Quinzees (think snow caves you sleep in for those who don’t know the lingo) for the Wyoming Catholic College Freshman Winter Expedition have unfortunately been pretty prosaic and uninteresting. Rounded mounds with no real design are of course the easiest to build, but with school a curriculum devoted to the good, true, and especially the beautiful, it’s surprising to many just how little attention is paid on the trip to the finer things, to those things that are not necessarily useful, but which are good in themselves.
Luckily art and humanities professors at Wyoming Catholic were able to discuss this years-old problem with the administration of the Outdoor Leadership Program (OLP), and more advanced, “artisan”, and beauty-soaked quinzees and campsites are on the agenda for this year’s winter trip. Grading for students on the expedition this year will now be based on the design of each group’s quinzee and campsite to aid this, and not on such “illiberal ideas as efficiency, effectiveness, expedition behavior, or worse, quizzes,” Dr. Remmiz, head of the OLP told IIT.
“Imagine quinzees shaped like the Trojan Horse, Quinzees three stories tall with space for an art gallery inside and improved social distancing, Quinzees shaped like roses, George Washington, Julius Caesar. The possibilities are endless as we aim to finally make the OLP feel like the rest of the curriculum,” Remmiz added on the subject of what he wants student groups to build this year.
Several seminar classes in the backcountry are also being planned for this year’s winter trip, with the goal, according to OLP official Kristin Milligan, of “making the trip just like a week in the classroom at WCC,” with introductory Euclid, Humanities, Philosophy, and Theology classes for the freshmen on the trip. “What could be a better integration nugget,” she added, “than making the week just like any other with homework, long readings, and seminar classes with quote ID quizzes, but in the backcountry?”