Winter: Wellness and Wilderness

What are Panoramas?

At the end of each semester, we break from our standard schedule for Panoramas, 3-week immersive and cross disciplinary courses. Panoramas present students with a diverse set of learning enviornments where they can explore, investigate, and evaluate different topics and themes with teachers, classmates, community partners, and experts through seminars, hands-on labs, travel, service, and critical work. Students input is integral to the process of creating these offerings so that we can include student interests and goals in our planning and final itineraries.

Dispatch #1:

Last week’s epic snowstorm wasn’t part of the plan, or was it? In this Panorama, group decision making is a key theme and practice. The huge snow dump in the mountains provided a perfect opportunity for students to do exactly what winter recreation requires: an informed evaluation of data to make safe decisions for yourself and others. With their own data in hand, students reached the decision that we needed to delay our mountain plans, and the photos below prove their decision was spot on. We’ll get to the mountains soon and we’ve had plenty to do at this elevation.
So far students have:

• Prepared for snow-based activities with avalanche training (thank you Northwest Avalanche Center!) and hands-on weather monitoring where they learn to read forecasts and also study new tools like satellite imaging to understand what’s causing weather predictions.
• Explored indoor fitness options, knowing they are a great complement to outdoor winter activities, with a number of fitness classes with community teachers, like barre and HIT classes at Island Fitness and Yoga with yoga instructor Anna Matriotti (an alumni mom!).
• Examined nutrition for winter sports and even made our own granola bars in the kitchen at BARN.
• Worked through intentional group decision making challenges like the ropes course at IslandWood.
• Watched the documentary 14 Peaks.

This week students dive into their research projects on winter topics including women pioneers in winter sports, the politics and economics of ski resort ownership, and cultural celebrations of the winter solstice.
Next up: Snoqualmie Pass Mountain Workshop with the Mountaineers and an overnight at their lodge!