Visit the Outdoor Adventure Oral History Project

‍

Oral History and Africa

Andreana Prichard has been using TheirStory for two years, ever since she went looking for technical assistance in running an oral history project and found that nobody on her campus–not even at the library or in digital humanities circles-could help. So she built her own infrastructure instead. Her Honors Colloquium, Oral History and Africa, walks 22 students, mostly juniors and seniors majoring in things other than history, through the origins of oral history as a field and its long use as a tool for social justice, then into African oral history projects specifically. None of the students had done oral history work before. For their own projects, though, Prichard steers them away from Africa. The distance makes that hard to do well, at least for now. Students choose from a handful of local projects instead.One project is the 

The Fight to Save Outdoor Adventure

In 2023, an interim dean had abruptly shut down the 20-year-old program, and students and their advisors, Prichard among them, were furious. In what she calls "classical oral history fashion," she redirected that anger into her center’s first  project: an oral history series documenting everything the program had accomplished over two decades. The Outdoor Adventure leadership team didn't just cooperate, they helped build it, recruiting alumni, writing interview questions, and conducting some of the interviews themselves. Prichard's students interviewed around 40program alumni, then edited the transcripts, built indexes, and cut clips. One clip, recorded by student interviewer Jacob Klausen, captures alum Nick Aguilera remembering the Four Pass Loop, a 24-mile route through Colorado's Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness that crosses four passes above 12,000 feet. Prichard turned interviews like his into a trail map tracing where OA alumni had independently backpacked over the years.

A Program Reborn

In 2025, a new dean arrived in the Honors College. The newly documented history of Outdoor Adventure, the students’ enthusiasm for the program, and the dean’s own background in backpacking and familiarity with outdoor leadership encouraged him to reconsidere the future of Outdoor Adventure. , In August 2026, incoming first-year students took a five-day, self-supported backcountry trip through New Mexico's Pecos Wilderness. The faculty advisors stayed comfy at basecamp while the students navigated wildfires, a precocious bear, and altitude sickness. Prichard plans to continue expanding the series next semester with the program’s newest alumni. And, she wants to turn the whole collection into a physical installation: alumni photos and quotes printed on technical fabric and sewn into backpacks, tents, and rain flies to display around the Honors College. "Yay for the power of oral history!" she says.

‍

Visit the Outdoor Adventure Oral History Project