About 80 students gathered in Braker 001 last Thursday to learn the basics of wilderness survival.
Survival experts and educators Tim Drake and Dave Hall, who co-founded Primitive Pursuits, an Ithaca, N.Y.-based wilderness education program, delivered a two-hour lecture co-sponsored by Tufts Mountain Club (TMC) and the Tufts Institute of the Environment.
Drake and Hall discussed basic survival skills such as building shelters, finding and treating drinking water and building fires, according to TMC President Lily Glidden.
"They basically covered some very basic wilderness survival techniques and talked about its implications today — why it's important to study these things and what relevance it has to our world," Glidden, a junior, said.
TMC Vice President Daniel Meer praised the pair's focus on the mental aspects of survival.
"When you're acting in a situation, you won't necessarily be thinking clearly," Meer, a junior, said. "Having that problem-solving mindset of wilderness survival will help them come up with alternative solutions to fix the situation that they're in."
After the lecture, attendees participated in demonstrations of survival skills such as building fires, according to Glidden.
"I'm a [Tufts Wilderness Orientation] leader, so one of my freshmen came and we worked together as a team," she said.
Event organizers highlighted the opportunity for students to get involved in TMC without having to trek up to the Loj in New Hampshire.
"We saw a lot of freshmen and a lot of people who haven't been to the Loj before," Evangelia Murray, TMC's on-campus director, said.
Murray, a junior, said the hassle of traveling to the Loj prevents many students from participating in TMC activities altogether.
"A lot of times, it's hard for people to get up on the weekends or make a sacrifice," she said. "That's something we really struggle with."
Drake and Hall have taught wilderness lessons at Ithaca College, the Adirondack Mountain Club, the Cornell Outdoor Education program, and the Institute for Natural Learning in Brattleboro, V.t.
Murray said Drake and Hall sought to share with students their appreciation for the great outdoors.
"They just wanted everyone to come away with the feeling that they could be reconnected to nature if they really wanted to," she said. "It's just a matter of showing how important it is to go outside and take a walk."
Glidden offered praise for the event. "It went great," Glidden said. "I think the audience was really involved."
Murray agreed. "It was longer than I expected, but everybody stayed until the end. Nobody was leaving or getting bored," she said.
Meer said the event piqued student interest in the wilderness among those not involved in TMC.
"Attending the lecture was a great way for students who may or may not be interested to come out and find out more about an awesome field," he said.
"I think it was nice because it was a lot more open to the community that isn't willing to leave campus and go to the Loj," Glidden said. "It was very easy and available to students in the greater Tufts community."
Murray said Tufts' urban location restricts student access to the outdoors.
"Sometimes it's all about being in the city, and sometimes we forget about our natural primal instincts and all the things we're capable of doing," she said. "We're so fixed in with all our technology and social structure and things like that and it's cool to recall and remember all the things we're capable of doing."
Murray said that TMC hopes to establish a semesterly adventure lecture series.
"I think students gained a tremendous amount from the lecture. I think a lot of them came away with a much greater understanding of what wilderness survival is," Meer said. "It really opened up a whole new world to a lot of students."
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Correction: The caption of the photograph accompanying an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the subject of the photograph as Tim Drake. In fact, it was Dave Hall.
