Field TripsDepartment of Environment, Geography, and Earth Sciences

We love getting students outside of the classroom! We’ve found that some of the best learning experiences and social networking experiences happen when we leave campus together.

We strive to make field trips accessible to all students and will communicate early and often with class members to ensure that everyone feels safe and has what they need to maximize learning on field trips. Yes, it’s possible that you’ll feel nervous about a field trip beforehand! Any new experience can seem daunting, and for some students this might be well outside of your comfort zone. However, we ask you to be attentive to the difference between feeling unsafe versus feeling uncomfortable. We want to ensure that everyone feels safe! And, we recognize that sometimes the best growth – whether it’s as a student, or athlete, or artist, or as a human in general – comes when we’re outside our comfort zone.

For overnight field trips: We’ve also found that even students who’ve never yet slept in a tent, cooked a meal outside, or gone for a hike in the woods find these experiences meaningful and empowering. We will give you all the information and gear you need to succeed. We’ve had many first-time campers on our trips, and we’ve gotten tons of enthusiastic, positive feedback afterward!

What is an overnight EGE field trip like?

We’ve found that even students who’ve never yet slept in a tent, cooked a meal outdoors, or gone for a hike in the woods find these experiences meaningful and empowering. We will give you all the information and gear you need to succeed. We’ve had many first-time campers on our trips, and we’ve gotten tons of enthusiastic, positive feedback afterward!

Our instructors have a lot of experience teaching “in the field.” If you are camping, we’ll make sure every student has a good sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and a tent situation that makes sense for them. We have a camp kitchen with stoves, pans, dishes, silverware, and cups for cooking and eating together “family style.” The class will help choose the meal plans, ensuring that everyone’s dietary needs are met, and the Department will purchase the food. We’ll usually assign small groups of students to cook each meal, under the supervision of the instructor if needed. Everyone will take a turn with doing dishes, and we’ll help teach you how to do that, too, if it’s new to you!

A typical day on a Gustavus EGE overnight camping field trip

  • Load up our College vans on a Friday afternoon after classes are over, then drive a few hours to a state park campsite
  • Set up the tents, cook dinner together, eat dinner, do dishes, then get an orientation to the area
  • Often students will hang out around the campfire for a while, or play cards or some other game before heading to bed at a reasonable hour
  • In the morning, we’ll have a set time for breakfast so that everyone knows when to get up. We’ll make coffee, tea, and cocoa, have breakfast, take down the tents, and pack up the vehicles
  • We’ll head out to do some work! That might involve short hikes, collecting rocks, interviewing local residents, taking measurements, having discussions, learning from local experts, touring farms, etc. 
  • We’ll often have a picnic lunch at a park or scenic lookout, then continue doing work in the afternoon

Examples of destinations

Destinations vary by course, semester, and instructor. Usually, introductory courses have field trips only during scheduled lab or lecture time so they stay near campus: Seven Mile Creek Park, local farms, and the Minnesota River are common destinations. Nearly all upper-level GEO courses and some upper-level GEG and ENV courses have weekend overnight trips in order to get farther from campus, where we can see new geology or meet with more distant experts. The longest trips regularly offered by the Department are week-long spring break trips associated with the course GEO 212 Evolution of the Earth; recent destinations have included Utah national parks, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and the southern Appalachian mountains.