Outdoor Learning

Alumni, Arches

The new PacTrail program turns the Northwest wilderness into a living classroom.

Grayson Shearer ’25 grew up backpacking near his hometown of Denver, and by the time he arrived for his first year at Puget Sound, there wasn’t much he hadn’t experienced on a trail. So when Shearer heard from a friend last spring about the university’s Pacific Trail Program, it wasn’t so much the challenge that appealed to him as it was the company.

“It seemed super fun and affordable, but for me, the biggest thing was the social aspect,” says Shearer, a senior majoring in communication studies. “Being with a group of people, specifically people I had never met before, it was really cool to get out there and share this totally new experience.”

Shearer was part of a small party of students, alumni, and staff who ventured into the wilds of Oregon and Washington in May for the second expedition of the PacTrail Program. Established in 2023, the program—which contributes to fulfilling students’ experiential learning requirement—was conceived by Mike Pastore, the university registrar, as a sort of domestic parallel to the university’s Pacific Rim Study Abroad Program. Where the PacRim Program takes a group of Puget Sound students to Asia, PacTrail offers a somewhat more accessible option that nonetheless promises meaningful impact.

Hannah Robideaux ’17, then the program coordinator for the university’s Sound Policy Institute, designed and led the inaugural two-week excursion, which involved hiking on the Olympic coast and ended with a climb up Mount St. Helens. Robideaux’s successor at the Sound Policy Institute, Sarah Petrillo ’19, took over PacTrail and led this year’s course, which aligns with the institute’s mission of using experiential learning to more effectively convey environmental policy issues. (Institute director Dan Sherman joined the backpacking portion to lead policy discussions.) “We want to help students understand that these places where we’re recreating are directly connected to policies that have been put in place—that’s what makes them accessible to us,” Petrillo says.

When the students gathered on campus ahead of the expedition this past May, such bigger-picture issues were addressed alongside more practical concerns: packing, meal planning, route navigation, map-reading—even, Petrillo says, “a little bit of wilderness medicine.” (Grayson, the experienced outdoors person, appreciated the guidance on how to fix splints and tourniquets on the trail.)

The group’s small size—three students and an alum took part this year—allowed Petrillo to tailor the trip to students’ specific interests, including geology and botany: “We spent a lot of time discussing rocks, and we stopped a lot to look at and identify plants.” (Organizers hope to expand the program to include more students and alumni next year and beyond.)

Maybe most valuably, those first two days of on-campus prep time also provided an opportunity for the group members to get to know each other. Says Shearer: “It was a really good chance to connect with these people I’d be spending all this time with.” With the virtual ice broken—more on the literal ice in a second—the group hit the road for five days of backpacking in the Columbia River Gorge. For Shearer, a trail veteran of the Rockies, the going was “a little slower paced than I’m used to, but really fun, and super scenic—one of the most beautiful trails I’ve ever been on.”

The waterfalls, narrow hillside passes, and lush valleys of the backpacking stint gave way in the second week to a climb up Mount St. Helens. Two more alumni—Ayden Bolin ’20 and Mariana Sanchez Castillo ’20— joined the group for the climb. Shearer describes the challenge as “something that should definitely not be taken lightly.” But, he adds, “This program showed that if you can walk three miles, you can climb Mount St. Helens with the right people.” The right people in this case included Carson Lyness Byrne ’16, a mountaineering guide from Oregon who walked the group through essential details (like how to use an ice axe) and paced them on the climb. Says Petrillo: “She’s a lot of the reason we all made it to the top.”

It was very much a group effort, of course, and the communal vibe was, for Petrillo, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the course. “You never know how much students are going to dig into it, so it really warmed my heart to see them genuinely take ownership of the program and fully show up for it,” she says. Multiple such moments stick out: The student who took the lead as the mountain’s packed snow began to make climbing difficult, kicking steps into the snow for her group mates to follow, or the student—Shearer, in this case— who hung back with a fellow climber whose boots lacked microspikes and helped ensure a safe ascent.

“He knew if he helped out, we’d all make it to the top—he had the greater good of the group and the mission in mind,” Petrillo says. “I think in the outdoors, people’s true colors really show when things get tough. I loved seeing the students grow in their leadership, take on those challenges, and excel.”