It was spring break 2012 when Whitman College Director of Outdoor Programs Brien Sheedy’s Glacier Mountaineering class set out for Mount Hood, about 50 miles east of Portland, Oregon. They planned to summit the peak, the highest in Oregon, but when a freak snowstorm rolled in, the group was forced to switch gears. Their lives depended on it.
Neither Sheedy nor his co-leader, Craig VanHoy—both expert alpinists who have guided mountain expeditions all over the globe—expected to experience that kind of squall with a group of relatively inexperienced college students. “That was as bad as any storm we’d ever seen anywhere in the world,” Sheedy recalls.
“The snow was falling at a rate of an inch per hour, but the wind pattern caused a 10-foot snowdrift to build on top of our camp,” he says. “We stayed up all night shoveling just to keep our tent from collapsing. Then we dug in to create a snow shelter.”
By the time the storm passed, everyone was thoroughly exhausted, and the avalanche risk was high, so the group abandoned their attempt at the summit—but Sheedy remembers the trip as an unequivocal success.
“We turned what could have been a life-or-death situation into this very real, exhilarating challenge for these students to overcome. And I am so proud of how they handled it and what they learned in the process,” he says.
More than 10 years later, the memory is etched in Sheedy’s mind like it was yesterday. The same goes for the students, he says. “The first-years talked about it for all of their four years on campus. And to this day, when I interact with students who were on that trip, they still bring it up.”
Such memorable experiences are not unusual for the Outdoor Program, which creates opportunities for Whitman students to explore more than just outdoor recreation—to build teamwork, leadership skills, outdoor skills and lifelong friendships.
Read the full story in the Spring 2025 issue of Whitman Magazine.
