The Wildside Club Returns! And Josh Stratman on His Path to Outdoor Education at MHCC

This past school year, one of the clubs that has re-emerged from the past at Mt. Hood Community College is the Wildside club. The group, which restarted in the fall of 2024, takes students on various trips to learn outdoor, adventuring skills.

The club’s current adviser, Josh Stratman, says that he was largely the person who started the club up again after it went dormant in years past, due to a lack of leadership.

He said that when he mentioned the idea of the club to students in his classes last autumn, a lot of them were interested.

For Stratman, the club is “an opportunity to introduce people to the outdoors, because that’s my passion,” he said. He has “always had a passion for being out there – love backpacking, love climbing,” he explained.

The drive that ultimately led him to become a wilderness educator started at a young age while he was growing up in Wyoming, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. A memorable moment and turning point in building that passion into a true calling came when he talked to an instructor for an outdoor education degree program at the two-year college where his parents had worked.

“The faculty member there that was teaching talked to me a little bit about it, and I thought that was a really awesome job and ever since high school that’s kind of been my goal,” said Stratman.

He he has been teaching and leading groups for colleges since either 2000 or 2001, he said, earning a masters degree in outdoor recreations and facility management from the University of Idaho. After that, he ran an outdoor recreation program for Illinois State University before teaching at San Juan College in New Mexico, he said.

Stratman then came to MHCC, where he ran the school’s wilderness survival and experiential education program (commonly referred to as WLEE) until it was discontinued in 2020.

Over the last academic year, the Wildside club has held several meetings at the climbing wall on the far side of the Mt. Hood Aquatic Center, and taken students out on one big field trip each term: A backpacking trip in the fall turned into a snowshoeing trip when a snowstorm hit; in the winter the club went cross-country skiing; and in the spring, the group went rock climbing outdoors.

“Being able to take people out into an environment that they have never been [in] and never thought they would, and get them to experience something” is the personal reward Stratman said comes with leading these student outings.

For example, when he took a class out to experience snowshoeing, some of the participants not originally from the region had not seen snow before, he said.

“We had people on that class that were not from Oregon and so they hadn’t seen, they really never experienced snow,” he said. “And they are hiking in the wilderness in, you know, fresh snow and so it’s just super, super rewarding, super exciting for them. Being able to give people an experience like that is why I do that.”

Beyond simply enjoying the outdoors, Stratman said he believes that getting students to go on outdoor trips helps them build a connection to the environment.

This is important to him because, “If you get people enjoying the outdoors they are more likely to protect it, too,” he said. He has seen the effects of climate change just in his lifetime, he said: While he was growing up in Wyoming, he would sled over fences buried under the snow, which he notes doesn’t really happen that much anymore.

“I remember snow so deep it would, on a regular basis, cover fences there and then we would be able to like sled and snowmobile over the top of fences. And that was a normal thing, but now that doesn’t occur,” Stratman said.

The amount of snowfall that he is seeing is much less than it used to be here in Oregon, as well, he said: “Some years we’ll get some great snow, other years we get very little, but overall, you are seeing a steady decline of snow up on (Mount) Hood, all over.”

Stratman sees other ways that climate change is affecting the outdoors. He said frequent droughts have meant that there has been in increase in the number of wildfires and that he knows of a number of trails up by Ollalie Lake [north of Mount Jefferson] that are still devastated from a wildfire.

He said he believes it’s important for people to be inspired and get involved, because if people don’t have a connection to the outdoors, “In the long run, we are not going to protect our natural environment.”

Leo Fontneau