On the Road with “Van” Halen
Participants in Lehigh's traveling Field Camp come as students but leave as professionals.
Life on the road with legendary rock group Van Halen in the 1980s was characterized by hedonistic excesses and imperious contract demands—like insisting that all of the brown M&Ms be removed from bowls of the candy backstage.
For participants in the department of Earth and environmental sciences annual traveling Field Camp, where students visit and collect data or document observations in 10 national parks—including Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the Badlands—life on the road is much more tame, but no less fun and rewarding.
Students travel across the country in a caravan of assigned vans: Van One, Van Two, and so on. After a few days, the students stop responding to their call signs on the radio and instead come up with their own names for their vans.
On one of the trips, one of the vans became “Van Halen.”
For associate professor and Field Camp Director Steve Peters, that's part of what makes the fun and challenging experience, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, so unique.
“The names were all pretty clever,” Peters said. “But those students that are all in one van become incredibly tightly bonded during the trip, and many keep in touch with each other after the camp is over.”
An EES Tradition
The Lehigh University Field Camp was conceived in 1975 by the late professor Ed Evenson, who directed it for 30 years. Today, Peters directs the camp with the help of professor Frank Pazzaglia, as well as graduate students.
The camp begins in early summer, returning to the Lehigh Valley before the 4th of July. It consists of several multi-day, multi-partner field projects where students make and record field observations, discern field relationships, and learn the concepts of geological mapping—all with an eye towards development as a professional earth scientist.
Students pay a fee to participate in the field camp, which covers everything—tuition, access fees, lodging, travel, and food—but there is financial support available.
“One of the things we have done over the years is create a fund that relies on donations from our generous alumni,” Peters said. “The alumni have donated money every year; and it's phenomenal, because the students they're enabling to go really value and appreciate their experience.”
During the two weeks before the trip, students prepare pre-visit materials for the projects at each of the field sites, review analytical approaches, and develop strategies for each project. Peters said that these steps closely follow how a professional would prepare for visiting a field site.
“Lehigh was a pioneer in experiential education,” Peters said. “We realized early on that having students actually do things in a long form, in contrast to a three-hour lab, is a much different, immersive experience.”
“If you look at our syllabus, we try to pack in as much learning as possible,” Peters added. “Not just with lessons, but things that you see and experience, and how those all interact in the real world—that's something that's hard to do in a lab.”
For example, on day two the field camp caravan pulls into Baraboo, Wisconsin, known for the Baraboo Syncline—a type of rock fold formed by plate tectonics.
“A long time ago, the North American continent was flooded by oceans, and you see the erosional beach environment preserved in the rocks, places where they were exposed and weathering,” Peters said. “We can actually see that incident in time, preserved in the geologic record.”
“You can see it in Wisconsin, but also in Wyoming, and in lots of different places,” Peters added. “After students have been introduced to it a couple times, they start noticing it wherever it occurs—in fact, there is a comparable spot on top of South Mountain on the Lehigh campus, but it is covered by a forest and is difficult to see today.” It can be seen along the Saucon Valley Rail Trail where Pazzaglia helped install an interpretive sign.
“Lehigh was a pioneer in experiential education. We realized early on that having students actually do things in a long form, in contrast to a three-hour lab, is a much different, immersive experience.”
In addition to the learning of the ropes of the Earth and environmental sciences professions that take place every year during Field Camp, Peters emphasizes that research has always been woven into its fabric.
“One of the teaching assistants we’ve had for the last two years, Sedona Boyle ’24, stayed out west with a field assistant to complete her master’s degree after this year’s Field Camp,” Peters said.
“This year we also visited a field site in Wind River Canyon of a doctoral student of mine, Zhihong Huang ’25,” Peters adds, “who had a paper published last year on observations that we made with field camp students.”
The Field Camp experience also emphasizes a sense of scale. Most travel that people do these days is air travel. When they’re done, they get back on the plane and fly home, never realizing how far away everything is, or how long it actually takes to get somewhere by other means.
“We drive from Pennsylvania all the way to Idaho and back, and you actually get to see the landscape change,” Peters said. “We first go from the Lehigh Valley onto the Allegheny plateau, and when you do that, you're changing into a different geomorphic province, so you'll notice that the rivers are dissected more, but the top surface is much flatter.”
“And then you drop down into Ohio, which is so unbelievably flat,” Peters added, “and that’s because it's an old lake bottom that was all underwater during glacial periods.”
An Immersion in Fieldwork
Another unique thing about Lehigh’s Field Camp is that the traveling troupe actually camps the entire time, rather than staying in hotels.
“We make base camps and students sleep in tents,” Peters said. “We pick places where there's good support resources, so every place has bathrooms, running water, stuff like that. But there are no structures—we make all of that ourselves.”
All the camp’s food provisions and scientific equipment for the trip are carried in a giant Penske Truck, which makes up the tail end of the van caravan.
“We have a kitchen, and we have a solar panel-powered power system that keeps refrigerators running, because we transport a lot of food,” Peters said. “The students tell us they eat better on field camp than they do at any other point in their young lives.”
While the food may be good, camping is something that can be daunting for some students.
“This past year when we left Yellowstone on the last day of camp, we got hit with a mid-June snowstorm,” Peters said. “All the students’ tents had about half an inch of snow on them, and it was a rough, cold morning.
“But we got everybody warmed up, fed them, and got on our way back to Lehigh,” Peters added. “And they did great at it—they were laughing and having a good time. Some of the people who have never camped before turned out to be really strong in ways they never knew, and that can be a real empowering experience.”
For Peters, the Field Camp isn’t just a camping trip that has science. It's much more of a science trip that also incorporates the best of a liberal arts education, which includes elements of personal growth and even cultural exploration.
“Students come back with some skills that are very hard to teach,” Peters said. “One of them is autonomy: they're responsible for packing lunch, keeping themselves fed and hydrated. We give them everything they need to succeed, but they have to choose to do so.”
While the unofficial motto of Field Camp may be that participants come as students but leave as professionals, it also affords them the chance to experience the cultural history of the places they visit.
“We go to the Badlands, we go to Devils Tower, we go to Yellowstone where students see Old Faithful—all of this great geology and geoscience,” Peters said. “In doing so, we experience the same landscape appreciated by native peoples for more than 10,000 years.
“We cross the Mississippi River, we cross the Missouri River, we stop at one of the Lewis and Clark encampments where there's a giant statue honoring indigenous peoples —there's so many phenomenal cultural things that we do along the way to place everything in context.”