PHOTO COURTESY OF OUTDOOR ADVENTURES Whitewater rafting is one of many activities available to students from Campus Recreation's Outdoor Adventures. Outdoor Adventures offers equipment rentals, certification courses and trip opportunities to UA students on a year-round basis.

Campus organization helps students tackle the great outdoors

Some students think fighting to add classes during the first week of school is the UA campus' greatest source of adventure.

Others prefer a more traditional route.

Now operating in its 15th year at the Student Recreation Center, Outdoor Adventures, the offspring of Campus Rec and Campus Health, Life, and Wellness is offering its paddles, belts and hiking boots to UA staff and students for its fall season.

The idea of climbing steep mountain slopes and hiking to the highest peaks in Tucson while mercury bursts from the top of the thermometer may be a turnoff for some. But Bruce Rischar, assistant director of Campus Recreation and overseer of Outdoor Adventures, encourages students to keep an open mind about what the program has to offer.

"It does require a moderate level of physical fitness," Rischar says, "We're really trying to entice beginners and give them a positive first experience."

Events available on the fall schedule include canoeing, scuba diving, backpacking and sea kayaking trips. Particularly adventurous participants can cave in the Santa Catalina Mountains or scuba dive in the Bahamas and around San Carlos, Mexico.

"It's a chance to experience something they've never experienced before - to go on an adventure outside of Tucson and to enjoy the wonders of nature within a beautiful environment," says trip leader J. Michelotti, who joined Outdoor Adventures in 2001 after attending three trips of his own.

Michelotti said his first experience, a rock climbing trip in the Dragoon Mountains outside Cochise County, was nothing short of eye-opening.

"I met some wonderful people on that trip," he said. "I got so into it, I've been rock climbing ever since."

The fall schedule begins Sept. 10-13 with a canoeing venture into Black Canyon on the Colorado River. The month concludes with the first of three backpacking classes offered this semester, a two-day seminar preparing for a trip to Aravaipa Canyon, 190 miles east of Phoenix, which lasts Oct. 15-17.

The season ends with two dates - a backpacking stint in the Grand Canyon from Nov. 24-28 followed by an intermediates rock climbing session Dec. 3-5 in Queen Creek Canyon, 60 miles east of Phoenix off Highway 60.

Located at the east end of the first floor of the Student Recreation Center, 1400 E. Sixth Street, Outdoor Adventures rents anything from tents, sleeping bags and hiking packs to outdoor stoves, in-line skates and beach chairs for those who choose to forge their own path in the great outdoors.

Michelotti notes that what works for some won't be so appealing for others.

"We have an incredible variety (of customers), from people just sitting out to people who are highly skilled and more advanced," he says. "If you want a low exertion level, a nice, light hike, we have one of those, or a high exertion level, where we're climbing mountains and back in a day. There's a variety for anyone who wants to do pretty much everything."

Those who enlist for a given trip must attend all pre-trip meetings and have admittance fees - ranging from $10 for a single day hike to $1,750 for a Memorial Day weekend scuba diving trip aboard a 65-foot sailboat in the Bahamas - ready by the sign-up deadline. Non-students must pay an additional 10 percent to register.

"We have incredible resources to provide the community with this beautiful service," Michelotti says. "There's so much variety for everyone to try anything they can think of."

At its core, Rischar says, Outdoor Adventures offers an escape from the ordinary.

"It allows (people) a possibility to experience the wilderness and all that it has to offer," Rischar said.