| Day Hikes Day hikes are a safe, easy way to gain the skills you will need to stay safe in the wild--all while learning about the natural and social history of the area. You will learn about the 10 Essentials, map and compass, trip planning, risk management, and staying found. Your Guide will lend you a kit with some of the Ten Essentials, and you will hike +/- 7 miles while learning about Olympic National Park. Trips do not leave every day, so Reserve Your Spot Today! |
Backpacking Backpacking sweeps the backpacker into the wild world of wilderness with all its grandeur and intensity. Backpackers can hike for almost as many days and almost as far as they want: for example, from Staircase in the southeast corner of the park to the Grand Valley in the northeast, from the Dosewallips in the east to Quinault in the west, or from Elwah in the north to Sol Duc in the west. Consider these routes for your ultimate wildnerness experience. Then Reserve Your Spot! |
| Leave No Trace (LNT) Trainings Leave No Trace is the national standard for outdoor recreation ethics from a conservation perspective. The Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics has established two main basic trainings in LNT: Awareness Workshops and Trainer Courses. Awareness Workshops last only a couple hours and offer little or no outdoor training. Trainer Courses are an intensive overnight experience with some backpacking. Reserve Your Spot for the course that's right for you. |
Scouting Guide and owner Jason Bausher is an Eagle Scout, Vigil Honor recipient, and is Wood Badge-trained. He can advise your troop about 50-miler hikes, the Leave No Trace Awareness Award, and merit badges such as Hiking, Backpacking, Camping, and Climbing. Jason can also serve as a liaison with the National Park Service to organize work parties or service projects in Olympic National Park. PLUS: Grays Harbor Boy Scouts receive FREE TRAININGS! Reserve Time for Your Program. |
| Service Tourism on the Olympic Peninsula will only last if we work to conserve the resource by doing trailwork, raising money for political action, and by teaching wildness to the generation to whom we hand over the earth. Sign Up Today to do or give what you can for the preservation of our children's earth. Where are your talents? Clearing trails? Educating National Park visitors about Leave No Trace ethics and practices? Raising money from friends, family, and business associates? Leading Boy or Girl Scouts? YOU CAN HELP!!! |
Mountain Seminars Do the mountains, rivers, and glaciers of Olympic National Park merely form one big playground, or is wilderness essential to our Being as embodied Beings in the world? Jason Bausher works on questions such as this in his environmental philosophy, and he shares his research in mountain seminars. He received his master's degree in theology from Yale University and is finishing an M.A. while in a doctoral program in philosophy. Check out a few of the seminars. Don't see your burning "big questions" being asked on this list? Email Olympic Mountain School for a custom program. |
Examples of 2006 Seminars Offered by
Jason Bausher, MAR
See also Jason Bausher's PHILOSOPHY OF WILDNESS for seminar topics.
Scheduling Options:
1. Short Evening Discussions
• Short list of readings listed on-line and with registration materials.
• No assumption of prior exposure to readings.
• Bibliography distributed for further reading.
2. One Day On-Campus Lectures/Discussions
• Longer list of readings listed on-line and with registration materials.
• Reading selections for discussion distributed as Course Packet.
3. Overnight Camping Two-Day Lectures/Discussions
• Longest list of readings listed on-line and with registration materials.
• Reading selections for discussion distributed as Course Packet.
• Time distributed between short lessons in LNT (always necessary) and camping skills (if necessary), teaching curriculum, and allowing for solitary time in contemplation.
1. “Olympic Bacchanalia”
Henry David Thoreau and John Muir promoted “wildness,” but the ancient Greek god Bacchus invented it. This seminar will show how Bacchus brought his followers back to nature and away from the city, and we will explore whether wildness is a category of chaos or form of rationality in its highest form. We will explore Bacchus myths, the history of Bacchanalian reveling, death and rebirth, the role of Maenads and satyrs, and the alienation between mountain and city.
2. “Mountain Spirituality”
Seeing mountain landscapes in many of the world's major religions, we will explore reasons for their significance. We will begin with their beauty as an expression of a cosmic structure. We will quickly move on to showing that human fascination with mountains is most intense in the personal struggles unfolding amidst the heather and ice of their higher reaches. Whether religious or anti-religious, we will see how mountains challenge our conceptions of Spirit.
3. “Finding a Self in the Mountains”
The Self is paradoxically snuffed in our time of the Individual. This seminar will look briefly at the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, and Adam Smith to see the chains worn by individuals today. We will see in this seminar how mountains can liberate us from these chains by allowing us to return momentarily to natural laws from which a Self may be born—a natural Self that is nothing less than Spirit.
4. “Wildness and Wilderness”
Wilderness is a place, and wildness is the way this place is. This seminar will consider writings from Henry Thoreau, John Muir, F.W.J. Schelling, and Euripides' Bacchae to see what we mean when we talk about wildness as a “way” of being in the world. We will examine whether wildness is really a crass anarchism, and we will find an order in chaos if wildness is something more than this. We will see that wildlife do not monopolize wild living.
5. “Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir”
The Spirit of German Romanticism jumped the Atlantic and became the conservation movement in the nineteenth century. This seminar will look briefly at German Romanticism in J.W. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and F.W.J. Schelling to show how the idea of Spirit became the basis of holistic—or mystical—philosophy. We will then see how this Spirit offered the Americans a unifying theory wherein wildness animated all life and could ultimately save the world from itself.
6. “Wilderness Romanticism”
Wilderness was a glorious place for writers in the nineteenth century. This seminar will look at nature in the writings of William Wordsworth, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and F.W.J. Schelling to see their revolutionary return to the wild life of the world. We will see how their literary and philosophical contributions can be applied today to our relationship with our natural world.
7. “Ancient Natural Philosophies”
Nature was alive for human beings until the “disenchantment of the world” during the Enlightenment. This seminar will examine Heraclitus and other ancient philosophers to show how human beings interpreted their living world until the “age of reason.” We will explore ways of re-enchanting the world in the age of reason by returning to fire, water, air, and earth.
8. “Biophilia: Loving Life”
Loving life should be presupposed in a living world. Yet thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Norman Brown, and Herbert Marcuse have argued that the death-drive (Thanatos) is conquering the life-drive (Eros) in our time. This seminar will see what these thinkers mean by these drives and what the natural world can tell us about restoring life in a dying world.
9. “Mountains Mysticism”
Mystics have ascended mountains for as long as they have been ascending to the Absolute or God. Whatever one calls this “higher power,” it resembles mountains. St. Anselm of Canterbury, for example, described God as “greater than which nothing can be thought,” and mountains come close to this in the realm of human experience. This seminar will explore the writings of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Euripides' Bacchae, and Meister Eckhart.
10. “Freedom of the Hills”
Freedom is said to be offered today by governments, but people find a much different freedom in the hills far away from state and society. This seminar will touch briefly upon the writings of Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Hobbes, J.J. Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant to explore the idea of freedom. We will then see how experiences in mountains nourish freedom through wildness.
11. “Willi Unsoeld on Mysticism, Morality and Mountains”
Pacific Northwest mountaineering pioneer Willi Unsoeld epitomized wildness in his life and carried his mysticism up Everest and through life. This seminar will explore Unsoeld's mysticism in his doctoral dissertation on morality and mysticism in Henri Bergson. We will see how Unsoeld's academic work on mysticism can be seen in his wildness, and that his life demonstrates that wildness requires mysticism.
