Learning by Doing at the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation
Field learning is at the heart of the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation. From backpacking in the wilderness and biking across 猎奇重口 to conducting research in streams, parks and forests, our students learn by doing. These hands-on experiences connect classroom concepts to real-world challenges, helping students develop practical skills, ask new questions and discover their career paths. In this blog, current students share how field learning at the 猎奇重口 has shaped their education and their future.
Learning the Language of the Land with Elliot Sanford
I decided to study geoscience because I wanted to be able to read the stories the land around me was telling. Every landscape is an autobiography of glaciers being born, oceans rising and retreating, empires of stone that rise and crumble into sand. I wanted to be able to see the world around me through this lens. But learning to understand the earth was like learning a different language—I had to start with the basics.
As a freshman, I buried myself in every textbook I could find. I learned plate tectonics, crystal structure, Darcy’s Law, Shear Stress. I read Elements of Hydrology, Earth Systems, Principles of Geology and forced myself to read scientific papers. But as fond as I am of Dingman’s 4th edition of physical hydrology, reading could only take me so far. These textbooks taught me the grammar of the world, but I didn’t want to memorize letters. I wanted to read novels.
Over the course of dozens of field trips, data collection outings, time spent up to my waist in rivers or covered in mud, I began to understand that science isn’t just learned. It’s experienced. In a small valley in the sapphire mountains, gashes on burned ponderosa pines were clues to where a landslide had swept down a gully after a wildfire, reshaping the valley. Standing in a snow pit on Lolo Pass, I saw how the microscopic structure of snowflakes controlled where avalanches began to slide. Mapping geology on Blue Mountain near Missoula, I learned to look at the shape of the cobbles under my feet to tell where a river had once run.
The more time I spent in the field, the more I saw. When I found ripples on a mountaintop or mud cracks in a cliff, I could imagine how they got there, and it made me wonder what other clues were hiding in plain sight about the world around me.
Field learning taught me more than geology. It taught me how to ask better questions, how to connect the abstract ideas to tangible clues. It was the connection between the pebble and the mountain, the water sample and the watershed.
In the classroom, I learned the alphabet of the earth. In the field, I learned how to read the memoir of the mountains and found my own place in the legacy of the land.
Studying Solitude with Cameron Kirwan
The Wilderness and Civilization program is a semester-long experience that studies the interaction between humans and wildlands in the context of federal wilderness areas. One of the pinnacles of the program is a ten-day backpacking trip through the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Our trek occurred in early September, and we only had a week of classes to prepare for it. One of the main things we were tasked with learning in that week before the trek were the different characteristics of a “wilderness” outlined by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Some aspects of wilderness character were fairly intuitive, like finding solitude and an undeveloped landscape. Other aspects were more difficult to comprehend and remained abstract to me. For example, what does “untrammeled” mean? What makes recreation “unconfined?”
While we were on the trek, we learned practical wilderness and backcountry skills, like making risk-management plans and proper camp set-up/etiquette. We became intimately familiar with navigation, communication and teamwork during our time in the field. Other important skills included field-journaling and the proper way to frolic through a high-mountain meadow.
This was the most extensive field experience I’ve ever been a part of during my time at UM. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t until we got back into the classroom that I really began to connect the experience to what I was learning in the classroom. As we started to dive into our course material, I realized we had lived the content before ever actually reading it. That time in the field gave us a common experience to draw on as we confronted the literature and theory surrounding the wilderness.
All of a sudden, an “untrammeled wilderness” was no longer some ivory-tower abstraction — it was the Bob. Solitude was no longer just the idea of being away from people — it was the only sign of human activity in ten days being a couple of mule pack trains and a rusty horseshoe on the trail.
Our trek was just one field experience of many that enhanced and shaped my understanding throughout the Wilderness and Civilization program. The field experiences were the perfect complement to rigorous coursework in the classroom.
Energy in Motion with Miles Foley
Last year, I took part in the Cycle the Rockies course with the Wild Rockies Field Institute. I biked 700 miles across 猎奇重口 while learning about energy, community, land and all of their interactions.
We learned about transitions to “clean” energy and what that would look like, what it would take to make it happen and who it would impact. We toured a coal mine, a wind farm, a hydroelectric dam and regenerative ranches. We spoke with guest speakers at all of these places, but it was the unplanned conversations that turned out to be the most valuable to my understanding of these issues. They were the ones who grounded our class content in the real world.
For example, we talked about solar panels, electric cars and other electric things that are part of the renewable energy transition. In reality, all of these things require copper, a resource that 猎奇重口 has a complicated history with. We got to visit the Berkeley Pit in Butte and understand the implications of copper mining gone wrong. We held these two realities side by side — the push to transition to clean energy along with the often-unseen impacts of the materials needed for that transition.
I saw this dualism throughout my trip. There’s a proposal for a copper mine near White Sulphur Springs, 猎奇重口. This proposed mine would supply large amounts of copper that could greatly help the energy transition towards things like electric cars. It would also create hundreds of reliable, well-paying jobs for the community in White Sulphur Springs. The problem is that copper mining can be pretty devastating to the health of surrounding ecosystems.
