Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell how they got here and what happened once they did, and every story is different. This is Our Whitman, My Story.
My name is Thomas McElfresh, I'm from Duvall, Washington and I'm a geology major.
I took a gap year before coming to Whitman, and then I ended up heading back down to San Diego in mid-April and hiking back home along the Pacific Crest Trail for the next 111 days or so before coming to Whitman for the first time. Hiking the trail was a profound experience. I think there is so much I could say about that, but I think the way that I like to summarize it is by a lot of times people will ask me what sort of profound and complicated and interesting things that I spent thinking about on trail and what sort of revelations I had. And I think for me a lot of that is understandable, but also sort of ironic. I think I spent a lot of time thinking about nothing and that might look like if I was hungry, what I was going to eat, where I was going to sleep that night, where was water, where were my friends, what the weather was feeling like. And I think in that very nature, had 111 days of thinking of things that are just very vital to your own well-being was the most profound and incredible part of that. Was just spending that long engaged with how you were feeling.
The Outdoor Program at Whitman is a lovely place with lovely people. They spend a lot of time and energy creating activities mainly on the outdoors, but just I think having the main goal of bringing people together to connect in a space that might feel a little bit more a foreign to some people, but I think that there's a very rich power in connecting people through the outdoors as a space and a setting for that. And I think that's their goal, to seek the enthusiasm from people to get outside and explore around Walla Walla and the greater area. Anyone can sign up for Outdoor Program trips and that's the really cool part. It's really inclusive and working to be even more so. And yeah, usually pretty small groups and that's really cool as well. You get a lot of time to connect with people in the outdoor space.
I spent one sort of early spring last year... No. 2022. Yeah, 2022. Late February did an ice climbing trip with the Outdoor Program, but I didn't really know many people on that trip, but ended up becoming really close with a few of them and it was amazing. It was kind of up near Bluewood, it's called the Weeping Wall eventually ice just coming off of it and got to just take tools up there and scramble up and come back late in the day. And honestly, the car ride was really fun. It was like an hour drive, but with people you don't know and still my friends.
You climb ice with specially designed tools to do so. It's kind of interesting because I spent a lot of time rock climbing and I've built up this level of trust and familiarity with my feet and skin on rock, but ice climbing is kind of removing every aspect of that. You have no nerves on the end of your tools or your crampons, and so you kind of have no idea when things are going to hold or pop. So it's slightly terrifying, but it's crazy to just kind of trust these little points in the ice, but they're pretty strong and I think that was cool. Building the trust for that and working upwards slowly.
Teaching someone to climb who has never climbed before is a weird backwards problem that I've been trying to figure out. I've realized that the very basic ways that I learned things have sort of dissolved into my being. A lot of things feel second nature, and so I've spent a lot of time trying to recall what helped me learn when I was beginning. And that in itself has been a cool experience. But I think just a lot of time on a lot of the basics. Especially when someone has never climbed before a lot of this equipment is Intimidating and you're kind of trusting people to hold your body weight with a little mental device and that's terrifying. But slowly building trust is good, so we spend a lot of time just looking at gear and becoming familiar over time. It's an 11 week course, so it takes a good amount of time.
I spent my fall semester of sophomore year on a program called Semester in the West. Semester in the West is probably one of the most radical ways to spend a semester of college. It's I think near 90 days of traveling around the Intermountain West camping and cooking with your friends and mostly spending time in conversation with environmental activists and Biologists and ecologists and authors and ranchers. The list goes on. I think really meeting these people in their line of work where they're at to see the conflicts and complications that they have to work through in their everyday life and for me that is one of the most important parts of Semester in the West was seeing how unbelievably complex some of these issues are. Like wolf conservation, but also talking with the rancher who's losing cattle to wolves. There's this very strong empathetic, I don't know, it's like you connect with these people that are enemies with the person that you just connected with the night before. It kind of wrenches your heart in a lot of ways, but you spend a lot of time writing about it and articulating your thoughts. You're kind of in the best classroom that you could ever have in the Slickrock Desert or tucked in the trees of Northern Oregon.
What I do for fun is things that make me feel the most, and I think I find a lot of that in the outdoor space and biking and whatever it is. Usually it's a mix of some sort of activity like biking or running and the outdoors is sort of what I live for and have fun doing, especially with friends, there's a lot of people here who want to do that too. So that's really exciting. And climbing is the same way a lot of time outside with friends doing some sort of physical activity.
I chose geology as my major, sort of as a function of how many geology classes I had taken, which I wasn't really planning to major in geology, but I think I took the classes that interested me the most. And when I had to choose by the end of my sophomore year, it looked like geology would probably be the easiest track, which works out for me because I am unbelievably stoked on geology and all of the classes I have taken in that field have been incredibly invigorating.
So the Geology Department, it honestly probably has the most amount of field trips per major than anything else, which makes sense. There's a lot of field applicability to geology that you can just go drive to see, mixed with just regular class field trips where we're driving an hour or so on Wednesdays to see either like Palouse Falls or something like that. They offer larger geology trips. For one, there's regional geology, which happens every fall and spring, which is four days somewhere in the Pacific Northwest kind of greater area within driving distance for four-day trip. And that's really cool because the entire geology department, usually like 30, 40 people, just camping for four days. All the professors come and kind of like a mix of everything I love to do.
There's also these spring break... Yeah, there's a lot of Spring break geology trips. My freshman year I did two weeks down in the Mojave Desert with Lyman just doing field geology and driving around with new friends and building a really close community on that. I think that's a defining factor of Whitman is a lot of small, really close communities that work together and that I get to see very frequently and feel seen by and effective part of.
I think my biggest hesitation in coming to Whitman was the location. I'd spent a lot of my time growing up near the mountains and not really open spaces, and I was going to go to college in a wheat field, which is the main reaction I think from a lot of people. But the thing that surprised me most about Whitman was the drive of the people around me to get out and explore regardless. And I think a lot of us ended up finding so much beauty and uniqueness in this place, and that's something that still surprises me is finding people who just really want to go out and learn new things and see new places. It feels like those experiences have led to my closest friends here.
I am Thomas McElfresh, and this has been Our Whitman, My Story.
There are more episodes of Our Whitman, My Story available right now wherever you get your podcasts. Music for this podcast provided by Big Joe, a band made up of Whitman students. For more information, go to whitman.edu/stories.