Course code:

HS4042

Level:

MA - Intermediate/Advanced

Lab fee:

1500

Typically offered:

Upon occasion

The spectacular range of habitats between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts has generated some of the most significant “place-based” writing within American literature.

In this intensive field-based course students will be required to read a range of materials dealing with key places, people, and events in the western landscape during the summer prior to the formal start of the course. The class will then convene in California and begin a trek eastwards into the Great Basin Desert, south to the Carson/Iceberg Wilderness, Yosemite, the Hetch Hetchy Valley and Mono Lake, and then finally southeastward across the Sonoran desert to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where students and faculty will participate in a conference celebrating the first 50 years of the Wilderness Act.

Readings will include work by Muir, Didion, Steinbeck, and Fremont. Evaluation will consist of class participation, a series of essays and journal essays, and a final term paper that will be completed following the end of the field portion of the course. This course will be integrated with and requires co-enrollment in Ecology and Natural History of the American West, and Wilderness in the West.

 

View photos from the Great West program on Instagram.

Prerequisites:

Permission of instructor; camping/backpacking ability.

Always visit the Registrar's Office for the official course catalog and schedules.