Adirondack Park Archive

Even though I’ve been done with the semester for a couple weeks already, I can still feel the intensity of finals week around Houghton. I feel bad when people ask me how my week looks and I have to say “Er…I’m…actually done, and don’t have any finals.”

The past few weeks haven’t been too eventful, but while being back on main campus one of my friends had a coffeehouse, and it was quite a bit of fun.

Coffeehouses are held in the coffeeshop (surprise!), Java 101, located in the basement of the campus center. Any student can sign up to do one, and the turnouts are usually quite good. Anyhow, since I tagged this post with the tag “Adirondack Park”, I guess I’ll give you guys another …

For other Houghton students, that is. The Star Lake program is actually over and done with, as we finished over a week ago and have a almost-two-months-break ahead of us. I still have a couple papers to finish, but other than that I’m done! It’s quite exciting.

There’s plenty of stuff that we did up at Star Lake that I did not have that much time to blog about earlier, so I’ll be attempting to make up for some of it while I’m on break and not doing anything.

This is a picture I took through the car window — effectively polarizing it, if you were wondering about the ridiculous colors — while we were coming back from a field trip …

So, we’ve gotten through the leaf-peeping season and moved onto winter. We had our first snow awhile ago, and it’s getting pretty cold. But fall up here is amazing. Example:

Yeah. I like it.
We’ve been keeping busy as well. We went to the Watertown Zoo a couple days ago, and it was freeeeezing. It’s gotta be cold if you’re the only people at the zoo. After that, we went ice-skating, which was quite a bit of fun as well. Yes, we have a lot of free time up here. No, I don’t mind. Other than our regular courses, I’m also doing an independent studies in photography, so that gives me quite a bit of time to go …

…from the midsemester break and camping trip, that is. We had most of last week off, and a bunch of us headed back to Houghton from Star Lake for homecoming. It’s the only break we get, but our semester ends a month early. It was nice to visit and catch up with friends, some of which I hadn’t seen for almost a year, because they were abroad last spring. We had our camping trip from this Wednesday to Friday. We went out into the Five Ponds Wilderness, and it was great, except for the weather. Which, by the way, plays a significant part of camping trips. Ok, so we still had lots of fun, but it was ridiculously wet and cold. Hence, I didn’t even bother trying to …

So first of all, my profile picture is really ugly, and I hate it.

But mainly, this blog is going to be about the Adirondack Park Star Lake program and what we do here. A few days ago we just got back from Alaska. We spent two weeks up there, and it was absolutely fantastic. I’d upload more photos, but it would take up the entire interface of the blog, so I’ll refrain from doing so. My Flickr website will have the rest of the Alaska photos sometime in the future, though, so feel free to check it out. Here’s a sea otter we saw from the ferry.

We also saw a lot of grizzly bears, moose, bald eagles, …