From its beginning, when carving the campus out of the wilderness was part of students’ work at the College, Dartmouth has embraced the educational and character-building opportunities of the outdoors. In celebration of this spirit of exploration and experiential learning, the Ledyard Canoe Club and Dartmouth Outdoor Programs hosted the “Dartmouth Explorers Symposium: Adventure, Learning, and Leadership on the World’s Rivers and Oceans” on April 24.
In this video, a current Ledyard and Dartmouth Outing Club leader and several alumni—who have gone on to exceptional careers as writers, journalists, public policy leaders, scientists, and entrepreneurs—share their life-changing experiences and talk about how they expanded their Dartmouth experience into a lifelong adventure.
Among them is Dan Reicher ’78, a green energy entrepreneur and former Google executive who discovered the power of rivers in 1977 with classmate and now-U.S. Sen. Rob Portman ’78 when the two joined a National Geographic-sponsored expedition to navigate the Rio Grande from its Colorado headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico.
An organizer of the Explorers symposium, Reicher says he conceived of the gathering to “explore leadership, risk-taking, and problem-solving from the cockpit of a canoe or kayak, where nothing focuses the mind like a big wave in the face.”
