Each fall, juniors and seniors in Forest Recreation Resources come together for a Field school to work with resource managers on their territory so that we might better understand current issues in the broad field of recreation. Another important purpose of this class is to strengthen friendships between students. I participated in the 10-day field school this year.
       Led by instructor Mark Reed, we traveled through northeastern Oregon and Idaho and into Utah, where we spent five days in Escalante working with Maile Adler and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Our project was to build a pole fence and floodgate from lodgepole pine and juniper to exclude cattle from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
      For our five days in Escalante, we camped at a group campsite at the Petrified Forest State Park. The second day in town, we met at BLM headquarters and got the scoop on what our project would be like. That morning we loaded supplies onto a trailer and into the bed of a pickup. From there we went to the worksite and unloaded the materials. We finished the day off by celebrating a student’s birthday at the Cowboy Blues restaurant.
      The following day (September 11) our group was split in two. This made it so that a smaller number of students could recreate and observe management issues on the monument and stay within the group number requirements to be in

the backcountry areas of the monument. Each day the groups would alternate activities. The smaller of the two groups (the group I was in) spent the morning at the fence project.
       Upon learning of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast, we went back to BLM Headquarters where employees were getting ready to go home. “Field School is over,” we were told, because there would be no one left to supervise our project. We spent the day listening to the radio and catching glimpses of the events on a small and fuzzy television in the gas station’s mini mart.
       There were a lot of tough decisions to be made before we would be home. The consensus, however, was to stay in Escalante, where we had friends in the BLM. We feared that if we rushed home and the terrorist activities escalated, we might have been stuck on the road somewhere in Nevada or California. The next day we heard that government employees were to “return to work as usual”. This put us back on track and allowed us to finish the fence and carry out the rest of our activities. We completed the project in three days, leaving us lots of time to enjoy ourselves in a spectacular natural setting.

— K.D.P.
Junior, Forest Recreation Resources

Author Kate Pryor, above left, with friends at Peek-A-Boo slot canyon, Grand Staircase- Escalante, and Fiery Furnace, Arches, Utah.

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