By Stacey Stowe

On a blue–chip August morning last summer, a day of cloudless skies and soft air, the sun–dappled road into Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk, Conn., was dotted with people, heads down, muttering under their breath.

The 31 men and women here were pacing, single file on the dirt road and stopping every few feet to scribble something on a paper. The uninitiated might have taken the scene for a poetry workshop or a therapy session. But alumni of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies would instantly recognize students who were calibrating their pace—that is, measuring their stride in meters to train the body to establish distance over a landscape, regardless of the terrain.

Since its inception, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has used a camping experience to provide incoming students with a foretaste of their life in the master’s program. During weeklong sessions at Great Mountain, Yale–Myers Forest and Beaver Ponds Park in New Haven, 97 students from 20 countries and ranging in age from 22 to 61 followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, engaging in rugged outdoor activities worthy of inclusion in an episode of the reality TV series, Survivor, as part of the Training Modules in Technical Skills, more popularly known as “Mods.”

While the students focused on learning the prosaic skills associated with land measurement, mapping, geographical information systems, plant identification and urban issues, the emphasis was on having fun, bonding and engaging, rather than competing with, each other—an approach, they came to discover, that is at once eminently practical and deeply rooted in the school’s culture..

At the camp in Great Mountain Forest, which straddles the line between the towns of Norfolk and Canaan, students slept either in yurts, tents or cabins that were set in a meadow. The sleeping quarters ring a rustic lodge, where students ate at long tables and relaxed by a fieldstone fireplace.

Earlier on that August morning, the students learned or fine–tuned how to use a compass. Then there were forays up a forested hillside to test the theory and practice of a pre–measured pace. In one small group, Murefu Barasa led the way, while Baihai Wu of China checked his course from several yards behind.

“Wave or jump up and down or something, so we can see you,” Wu shouted as Barasa grew increasingly camouflaged by brush and trees. Jack Yeh checked the distance to an established target to estimate the accuracy of their compass work. Others bemoaned if they were off–course, but with laughter punctuating the grumbles. Four dogs, unofficial mascots of the camp, were good–natured companions of the students.

“Everything has metaphorical value,” said Barry Harrison Muchnick, a Ph.D. candidate at F&ES who directed the Mod at Great Mountain Forest. “You encounter an obstacle. How do you maintain your line and get back on track?”

“The Mods are about building observational skills, but they are also about building a community,” said Harrison Muchnick. “And it’s a continuing community. If you run into somebody who graduated 20 years ago, they’ve run through the program.”

The students honed orienteering skills on compass courses prepared by Starling Childs ’80, whose family foundation operates more than 6,000 acres of Great Mountain Forest. The Childs family donated the seven–acre campsite and buildings to Yale in 1940. Childs’ grandfather and namesake, Starling Winston Childs, Class of 1891, bought the heavily cut–over property for 10 or 20 cents an acre in 1909—land that had once provided charcoal to the hungry blast furnaces in the area.

The students take pride in thinking of themselves as woodsy, wild heathen, which was aptly expressed in a felt banner that hung over a doorway in the camp’s lodge, bearing the caustic summary judgment of a visiting preacher to a local colony of charcoal miners in the 1800s—A hamlet of heathens living in intellectual, moral, and spiritual darkness—lending a raffish air to the otherwise cozy room that contains a fireplace, piano and moose head jutting forlornly from a wall.

Childs acknowledged that the means of measuring a landscape for the purpose of surveying a forest are far more sophisticated today with global positioning systems and even hip–chains, a measuring tape–like device, but he takes pride in the original method.

“You are literally and figuratively following in the footsteps of your predecessors,” he said.

Until 1968, students spent 10 weeks on summer Mods. The program was shortened to meet the realities of students who needed more time in the summer to earn tuition money, but the three weeks cements friendships in and out of the woods. Meal time in the dining hall gave the impression that the students knew each other for one year instead of one week. The cache of 20– to 40–something students who hopped over prickly berry bushes and fallen tree limbs, sat at rectory tables in the barebones lodge, eating fare like tacos or pasta casseroles, deep in conversation.

After lunch, a three–hour orientation involved clambering over rocky cliffs, through gorse bush and among shoulder–high ferns to reach five, pre–measured points. The exercise was intended to push the students out of their comfort zone. Teams of five to six students were dropped off many miles from the lodge, Survivor–like, in deeply forested land, where there were no faculty members within earshot. “There was no turning back until one’s destination was reached,” said Harrison Muchnick. “It forced the students to work as a team.”

Before heading out, the students took a biodiversity inventory of the terrain that they would hike. They plotted out the distance and direction of the route using an aerial map that would allow them to anticipate and predict terrain and vegetative changes of the area—its forest, open farms, dams and streams, the same ones they would be crossing. They used a field stereoscope to generate a two–dimensional image out of two sequential photographs. It is a technique used by the United States Geological Survey to establish a baseline for creating three–dimensional topographical maps that allow for incorporating changes to a landscape over time. The point of the exercise is to convey to the students that a map is a dynamic document, the result of an interaction between a landscape and an interpretive perspective, Harrison Muchnick explained.

They were also given routes and distances to target sites, routes that could be traced on the aerial photos, explained Ariana Bain, as she peered intently at black and white photos of Sterling Forest and its rocky outcroppings and swamps.

“A lot of the students aren’t from New England and aren’t going to know a hemlock or pine or that funny stuff that is everywhere—Mountain laurel,” Childs said, as he worked with students in the classroom along with Harrison Muchnick.

For their trek, the students were dropped off, as planned, in the middle of nowhere on a course, but they wasted little time heading into the trail–less woods.

Ankle deep in a mushy bog, Tara Pathasarathy laughed and said, “Does anyone know where we are?”

Throughout the three–hour hike, it was an oft literal but usually rhetorical question. Difficulties abounded. The terrain was often steep and wet. Calculating distances to target sites without maps seemed possible in the classroom, but in heavily forested land, it was challenging.

Helen Chabot, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of plant and tree species, was stung at least a dozen times by honey bees, but she never complained. J.F. Thye stopped the group several times to check on her. Everyone held a branch, warned each other about poison ivy and laughed and remained good–natured throughout the muddy, buggy adventure. Walking through chest–high ferns, smelling the piney air and reaching a rocky summit that offered a glimpse of the Berkshires were among the rewards.

Later in the evening, students did cannonballs off of an inflatable raft in the middle of Norfolk’s private Tobey Pond, while others swam languidly in the silky water. Afterward, there was a cold Rolling Rock on the porch supplied by some blithe–spirited student. A class on celestial navigation was held before a bonfire ended the day.

The intangible reward for summer Mods is meeting each other outside of the classroom and exams, in the woods, around a simple wooden table or in the water.

As Sarah Charlop–Powers said, “It’s a really good idea to start the academic year with this knowledge base. I knew about the Mods when I applied, and thought they sounded really fun. I was right.”