bridges and other trail projects, summit peaks, hike in the dead of night, hike from Jemez to Cochiti pueblos, and cook great meals (and other meals, too) with hundreds of Academy students.
The activities of the outdoor program have varied for a lot of reasons over the years, including staff changes in the program and changes in the larger school schedule that in turn impacted the Ex Ed program. While today’s program may look very different from the program you participated in back in the 1980s or the 2010s, the program has had a steady, solid core of goals, expectations, hopes, and dreams for our students. These have included, in no particular order, getting a break from the pressure cooker that Academy academics can be, fostering an appreciation for the natural world, offering leadership training and leadership opportunities, allowing students to get to know themselves and their peers beyond their academic performance, and learning new lifelong activities and skills, to name a few.
As the science department reflects proudly on alumni who make good as doctors or researchers and the English department is rightly proud of fostering our many published authors, Ex Ed likewise has fostered young outdoorsfolk who go on to work as outdoor educators and outdoor leaders. The most important of those successes is, of course, my own daughter Ruby ’15, who now traipses around the country helping to initiate young people into their own rewarding relationships with the outdoors.
I am not naive enough to think that everyone who makes it through the Ex Ed curriculum becomes an outdoor enthusiast or a card-carrying Sierra Club member, let alone an outdoor professional. I know there are those amongst you who, upon completing your 9th- or 10th-grade trip, have rejoiced that you will never have to sleep on the ground again or go a day without a shower. But, likewise, there are those of you who will take a hike this afternoon in your local open space, or who think a week-long backpacking trip is the perfect vacation. More importantly, there are many amongst you who will pass your own love and appreciation for the outdoors on to your own children. In my last year of teaching, I had a 7th grader who told me all about his family’s backpacking adventures. I saw pictures of him on a tall peak in the Pecos Wilderness. What I did not know, and only learned on Parents’ Night, was that in one of my first years at the Academy, I had taken his mom on her first backpacking trip!
I have so many great memories of working with you all, both in the classroom and especially in the field. One sticks in my mind because it summarizes why I love working in the outdoors. It was my first year at the Academy, and we were caving with 10th graders in the Carlsbad area. Our last adventure of the day was a small gypsum cave that, as it turned out, had a different entrance and exit. I was pulling up the rear as we made our way through the cave, which at the start was tall enough to stand in. The cave was formed by running water, and we could see ripple marks on the sides of the cave. As we progressed, the cave became narrower and shorter, necessitating that we stoop, then crawl, then slither, pushing our daypacks ahead of us, grunting and sweating as we went. As we neared the end, but still beyond the reach of sunlight, I maneuvered around a corner only to be face to face with a pair of red eyes shining in the light of my headlamp. I can’t remember whether I yelled or not, and I don’t recall the jolt of adrenaline that must have coursed through me, but what I do recall is that when I emerged blessedly back into the light of day, sweat streaming down my face, my co-leader, Cathy Campbell, greeted me saying, “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure!” Indeed it was an adventure, and I think fondly and gratefully on all of you who helped make it so. I hope that you are all having your own adventures spawned by this great Academy program, whatever name you know it by.