Lakeside School Outdoor Program

History

Lakeside has long appreciated the value of providing opportunities for students to learn outside of the classroom and out of the city. A case in point is an observation by Upper School Outdoor Program Coordinator Chip Mehring: “While visiting Winthrop with Upper School students on cross-country ski trips and with a group of 6th graders touring orchards and rafting on the Methow River, I greatly enjoyed visiting Bob Crandall ’36 in the cabin he donated to Lakeside. He would tell me tales of being a Lakeside boarding student in the mid-1930s. Bob and Fred Bleakney, teacher of English and Philosophy from 1930 to 1972, would head off in a fleet of Model Ts on the weekends to visit and, as amateur archeologists, explore the abandoned First Nation Villages along the Columbia which were to be submerged by the rising waters behind the new dams.”        

The 1960s-1970s were the times of the large, grade-level hikes along the Olympic Coast. A group of sixty students, an entire grade level, would hike and camp along a section of the coast as was the style of large outing clubs at that time such as The Mountaineers, The Mazamas, and The Sierra Club. In the mid-1970s, Head of School Dan Ayrault decided that Lakeside had enough trips to warrant hiring an outdoor program coordinator, thus ensuring the quality and safety of the program. The first person to hold this position was Bill Vanderbilt.

Under the leadership of Vanderbilt and Peter Hayes, the number of Outdoor Program offerings, and the types of activities, multiplied. Quickly a core group of students, known as the Wilderbeasts, developed and regularly participated in the program. Then, in the early 1980s the question arose: “Is the intention of the Outdoor Program to provide extensive, repeated experiences and training to a small group of students or should it be focused as an introductory experience for everyone?” The establishment of the Outdoor Program graduation requirement in 1984 spoke to the value that Lakeside puts on outdoor and experiential education.