Jessica Blanton: Outside Reading 3 (February 23, 2010)

In the process of finding sources for my Annotated Bibliography project, I came across an article about two professors who studied the effect of wilderness on people’s spirituality. In other words, they studied Wilderness as a medium for spiritual experiences. The two professors were women, and they split up to form two groups of women. One professor took her group to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness for a week (I have been to the BWCAW as well), and the other professor took her group to the Grand Canyon to backpack for six days.
The study was incredibly interesting. The professors attempted to make a scientific research project out of something that is abstract. They tried to measure the idea of sacred, and prove that certain wildernesses are sacred due to statistical means. In the end, though, the two professors added personal interviews from the respondents. Perhaps they did this because they knew that they could not fully prove (or argue, for that matter) the existence of sacred places, of abstract ideas, with only concrete support. They needed the “poet’s” language, as stated by Lane.