Photo: Cathy Cockrell
Chopping wood. Fireside sing-alongs. Bird watching and a dip in the creek. Sounds like the stuff of summers past, but for about 40 students each year, these activities are an unforgettable part of their education.
Forestry Camp is an eight-week field program in the Sierra Nevada taught by faculty in the College of Natural Resources. The only one of its kind west of the Mississippi River, the camp enables forestry and other majors to dive headfirst into the scientific and professional dimensions of managing forests. It is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
While the curriculum’s 20th-century focus emphasized growing and harvesting trees for human use, today’s students have an eye toward bigger issues, such as protecting threatened landscapes and mitigating increasingly destructive wildfires caused by climate change. Their camp studies include ecology, surveying, forest operations, and management.
No stranger to the wild, Sophia Lemmo ’16 has gone backpacking since childhood and worked on a variety of park restoration projects as a teen. But Forestry Camp deeply immersed her in the subject for the first time.
“It’s a really great place to live what you’re learning,” says Lemmo, a forestry major. “Classes and books are great, but you get to see it, touch it, and feel it at camp.”
She also experienced what generations of campers before her never forget — lifelong bonds. “Living in the forest with your peers is all-encompassing,” she says. “You bunk together, eat together, work together, play together. It was one of the best experiences of my life.”
To help preserve this only-at-Cal experience for future foresters and environmental leaders, make a gift online at nature.berkeley.edu/forestry100 .
