For a month each summer of the past three years, I have gone into the backcountry of a different national park with a Student Conservation Association (SCA) crew. I went to Saguaro National Park in Arizona before tenth grade, Glacier National Park in Montana before eleventh grade and Lake Clark National Park in Alaska last summer. I also participate in monthly conservation projects on the weekends, mentor new SCA members and help to plan and lead a large Earth Day project with the SCA in Seattle during the school year.

I find it necessary to go into the back country for a month out of the year with SCA because it gives me a chance to get away from it all and do some hard, honest work. I very much appreciate the ease of life that modern technologies allow, but they also bring problems. My time in the backcountry gives me an opportunity to live without technology such as refrigerators, plumbing, microwaves, cell phones etc. I also get to do some hard work, which is pretty rare in a modern student’s life. During the year, the majority of my friends’ and my time is dedicated to a combination of homework and social events. In the wilderness, we still work, but it is a very different kind of work. Instead of text books and calculators, we use McCleods (rakes designed for trail work) and Pulaskis (axe/hoe combination). Taking a break from crunching numbers and balancing chemical equations to crush rocks with sledgehammers is very enjoyable for me. The SCA experience is all about getting indescribably dirty, busting ass for eight hours a day, and then coming back to camp to relax, read and eat dinner. A perfect day for me is waking up around 7 AM, eating some biscuits with a mug of boiling chocolate, hiking two miles along a glacial lake to work, cutting a new trail through dense brush until lunch time (preferably using a saw and/or a sledgehammer), eating a big peanut butter and jelly sandwich on some bread baked the night before, working until about 4 PM, hiking home, reading a sci-fi novel (ideally by Alastair Reynolds) until dinner is ready, sitting on the non-smoky side of a camp fire while eating several large servings of spaghetti and sharing stories with my fellow crew members, not having to do dishes, and then falling asleep while reading the same sci-fi novel in a tent reeking of nasty, wet socks.

 This essay was written by Aaron McCarty, Garfield Class of 2007, Carleton College Class of 2011.