Adirondack Connections

St. Lawrence was the second college in America to have an organized Outing Club. In 1937, when the club was formed by student outdoor enthusiasts, only Dartmouth had a similar organization.

Since 2000, St. Lawrence's Adirondack Semester has allowed a select group of students to spend a semester living simply on an Adirondack lake shore, studying courses ranging from ecology to environmental ethics.

It makes perfect sense for SLU to have one of the first and largest Outing Clubs anywhere: the Adirondack Mountains are in our backyard.  The Outing Club's first hikes consisted of long walks that began on campus. But as travel became easier, more and more students began traveling to the Adirondacks for skiing, hiking and backpacking, canoeing, rock and ice climbing, fishing and whatever else appealed to them.

More recent Outing Club initiatives have included Peak Weekend, in which members try to climb all 46 Adirondack "High Peaks" (those designated as exceeding 4,000 feet in altitude) on the same weekend, and cooperation with pre-Orientation trips, on which incoming first-year students are introduced to the region.

But while recreation has been important, it has not been the only way in which the Adirondacks have been a resource for St. Lawrence:

-The University's Adirondack Conferences at its Canaras Conference Center on Upper Saranac Lake brought together local politicians, artisans, historians, planners, environmental activists and others for passionate (and sometimes fiery) debates on issues affecting the Adirondacks, such as land use regulations and second home development.   Important "position papers" often emerged from the conferences, which received widespread media attention.

-Canaras has also since 1990 been the site of conferences for high school writers who live in the North Country and Adirondacks. The students work with professional poets, essayists and fiction writers, some of whom are also Adirondack residents.

- The University supplied personnel and expertise in various areas for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, including studies on the impact of the Games on the local community.

The Adirondacks have always beckoned St. Lawrence students; the University's Outing Club, founded in 1937, is the second-oldest college outing club in the nation.

-The founding of St. Lawrence's pioneering environmental studies program in 1973 was spurred by the fact that rare wilderness and forest environments were only a short drive away.

- A popular summer course in the 1970s and '80s was a combined sociological and environmental "on the ground" comparison of the Adirondack and Appalachian regions.

- Use of the Adirondacks for academic purposes has grown in recent years, with the advent of the Outdoor Program, a quasi-curricular skill development initiative; the outdoor studies minor, which draws courses from several departments into a cohesive course of study; and the Adirondack Semester, modeled after the University's extensive international study programs, in which about a dozen students live "off the grid" by an Adirondack lake for several months while taking four courses that cause them to think deeply about humans' relationships with nature
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- Perhaps most significant, the region has from the University's earliest days been the source of some of St. Lawrence's best students.   A perusal of the record book of Phi Beta Kappa, the leading academic honorary society, shows that a disproportionate percentage of the elected members list Adirondack communities as home.