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Nothing can stop traffic like a pair of teenage lions. Members of the Hamilton Outdoor Club (HOC) experienced this first-hand during a winter break trip to Kenya. On the first day of their two-week trip, the van that the students were traveling in was held up by a lion-induced traffic jam.

The Climbing Wall in the Blood Fitness Center took on a new identity as a Rave Cave on Oct. 22. The Outing Club sponsored the Late Nite event where participants wore headlamps and climbed on a wall covered in glowsticks.

One of the great resources for the Hamilton Outing Club (HOC), is the College’s proximity to the Adirondack State Park. The Adirondack Park is the largest state or national park in the lower 48 states, and boasts thousands of miles of hiking trails, hundreds of waterways ideal for canoeing and whitewater rafting, and some of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the Northeast.

Seven Hamilton students—trip leaders Pat Dunn ’12 and Leonard Teng ’12 along with Makenna Perry ’12, Leslie Cohen ’12, Lucas Harris ’12, Marco Scheuer ’13 and Max Lopez ’15—were part of a Hamilton Outing Club (HOC) backpacking trip last weekend that tackled two of the Adirondack High Peaks: Algonquin Peak, the second highest mountain in the state at 5,115 feet, and Iroquois Peak, the eighth highest at 4,843 feet.  

Hamilton students gathered on Thursday at the Glen House for a party hosted by the Outdoor Leadership Center. The party, which was thrown in celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Glen House’s dedication, featured refreshments and a variety of outdoors-themed games and competitions.

As the variably extreme (and predominantly unpleasant) second-semester weather on campus reached a crescendo in mid-March, the Hamilton Outing Club sent south four rugged adventurers to explore the half-rock, half-cacti world of the Superstition Wilderness in central Arizona. HOC officer Anna Bastidas ’13, HOC member Adam Fix ’13, and myself, official HOC journalist, with tireless leader Jeannie Folan ‘12, camped five nights and hiked five days through the wilderness, which makes up part of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.

Andrew Skurka boasts an extraordinary resume—he has been named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic and Person of the Year by Backpacker Magazine, and has under his belt more than 30,000 miles of backcountry trekking, skiing, and packrafting.

Andrew Skurka, an adventurer, speaker, guide, and writer, will give two presentations at Hamilton on Monday, Feb. 28. The first, a lightweight backpacking skills clinic, will take place at noon in the Glen House. The second, a lecture on Skurka’s Alaska-Yukon expedition, will begin at 7 p.m. in the Red Pit, KJ.  Both events are sponsored by the Hamilton Outing Club and are free and open to the public.

This concludes the tale of the Hamilton Outing Club's three-week trip to  Ecuador over winter break.  Many thanks to Dani Forshay '11 for sharing her experiences and photos.

This is part III of the story of the Hamilton Outing Club's winter break trip to Ecuador. The next day the mountaineering portion of the trek began, and we prepared to hike Cayambe and Cotopaxi, two glaciated volcanoes of 18,996 feet and 19,344 feet respectively.