A reed-thin teenager skittered up a 45-foot wooden pole, his sharp metal spurs digging into the wood as he ascended. Another student, ax in hands, flailed away at a block of white pine. On nearby Lower St. Regis Lake, a brawny young man tried his feet at the slippery sport of logrolling.
It was all in a day’s work at an unusual kind of summer school, one free of algebra problems and reading-comprehension drills.
In an age when Facebook and video games have conspired to keep adolescents tethered to a sofa, and the book “Last Child in the Woods” laments the loss of contact with nature, Paul Smith’s College, a small private college in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, is providing an outlet for young people who crave a different experience. Its new summer program — a two-week, college-credit course called the Adirondack Woodsmen’s School — is dedicated to traditional lumberjack skills and sports, like carving a dugout canoe, building a fire without matches and throwing an ax.
Indeed, there was nothing virtual about the heady scent of pine, the buzz of chainsaws or the flying wood chips last week as the first session began. And the two dozen young men who showed up, mostly high school seniors and college freshmen, had the blisters and sweaty brows to prove it.
“They’re a very anachronistic group,” said Brett McLeod, an assistant professor of forestry and natural resources at Paul Smith’s who directs the summer program. “They should have been born in the 1800s. They really like working with, and learning with, their hands.”