When we had our pre-departure meeting back in April, our program coordinators and instructors joked about the culture shock we would experience going from the east coast to Wyoming and back again. I couldn’t imagine then that I would feel much of a difference at all. It’s all the same country, I thought to myself,…

Throughout the course, we’ve used a combination of geological, ecological, and human-centered perspectives to understand the world we live in, and we continued to take this interdisciplinary approach in Yellowstone on day 7 of our 10-day road trip across Wyoming. Our first official stop of the day was an overlook at Yellowstone Lake which formed…

One of the reasons I decided to apply to the Spring Creek Field Studies Program was to learn more deeply about how Earth systems interact to shape the world we see in front of us. Over the first half of the course, I was fascinated by the different plant communities we saw on the preserve…

On the windblown and weathered surface of the Spring Creek Preserve, belemnites and vertebrae from dinosaurs litter the ground. It is easy to focus on the sheer wonder of finding a fossil, then another, then a cluster, transporting you back to the times of the Jurassic or the ancient seas that once covered Wyoming. To…

The first thing I noticed when I got to Laramie was the importance of cowboys. Walking around the University of Wyoming campus, you see cowboy statues everywhere, which makes sense given that the school’s mascot is a cowboy. Even beyond the campus though, the silhouette of a cowboy on his horse is emblazoned across the…

The vast, mostly uninterrupted space of the Wyoming prairie is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It is easy to get lost in the view of the land stretching for miles and miles until it touches the sky. The sun rose to my left as I sat looking at a cliff on Saturday morning, and…

Hi! My name is Lillian Taylor, and I’m a rising junior at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m majoring in environmental science, and I also intend to pursue a minor in history and a certificate in GIS. I am deeply interested in the interactions between humans and the natural world, specifically the impacts of land use…