OUTDOOR CLASSROOMS
Cottonwood Gulch treks are like ‘the most epic family road trip with your best friend’
Students learn on wilderness treks
Cottonwood Gulch treks are the kind of adventures you just have to experience to understand completely. Two veterans of the outdoor experiential program — 17-year-old Milo Patterson of Albuquerque and Los Angeles resident Austin Troy, who first went on a trek in 1984 — say the experience is “hard to describe.”
But when they do find the words, both Patterson and Troy have glowing endorsements of the Albuquerquebased program that has been guiding youth on cultural and outdoor expeditions in the Southwest for more than 90 years.
“The Gulch has its own sort of culture,” said Patterson, who went on his fourth trek last summer, the sixweek Mountain Desert Trek. “It’s the magic of being in the Southwest for an extended period of time and being able to remove yourself from society.”
He said the simple, unplugged way of living allows “trekkers,” as the campers are called, to escape the distractions of everyday life, and focus on connecting to others and to the natural world.
Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions was founded in 1926 by Hillis Howie, a young teacher from Indianapolis. He befriended Navajo Tom Henio, starting a long affiliation that led to trekkers living on the Navajo Reservation, helping to brand cattle, corral sheep and learn about the culture. Howie also led an all-girls expedition in 1934, a revolutionary idea at the time.
When Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., served as executive director in the late 1990s, he helped shift the nonprofit program away from its East Coast base and more to New Mexico.
Trekkers aged 10 to 18 spend time at the 540-acre base camp in the foothills of the Zuni Mountains near Thoreau, take backpack trips and go on the road to join in cultural programs that can include helping lasso sheep on the Navajo Nation or working on a U.S. Forest Service river restoration project. The trekkers, who come from across the country and around the world, also might learn silversmithing, visit with a movie maker or work with an archaeologist on the two- to six-week treks.
Executive Director Kris Salisbury describes it as “the most epic family road trip with your best friend” and says she hears every week about how the Gulch has changed the trajectory of someone’s life.
“A lot of trekkers get to do the early career exploration that happens when we’re 14, 15, 16,” she said. “We never know where kids will get their inspiration.”
The Gulch has had an impact on Troy’s life.
“It was such an amazing experience and so unexpected. … Being in the midst of and involved with a lot of Native cultures was completely new to me,” he said. “After one summer, I was completely sold.”
Troy first went on a trek at 14, returned for three more years as a camper and then two as a cook. He joined the board of directors in October, and his two children will be trekkers this summer.
Cottonwood Gulch also offers weekend intensives focusing on subjects such as geology or weaving, family and adult treks, and school break treks and day camps. The cost for summer treks ranges from $2,575 to $5,600, and scholarships are available.
Fifteen years ago, the program added school-based expeditions, which now make up half of its work. The Gulch takes hundreds of mostly private and charter school students a year on adventures ranging from a day to almost two weeks.
“We like to think of ourselves as a program out of the box,” Salisbury said.
It’s a curriculum based in science and nature, wilderness, and arts and culture. Students studying geologic time might, for example, visit the Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains, summit Mount Taylor at sunrise or look for dinosaur fossils at the Ah-Shi-SlePah Wilderness Study Area south of Farmington.