SUSAN GARTNER and Marge Rachlin believe in investing in themselves, and as a result, they have accumulated a cornucopia of riches.
Gartner, of Chevy Chase, Md., and Rachlin, of Washington, D.C., aren't sitting around counting money; instead, they're drawing on a treasury of memories from numerous trips that combine nature education with adventure.
"A lot of people don't think of universities, museums and nonprofits as vacation options, or even co-ops like REI, the sports outfitter," says Rob Fulton, a biologist, educator and longtime resident manager of the Desert Studies Center at Zzyzx, Calif., on the northwestern edge of the Mojave National Preserve. The center is a field station of California State University and hosts classes, symposiums and research by more than 50 institutions, including early ground tests of Mars rovers.
For $290, I spent a weekend ed-venturing at the center -- soaking up the natural sciences and sleeping in a historic bunkhouse. In all, the experience was much like going to camp: We had scheduled activities and lived in communal facilities, mixing with congenial strangers, but the food was much better.
Lower-cost ed-ventures, like my extended learning class at Zzyzx, can also be found through nonprofits, such as the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy, or even state park associations such as Anza-Borrego. Shorter programs offered by botanical gardens are another option. UC Berkeley's Jepson Herbarium, for instance, runs numerous overnight nature study workshops at wilderness reserves in Southern California and elsewhere in the state.
About two-dozen nonprofit institutes, loosely affiliated with U.S. national parks, also offer intensive natural science study programs, including the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park, Sequoia Field Institute in California, the Glacier Institute in Montana, Mesa Verde Institute and Rocky Mountain Field Seminars in Colorado. You can also be instructed and guided through national parks by most of the major organizers of eco-tours.
Ilona Popper of Shepherdstown, W.Va., who has taken several courses on wolves at the Yellowstone Institute, finds the educational atmosphere exhilarating. "The thing about these scientists is they love to answer questions," she says. "My instructor made each of us feel special, as if we could ask anything."
These two- to four-day field seminars, priced from $160 to $340, offer rustic shared cabins and a communal kitchen for an additional $25 a night.