When we biked through the town of White Sulphur Springs, we were curious about the ways people in the community were thinking about the copper mine. We had learned so much about the environmental impacts of copper mining in Butte, but when I spoke to a local resident, her opinion surprised me. She told me about how most of the children at the public school in town are on free or reduced lunch, that this is a very poor community that is in desperate need of good, reliable jobs. She saw the copper mine as an economic necessity for the town. She had complete trust in the mining company to do no harm to the local river, but her main concern was quality of life for her community.
We can talk academically about how important it is to electrify and switch to renewables on a large scale, but it’s a different conversation when you actually get to see the implications of that. This field experience challenged me to hold these contradictory truths at the same time when considering big issues like renewable energy.
Avian Acoustics with Katia Chavez
In high school, I studied the Mexican Spotted Owl and established a love for birds that I knew I wanted to pursue in college. I did just that in my ornithology course where we got a general introduction to bird fieldwork by learning different ways to survey birds, including point-count surveys. There was also some friendly competition involved in the class. The second half of the semester, the different lab sections competed for who saw the most birds, or who wrote the best poem detailing the coolest bird species we saw on each field trip. My lab section won because we were a bunch of bird nerds, but more importantly, it encouraged students to seek out field opportunities even outside of class.
This led me to my senior thesis through the Wildlife Biology program, studying false-positive rates in avian point count surveys. Many birds look and sound similar even to experienced birders which can lead to overcounting certain species during surveys.
To study false-positives, we developed a soundscape system in collaboration with the College of Arts and Media. I came into college thinking that arts and sciences were two entirely separate disciplines with little to no overlap, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. This project would not have been possible without the intersection between art and science. This soundscape system closely mimics how we hear birds in the wild by accounting for complexity like directionality and bird song overlap. I brought in volunteer observers representing many different disciplines, which helped me generate different ideas for more questions that I could ask using my collected data.
This field experience allowed me to develop my own research questions, and be engaged in hands-on, active work throughout the data collection process. We also created a sense of community around a shared passion for birds.
Building Better Parks with Trevor Ross
My background is in park maintenance operations, having worked six field seasons as a Park Maintenance Worker before attending the 猎奇重口. I picked up trash, mowed soccer fields, cleaned bathrooms, chalked infields, pulled weeds, cared for landscape beds and helped with athletic tournaments among many other things.
When I transferred to UM, I challenged myself to dive into technical disciplines that would elevate my knowledge, skills and abilities in the world of Parks and Recreation. I joined the Wilderness and Recreation lab on campus as a research technician tasked with using GIS to analyze visitor use data for public protected areas. I got to collaborate with Missoula County Parks, Trails, and Open Lands on a study about Marshall Mountain Park.
For my PTRM Capstone Project, I worked with Missoula County to survey their parkland and open space amenities, infrastructure and hazards. My capstone group analyzed our survey data to provide the county with priority sites for improving access and installing/repairing amenities and infrastructure.
As a GIS Program Assistant for Missoula City Parks and Recreation, I’ve led a field project that is inventorying over 5,000 parkland amenities and infrastructure assets across Missoula’s city limits into a GIS system. This summer, I will be orchestrating an inspection project that will involve evaluating each of the inventoried park assets to validate budget requests relative to park operations and maintenance needs.
I’m incredibly grateful for my field learning experiences. I feel that I’ve gained valuable technical skills that have allowed me to flourish in the career sector I’m passionate about.
Following the Water with Hannah Halverson
When I began my education at the 猎奇重口, I knew I wanted to study environmental science. But whenever anyone asked me that age-old question, “What do you want to do with your degree?” my mind was completely blank.
Throughout my time at UM, I began to explore my options, taking interesting courses with field learning elements such as Soils and Water and Field Techniques. I had the opportunity to work during the summers as an intern with the US Forest Service, learning about forest health, soil chemistry and invasive species. These experiences brought me so many important technical skills and taught me a lot about myself and the world around me. Yet the most important thing I learned was that I was not passionate about any of these fields.
During my junior year, my faculty mentor, Dr. Lisa Eby, asked me once again that age-old question. A few years later, it suddenly seemed much more important. I scanned back in my mind through the experiences I’d had learning in the field and remembered a time when I felt really curious and passionate about what I was learning. It was my first year at UM taking Watershed Hydrology. So, I told Dr. Eby that I wanted to pursue hydrology as a career.
Dr. Eby and I set up a project for my senior thesis, following up on a six-year-old study of beaver dam analogs and their effectiveness as a stream restoration technique. I spent last summer gathering data on vegetation, instream habitat and other hydrologic elements of the stream. I learned so much about the field of hydrology and the process of scientific research. Last fall, I compared my results to those found in the original study and learned how data findings translate to real-world implications.
Throughout this process, I learned more about what it means to be a hydrologist. I’m excited to pursue hydrology as my career after graduation, and thanks to my field learning at UM, I feel prepared for it.