About

The Outing Club is a student run organization for those interested in outdoors recreation. We plan various excursions year round with destinations all over the country

Mission of the OC

For all of you that have no idea exactly why you joined this club (to see goat sacrifices, yes I know), here's the "true, mission of the club, decided sometime around 1971 or 1972: "Man needs nature. Man has been increasingly divorcing him-self from nature. Urban living creates pressures that increase man's need for nature. University life and academic work add to these pressures. The Outing Club provides relief. The Outing Club is dedicated to the enjoyment and preservation of nature. Outing Club returns to nature and leaves it a little better...and it's fun.

Unusual Trips

We all love the fun trips that allow people to witness more scenic views than Evanston, (if we can ever make it out of Evanston) especially the trips that take OCers far away from campus. Some interesting places that the club has gone on trip to include: the Badlands, Alaska, Perm-sylvania, the Grand Canyon, tons of trips to the Smokies and the Rockies, the Ozarks, Boundary Waters, West Virginia for rafting, and Georgia and Alabama for spelunking. The club has also done a variety of activities: hang gliding, ski diving, apple-picking, horse-back riding and the usual bike, climbing, camping, and skiing trips. In 1987, the club wrote 35 letters in support of an endangered national park in Oregon.

During the 1980's many spur of the moment trips arose. If someone decided they felt like sleeping outside, they would call a couple of members to go sleep out on the lake fill. Other times, members would grab a tent and go sleep on the beach by the light-house and watch the sunrise over the lake. Not only did spur of the moment camping trips arise on campus, during many slow nights records show that members had fun repelling off of TECH and Allison. Some of the other fun things the club did on campus include spontaneous sledding trips from the top of Norris down into the library.

Outing Club History

On November 6, 1965, 67 Northwestern students and some faculty members met at a residence in Judson Street to officially start the Northwestern University Outing Club (renamed to "Outing Club" at Northwestern University in 2002). After looking through the archive files, I found that not much exists about the beginning of the club. There is no record of who started the club, or why. We do know that the club was influenced in some way by the Intercollegiate Outing Club Association. The IOCA was based in upstate New York, and has members of Outing Clubs from all over the east coast, and spreads throughout the midwest. We can only assume that the OC belonged to this organization at some time. One thing that came out of the IOCA was the 'Traditional Thanksgiving canoe trip" (that's not a tradition anymore). It seems that the OC met up with the Purdue Canoeing Club and would go canoeing in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri during Thanksgiving. This tradition lasted until 1993.

However, we don't know how long we belonged to the IOCA. I would be willing to bet that one reason we withdrew from the organization was when we finally got around to reading the IOCA Creed, "We have learned to be self-sufficient outdoors, and to enjoy ourselves without the artificiality of alcohol." Need I say more?

When the OC was originally started, the club held meetings every other week to discuss the upcoming trips. They really didn't discuss the past trips, as those adventures were saved for the newsletters. However, in 1986, the president decided that it was too hard to co-ordinate trips every weekend with meetings every other week. So, that's when the established every week meetings came into play. Don't you feel educated now?

Also in the beginning of the club, dues were $5 for the whole year. Non-members were allowed to go on any of the trips, except that they had to rent the things they needed from the club. Amazingly enough, the club charged very reasonable prices on the equipment.

Unusual Things

During some part of the club's history, the club had Inter-Mural teams for all of the sports available on campus.

In 1988, the club held clinics on many of the outdoor activities that the club did. They brought in people from the area to speak on things like bike maintenance, cross country skiing, and how to effectively dress for winter camping trips.

In 1971-1972, the OC requested a budget of $600.00. In the following year, the club received $300 from ASG and $343.50 from dues; the club spent $670. Jumping to 1991-1992, the club had a mailing list of 97 people, 30 of which had paid their dues.

Future of OC

The Outing Club at Northwestern University has been around for forty years. We still have the same mission that the club started with, and have the same "family" atmosphere that separates us from many of the other organizations on campus. As the president of the club in 1987/88, Craig Havighurst stated, "We believe the Outing Club plays a vital role on campus, in spite of our relative obscurity. The privilege of getting away from campus for a weekend in the middle of a difficult quarter to find relief from the academics and the city's fast pace is appreciated beyond description be those who take advantage of the opportunity. Our goal is to give that opportunity to as many students as possible."

When asked what he thought the future will hold for the Outing Club, ex-president Chris Pasko responded with, "I don't think this is a club that will die out anytime soon. As the world gets more industrialized, people want to rebel into the wilderness even more. Nature is a great reliever. As long as Northwestern is stressful, the Outing Club will be a necessity."