“MHOC played a huge part in my life at the college and from then on through friendships made in the Intercollegiate Outing Club Association (IOCA.) I met my husband on an MIT Outing Club winter trip, and am still close to the folks who taught rock climbing at the Shawangunks and winter climbing at the ADK winter mountaineering session at Adirondak Loj. That training led to a trip in 1987 to Everest Base Camp and in 2011 to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro (how else to celebrate our 25th and then 50th anniversaries?) Ruth Elvedt’s canoeing sessions in Upper Lake before we were allowed to go to Fall Lake George were excellent training, and she taught us white water canoeing in the small stretch between the dam and Lower Lake in the early spring. (Took our teenagers down the Gorges of the Ardeche in France in two leaky canoes. My French vocabulary from MHC was pretty shaky by then, and I thought the guide said 13 km, but he said 30. It was a LONG day.) I first learned skiing on the hill that became the Amphitheater by the time I graduated – and that led to 15 years on the National Ski Patrol. At 79, I would not fit through the caves we explored in upstate New York and Virginia, but we have enjoyed seeing many commercial caves in the United States and Slovenia. I learned a lot of folk music and square dancing on MHOC sponsored trips, and I’m still active in the Santa Clara Valley Fiddlers’ Association and the Bay Area Country Dance Society. Or at least I’ll be active again when COVID vaccines let us get together again.
So best wishes for a happy celebration of MHOC at 100! I’ll send a separate email with photos of past trips, from a backpack into Colden for College Week, Fall Lake George, to Shockley’s Ceiling in the Gunks, to a relatively recent one from Kilimanjaro. I suspect that MHOC doesn’t encourage some of the stuff we did then due to potential liability issues (I think RPI no longer does the Lake George trips) but MHOC from 1959 through 1962 gave me some wonderful memories and encouraged a lifetime of outdoors activities. “
Share a memory you have from your time with the Outing Club?
“At Kendall pool before a canoe trip to Lake George, Ruth Elvedt insisted we learn to right an overturned canoe, then climb back into it and bale it out. We also had to do figure 8’s around cans moored tin Upper Lake. She emphasized learning to plan for problems so they wouldn’t become disasters. She didn’t tell us not to do risky-but-fun activities, but helped us gain confidence and skills to minimize risk and maximize fun.”
How did the Outing Club impact your MHC experience?
“Before MHC i did only day hikes, but MHOC introduced me to backpacking, caving, rock climbing, folk singing, folk and square dancing, and canoeing. I spent more time outdoors than indoors doing studying.Trips with other college outing clubs became a priority. On a Thanksgiving 1960 trip to Mt.Katahdin I met my husband and used both crampons and an ice ax for the first time. We married the weekend before graduation and honeymooned in the’Gunks, then headed west for a summer that included climbing rock climbing up the east face of Mt. Whitney. For our 25th anniversary we trekked to Everest base camp, and for our 50th we climbed Mt.Kilimanjaro. Our 60th is coming in 2022, but we’re back to just day hikes now. (I’m 80, he turns 85 in two weeks.) .”
Images from Anne…
Anne Raphael at Seneca Rocks, 1963.
