Dunbar’s introsem plunges into past polar expeditions

On a brisk March day in the Sierra Nevada, a handful of Stanford students were scrambling to find shelter. They had no tents and no professional wilderness training aside from what they’d read in books — only piles of snow, pine trees and plummeting temperatures.

Most people would be terrified to be caught in this situation, but not those in Rob Dunbar’s class, “The Worst Journey in the World.” This was the kind of scenario they’d studied all quarter.

Dunbar, a W.M. Keck Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, combined his work as a scientist and oceanographer, work in Antarctica and fascination with the writings of polar explorers into an introductory seminar that examined past exploration journeys to both poles and the lives of the brave explorers who endured them.

“The idea for this class came from realizing that the stories of the polar explorers provide great insights into polar environmental science as well as human responses under conditions of great stress,” Dunbar wrote in an email to The Daily.

Dunbar wanted his class to get a first-hand taste of the hardships the explorers of the past had faced and took his students on a weekend-long camping trip to the Sierra Nevada.

The seminar, which has run every second year since 1999, examined past polar explorations through journal entries of famous polar explorers. These pieces depicted both the successes and occasionally graphic hardships of early exploration. From killing their own sled dogs for food to sucking on their leather bootstraps for nourishment, the students learned how these intrepid explorers risked everything for the sake of discovery.

“Sometimes when I would read through the journals it seemed like it couldn’t possibly happen in reality, some things seemed so far fetched,” said Sara Ramsey ‘14. “The explorers went through so much.”

The featured trip had originally been planned for an earlier date, but due to heavy snowstorms was postponed until the weekend before dead week. The dogs they planned to go sledding with could not mush through the approximately 10 feet of fresh powder that accumulated from the storms.

On the trip, students went dog sledding, cross-country skiing and they made and slept in their own snow shelter.

“In the evening when we built [the snow shelter], you could sit up in it . . . it was probably the height of three and a half, four feet and then the snow sunk overnight . . . so we woke up and the ceiling at the entrance was about a foot and a half about the ground so it was kind of claustrophobic,” said Halsey Hoster ‘14. Yet despite the sinking, Hoster said the makeshift accommodations were “surprisingly comfortable.”

While the Stanford trip was only a glimpse into the challenges that the polar explorers of the past endured in reality, the overnight journey put the course material into perspective.

“It’s not that cold in the Sierras, especially in early March and the geography and light patterns and temperatures . . . stuff like that, obviously we couldn’t experience but in terms of making sure you’re staying warm, staying dry, trying to travel through snow I thought that was definitely a good experience,” Hoster said.

Ramsey agreed.

“[The class] gave me a good sense of what it would be like before all of the technology,” he said. “I think it would be a completely different experience now.”

While the camping trip was a big component of the course, the everyday class was centered more on understanding the travails of the explorers through written accounts and discussion.

According to students, Dunbar instilled a genuine interest in the subject matter through his efforts to “know students on a personal level.” Whether it was inviting them over to his home for a home-cooked meal, telling personal stories or showing a genuine desire to discover the students’ thoughts on the reading, Dunbar made a classroom effort to inspire a passion not only for the environment but also for the plight of explorers.

“I’d say I most want students to try to put themselves into the world of the polar explorer, to try to understand why people did what they did, what drove them to undergo such hardships,” Dunbar said.

According to Ramsey, he succeeded.

“He is pretty much the most epic professor I’ve had so far,” she said.