Five weeks before endurance cyclist Lael Wilcox ’08 began the Tour Divide—a 2,700-mile bicycle race crisscrossing the Continental Divide from Canada to New Mexico—she warmed up by riding nearly 4,000 miles from her Tucson, Ariz., home to the race start.
The 2023 Tour Divide, held last June, was her fifth, and she completed it in 16 days, 20 hours, 17 minutes. She won the women’s division and finished 13th overall.
When Shannon Hughes ’92 and Karen Moore Sales ’92 were students at Puget Sound in the late 1980s, they knew of each other, but they weren’t much more than acquaintances. They were both interested in business careers, but Hughes majored in business administration and Sales was in the Business Leadership Program. They both lived in Anderson/Langdon Hall, but Hughes was on the basement floor and Sales was on the second. They were both in sororities, but Hughes chose Pi Beta Phi while Sales opted for Alpha Phi. Today, each has only a vague memory of the other.
The idea seems quaint now, but in the early 20th century, going to a campus dance often meant picking up a “dance card” at the door. The small booklets gave the students—usually the women—a way of keeping track of the night’s dances and dance partners. The idea was to not dance with the same person all night long; instead, proper etiquette called for mingling.
The fading, centuries-old murals on the walls of churches around the Yucatán Peninsula reflect the influence of the Europeans who landed on its shores in the 16th century. It seems only logical to assume that the images were created by the Europeans, whose arrival transformed the entire hemisphere—but that assumption is actually incorrect.
Jeffrey J. Matthews knows leadership. As the George F. Jewett Distinguished Professor in the School of Business and Leadership, he has spent chunks of his career digging into the subject. And, as a historian, he’s also not afraid to call it as he sees it. His new book, Generals and Admirals, Criminals and Crooks: Dishonorable Leadership in the U.S. Military (Notre Dame Press, 2023), is an investigative meditation on military leadership gone wrong—a tour through hiccups, eruptions, and bad judgment that winds through Gen.
For Abby Steward ’25, “glamping” was as close as her family ever got to outdoor adventure during her childhood in Oregon. So when her summer research at Puget Sound took her not only out into the woods to camp for 10 straight days, but 60 feet up into the canopy of bigleaf maples, “it really tested my capabilities,” Steward says. “I was thrown into something completely new. Being able to witness what my body could do in climbing that many trees felt amazing.”
The Washington State Supreme Court went on the road in September, setting up shop on the Puget Sound campus for two days. It was the third visit to campus for the state’s highest court; justices made similar visits in 2013 and 2017.
“We don’t just hear cases—we also go to classes, answer questions, and learn from the questions that that are asked to us,” says Justice Susan Owens, who co-chairs the Traveling Court Committee. “Traveling court allows a wide variety of people who want to know more about the justice system to see it at no expense.”
“They get so confused sometimes when they see that it’s a woman who’s doing this,” Lily Godwin ’26 said a couple months back. She was doing a TV interview with local station KING5 about an accomplishment like no other— becoming the first woman to make an unassisted tackle in NCAA football history.
Don Scott ’91 came to Puget Sound as a student without having seen the campus before. “The fall of my senior year, an admission counselor from the university visited my high school in Great Falls, Mont.,” he recalls. “I absolutely fell in love with everything that she had to say. Puget Sound was a stretch school for me, but it all came together—and those four years were a truly transformational experience for me.”
