It’s easy to think of the Outing Club as a bunch of tie-dyed, Birkenstock-clad outdoorsy folk that like to gather around the campfire, hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” But Matt Butler, the co-president of the club, wants to put an end to that faulty notion.
“That’s a common misconception about the club — that we’re all a bunch of hippies,” Butler, a senior in elementary education, said. “We have every kind of member — people who have never climbed before to people who climb every weekend, people who are just learning to roll to people who kayak down class V rivers regularly.
Club co-president Katherine Chesnutt, a senior in science education, said the club provides unique athletic opportunities.
“My favorite thing about the Outing Club is that we get these crazy weird kids that are just these wonderful people,” Chesnutt said. “We don’t necessarily get the most athletic kids because we’re not the baseball club or the basketball club, but we’re doing all these extreme sports, and even if you’re not good at it, you’re doing it.”
Recently, the club has been limited to clinics and training sessions because, as Butler put it, the winter weather “isn’t exactly ideal for outdoor pursuits.” Bryan Triebert, a graduate student in computer engineering who will be leading a trip next weekend, shares Butler’s concern.
“Hiking in the winter — well, sometimes we call it a ‘death march,'” Triebert said. “There will sometimes be a person who forgets to put their boots in their sleeping bag, and they’ll wake up and their boots will be frozen solid. For them, the first hour or so of hiking is not pleasant.”
Butler said the club’s schedule is about to heat up.
“When the weather warms up a little bit, we’re going to try and take more trips,” Butler said. “We do kayaking trips, backpacking trips, climbing trips, all kinds of trips.”
Past highlights include the club’s annual excursion up to the Gauley River Festival in West Virginia, the biggest whitewater festival in the world. Triebert named a recent trip to the Gulf of Mexico as his favorite Outing Club experience.
“For spring break a few years back, we went to an island off the coast of Florida,” Triebert said. “Basically, it’s a state park where you can pay a ferry to take you over, and then you schedule when you want them to come pick you up. We packed up a lot of food, borrowed some cars and went down there. They had running water and outhouses, but the rest was up to us. We traveled all over the island and saw everything from alligators to manatees and dolphins — it was a blast.”
The trips are student-led and free to participants, as the club’s annual dues pay for clinics and most other expenditures. The presidents are even working on getting their gas covered by Club Sports. However, there are a few other factors standing in between the members and the river.
“As far as paddling goes, there isn’t a lot of water right now because of the drought, which is kind of a bummer,” Chesnutt said. “It’s just sort of a matter that the rivers around here run so sporadically that you sort of have to catch it when it’s running and catch it when you don’t have homework. It becomes sort of a dilemma.”
However, when the water level rises, the Outing Club will be waiting with its rafts and oars. Spring climbing trips to Pilot Mountain, north of Winston-Salem, and flat-water canoeing on Jordan Lake or Falls Lake are already on the agenda.
“At the philosophical level, you always come out learning a lot more about yourself and what’s going on in the world,” Triebert said. “At the literal level, you just want to get up the mountain and get out of town for a little while.”
