Frontiers Summer 1999

Minnesota's wildest classroom

From the lake to the lab, Itasca has offered studies of life at every level--along with fun and adventure--to generations of students.

By Geoff Gorvin

For 90 years, the University of Minnesota has been sending students and faculty members to the thick forests, pristine waters, and rolling prairies of Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota.

The park, home to the University's Lake Itasca Forestry and Biological Station, is the ultimate laboratory. Students can wander for days, studying aquatic life in the lakes and nearby streams, examining sprawling forest stands and rare plants, and chasing critters of all shapes and sizes.

Students and faculty there have generated some fascinating research over the years, and the Itasca experience has given many students solid direction in their career choices. But 90 years of small-group college studies in the wild are also bound to produce some interesting stories---of successes, failures, near tragedies, and, of course, shenanigans.

Although the Itasca station opened in 1909, the first field biology station in the country--and possibly the world--can be traced back to 1893, when a group of University of Minnesota faculty converted an old logging camp on Long Lake in Cass County (in the Brainerd lakes area) for biological research.

According to accounts, that station was fairly successful. It was mentioned in scientific periodicals from as far away as Europe, and the faculty documented plans to make the station permanent.

But the project lost its momentum after the first year and would never return to that site. A second attempt, the Seaside Station, took place near Vancouver Island on the west coast at the turn of the century, but that, too, closed down after a few years.

Finally, in 1906, the Board of Regents established a forestry station at Itasca, and work on the station began immediately. The first summer session was taught three years later.

A 1910 bulletin described the station: "The Summer School of Forestry is the ideal vacation school. The most serious student, much in need of rest, will find here a delightful and most profitable vacation place. There is abundant opportunity to escape civilization for a time and to broil your venison on a sharpened stick and to serve it on a sheet of bark, which always makes one feel there is red blood in the veins and that it is good to be out of doors."

Whether it had anything to do with broiling venison on a sharp stick, the station attracted students from throughout the United States, a trend that would continue to this day. In 1908, 18 forestry students visited the station to cut firebreaks. They were from Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Colorado, and Hawaii.

Students in those early years found facilities just short of primitive. A large, log student dorm was built in 1912, along with a log mess hall and four log cabins for faculty. Lab work was conducted in an old horse barn under the watchful eyes of bats and mice.

The station was used primarily by forestry students until 1936, when they started sharing the station with biology students. The station's name was changed to reflect a relationship that would last 34 years: Lake Itasca Forest Biology Laboratory.

In 1970, the College of Biological Sciences took over management of the station, and, instead of forestry students sharing the station with the biology students, the opposite became true. Since then, biology students have used the station during the summer and forestry students during early fall.

Over the years, the classrooms and labs would be improved and the park would increase in public popularity. But the one thing that remained constant was the quality of education being offered there.

"It's a wonderful place to get hands-on experience in different aspects of field biology," says John Tester, a retired professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior who first studied at the station as an undergraduate in 1949 and has taught and conducted research there since 1957. "Where else can you get your hands dirty and get your fingers bit, like you can up there?"

Tester has dozens of stories about the station's early days. For example, the lack of modern conveniences like washers and dryers offered some creative opportunities. To wash her bed sheets, one faculty member's wife would tie them to a row boat and row around the lake until they were clean.

The station also lacked firefighting equipment, which resulted in a student cabin burning down in 1961. "The fire started because the cabins were heated with a big barrel stove," Tester says. "The students had clothes hanging over the stove drying, when some of the clothes caught fire. We formed a bucket brigade to fight the fire, but the cabin burned to the ground anyway."

No one was hurt in that incident, which is the most important thing on everyone's mind at the station, Tester says. Emergency medical care is far away--a good 30 miles to Bemidji or Park Rapids--and it's easy for someone to get lost in the woods or trapped on the lake when storms blow in.

One of Tester's classes found out the hard way how important orienteering is when you're studying in the forest. The class was doing ruffed grouse census work, and the students had to follow a line through the forests using a compass. When the students returned, one was missing. Tester took the rest of the class along the student's line, but couldn't find him.

Tester called in park and forestry personnel to conduct a full-blown search, but just as they were about to go back into the forest, a car pulled up with the missing student. Apparently, he got lost and started walking toward a noise, which happened to be a highway. "It was a very frightening experience for him," Tester says.

Those stories are a rarity, Tester says. In fact, the station's success stories are much more common. And a lot of those successes occurred in the station's heyday back in the 1950s and '60s, when students had to apply to get in at the station because of high demand. Ecology was a buzzword then, and the environment had quickly become a hot-button issue in the United States.

That was true until the 1970s, when enrollment at the station dropped off and then stabilized, a phenomenon experienced at field biology stations nationwide, Tester says. A lot of it, he speculates, had to do with student attitudes, and the growing number of students who had to work in the summer.

A sagging enrollment never seemed to hamper the University's efforts to recruit faculty to teach at Itasca, though. The station has always attracted top faculty from universities throughout the country. That's a benefit to the students studying at the station, but it also affects the studies coming out of the station.

New plant and aquatic species are continually being discovered because of the intense efforts of faculty. Those efforts have even influenced the way the park is managed. A few faculty, for example, were studying the origins of white and red pine forests and discovered that pine forest origins can be traced back to major fires. So, in an effort to restore pine forests, the park's management now burns the areas where they want forests to generate.

The last decade has seen a lot of changes at the station, most significantly the addition of technology to the labs and classrooms. In the late 1980s, the first computers were set up, says Don Siniff, the station's director from about 1987 to 1997.

Early in his tenure, Siniff addressed the fact that enrollment was down to about 30 students per session (capacity is 120) by starting to diversify the station's users. His goal, he says, was to make the station an all-University facility and not just a biology and forestry station.

"We were fairly successful," he says. "We had an anthropology class there and a geology course that studied glacial geology, for example. We had to go out and recruit those programs, though, and let them know that these facilities were available."

The neuroscience program also started using the station, and still does. It has a "boot camp" for new graduate students, who learn lab techniques there.

Overall, the station probably hasn't changed much physically during its 90-year existence. But, as Siniff says, it has changed a lot of students. "Every year was different, but the one main thing is that you influenced students' lives. It's the first chance they get to do something with Œreal biology.' You feel good that you offered them an opportunity that influenced their careers."

Ripe for change: a future full of promise for the Itasca station

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