Outings Week

Outings Week takes place in the fall and is designed to give each class the chance to come together while enjoying the beauty and challenges of an outdoor trip. Freshmen generally travel to Pyles Camp in the Sequoia National Forest, where they go on hikes during the day, come together around the campfire and spend the night in open-air cabins. During the sophomore trip, students carry in all their food and gear on a backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park. Juniors and accompanying faculty head to the Kern River for a 40-mile-long, full-pack camping trip. Seniors can spend the week visiting colleges, taking part in a rafting trip on the Colorado River or serving as leaders on one of the underclassman camping trips.

The fall trips have been designed to build class unity, provide faculty and students an opportunity to work together in a non-academic environment, and to afford students the chance to experience California's unique environmental beauty.

It is significant that these goals, identified early in the Week's conception, list the interpersonal goals of enhanced community interactions before that of exposure to, and/or education of, the natural environment. Outings Week has always served primarily as a vehicle to help unify this community to become more cohesive with, and understanding and tolerant of, one another.

However, with our society facing numerous environmental crises and challenges, the need for students to understand and appreciate their connection to the natural world becomes more and more critical. As a result, Outings Week has evolved to meet additional goals, and it remains clear that these wilderness experiences serve to augment the overarching goals of the School's mission statement in ways that the traditional classroom setting and residential program cannot fully address.

In particular, a group of secondary goals have emerged:

1) To foster a sense of independence and an increased ability to handle challenge. By removing the creature comforts and technology upon which so many of our students increasingly rely, by introducing an element of physical challenge, and by pushing students outside of their traditional comfort zones, it is hoped students will redefine their own perceived personal limits, growing in confidence and gaining a sense of accomplishment that comes with exceeding one's own expectations.

2) To enhance students' understanding of one's personal responsibility in helping to achieve a positive group experience. By hiking and camping in small groups, students are given an opportunity to have a genuine impact on the success of each trip. Each person has the chance to shoulder real responsibility and to see the effects—both positive and negative—of their involvement in real and tangible ways.

3) To familiarize students with the outdoors. With each generation becoming increasingly modernized, it becomes imperative that students understand our connection to the natural world. We want to graduate students who understand clearly the necessity for healthy stewardship of the environment in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our own population. Our trips, however, are not designed as formal academic experiences. Rather, exposure to wilderness provides an opportunity for students to experience, firsthand, the natural environment upon which we all depend. In addition, the trips are meant to provide an opportunity for students to see the potential of the outdoors as a source of recreation, personal enjoyment, and opportunity to connect with peers (or themselves) in more meaningful ways than they might have previously known. Even if they choose never to hike or camp again, our students will all have a common set of shared, outdoor experiences, which will serve to enhance better their understanding of our place in the natural world and their places with each other in this school community.

Thus, both the original founding primary goals as well as the subsequent secondary goals serve to provide an overarching framework to apply to each trip. However, given the different nature of each trip, as well as the developmental differences of the students in each class, each trip places different emphases on each goal and attempts to meet the general goals in different ways. As a result, more specific goals emerge related to each trip, facilitating an evaluative process with which to identify the relative success of each trip from year to year.