Paddler, Climber, 4-term Planner
THE College course catalogue encourages students "to make imaginative use of the flexibility of the four-term system in planning their undergraduate programs." Ginger Cox '77 takes the admonition seriously, having spent nearly half of her Dartmouth career enrolled in a variety of off-campus programs. "The possibilities for off-campus study attracted me to Dartmouth in the first place," she explains, "but I've tried, while I've been here, to get involved in the activities and courses that are not available any place else. I've also tried to take advantage of other opportunities not available at Dartmouth."
After the spring term of her freshman year, during which she participated in Dartmouth Outward Bound's first Living and Learning Term (an on-campus program combining a group-living experience, academic courses, and outdoor education), Cox went to Greenland for the summer to work on a research project funded by a Richard King Mellon Foundation grant for environmental study. She and a partner, Thom Snowman '74, carried out a time-lapse photographic study of the Greenland peregrine falcons, one of the few remaining healthy pop- ulations of an endangered species suffering, in other locations, from the effects of contamination by DDT.
Cox and Snowman set up their base camp, a tent in the middle of the tundra, 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle and about ten miles from Sondrestrom Air Force Base, where they went for weekly supplies. Camped on the edge of a fjord which stretched nearly 90 miles in from the western coast, they could look out over the Greenland ice cap. The nests they were photographing were located about 18 miles from their camp and sometimes they saved nine miles of walking by paddling a kayak nine miles down the fjord.
Movie cameras equipped to expose one frame of film every minute, 24 hours a day, were aimed at two cliff aeries. "I went to Greenland partly because I knew how to rock climb," Cox says. Besides filming the nests, she and Snowman also banded some birds and collected beahvioral data by making over 200 hours of spotting-scope observations of the parent falcons while they were away from the nests. The only other time-lapse photographic study of a peregrine population had been done in Alaska, and one of the values of the Greenland study, which was part of a larger project in progress for several years, was that the 24 hours of daylight there permitted a thorough documentation of the healthy population's behavior.
That fall Cox went to Lund, Sweden, with a group of 16 Dartmouth students, sponsored by the College's Environmental Studies Program, to study Sweden's approach to environmental problems. In addition to taking Swedish language classes four hours a day, five days a week, as well as a course in the social and political consequences of environmental issues, a seminar comparing the CIA and the KGB. and a biology class which studied the quality of Swedish water resources, she began an independent study of 10,000 geese wintering on a nearby lake. She thinks "the Swedes seem to be making quite intelligent environmental decisions, based more on scientific data and less on economic and political pressures than they are here.... It's a unique situation, however, because of the distribution of the population. Since the situation is so different, many of their solutions are not easily applicable to our problems - at least'not on a national level."
Cox returned to Hanover for the winter of her sophomore year but then left again during the last half of the term to go to Nepal. She arranged for transfer credit, through the Experiment in International Living, for her study of the Nepali language and for a research project in ethno-musicology. She lived with a tribal Nepali family in a village about six kilometers from Katmandu, studied the language for five hours a day, and observed a caste of traveling musicians. "They're something like European minstrels were," she says. "They serve a news function, writing songs about important events.... They also write political songs, sing at weddings, and frequently write humorous songs, improvised on the spot to suit a particular situation. Some of them frequent army bases, singing love songs for soldiers separated from their families. The instrument they play is called a 'sarangi' - it's something like a crude violin with four strings and played with a hair bow. I suppose endurance is probably their outstanding capacity; sometimes they have to sing all night."
Back on campus for the summer, she took up rowing and began training with the women's crew. Last May she rowed in the boat that won the New England Open and was also in the shell that placed second in the Eastern Sprints. In June, at the Nationals in California, she, rowed in a mixed eight of varsity and novices, placing fifth. Although she broke her arm in a climbing accident this fall and had to switch from rowing on the port side to the starboard side of the boat, Cox is co-captain of this year's crew.
The day after the last race at the Nationals she flew down to Peru to join a Dartmouth Mountaineering Club expedition in Huascaran National Park, 200 miles north of Lima. Starting at an elevation of 7,000 feet, the group hiked for two and a half days, crossing a 16,000-foot pass, before making a base camp at 14,500 feet. Twelve burros and three local guides helped them transport over 1,500 pounds of equipment. "It was pretty comical," Cox says. "We weren't exactly expert burro drivers." She was there for seven weeks, the only woman in the group, and reached the 16,500-foot summit of Pilanco Sur and made attempts on three peaks in the 18,000-20,000 foot range. Members of the expedition made an attempt at a first ascent on Abasaraju (19,000 feet), where some of the best climbing of the trip was done and put up a new route, a direct ice climb, on the west face of 20,000-foot Quitaraju. "I would have been able to do. more climbing," Cox notes, "but I was sick some of the time."
When she returned to Hanover this fall, she took a full-time job managing the Outdoor Program, a DOC-funded center for coordinating outdoor activities for the community and College. Cox describes the job as "getting qualified people to lead hiking, climbing, skiing, canoeing, and biking trips, participating on most of those trips, organizing seminars and workshops in outdoor skills, and instructing rock climbing."
Winter term she took off again, this time to Panama and Costa Rica with the Biology Department's foreign-study program. Fifteen undergraduates, two graduate students, and four professors spent a month in each country, visiting different ecological areas and studying aquatic, vertebrate and tropical-plant ecology. The students kept detailed field journals, made tropical-temperate comparisons, and worked on independent research projects. "It was my best term ever," Cox recalls. "I learned more than I had in any classroom and because of the complex tropical environment it was a fantastic opportunity for field work." On the way home, Cox and a friend hitchhiked from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Guatemala City and learned, en route, how to drive a 15-speed truck on Central American roads.
Cox is a biology and environmental studies major, primarily interested in tropical agriculture and ecology. "I am concerned about the agricultural needs of developing countries," she states, "and interested in developing ecologically suitable agricultural systems." She says she wants to wait a couple of years before going to graduate school in order to do more independent study and field work. Her plans for the coming summer are still uncertain. Her home is in Washington state and she says "everytime I start thinking about the Cascades I'm anxious to get back there. Maybe I'll go to Alaska. I have a friend who says he'll hire me to work on a fishing boat."
Her one regret, looking back at four years as a student, is that she feels her heavy concentration in the sciences has left little time for other academic interests, something she is trying to remedy this spring by taking three courses in the humanities. Does a student who has spent so much time away from Hanover, maybe as much time off campus as on, really obtain a Dartmouth education? "The off-campus programs have been tremendous educational experiences," Cox says, "perhaps not strictly Dartmouth experiences but educationally worthwhile just the same."
