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(05/06/15 7:17pm)
Caroline Cating ’16.5 and Jason Feinman ’15 love to fly. Procuring their pilot licenses at ages 19 and 17, respectively, Cating and Feinman have become familiar with the Vermont aviation community. Last month, they implemented their passion for all things aviation when their pitch for the Aviation Club, a new interest club at the College, was recognized.
“The club is purely interest and education: we can’t finance your flying habits, but we can help you become a safer pilot, help you on your way to become a pilot, or any other type of aviation interest you might have,” Feinman said. “It’s a community for people interested in aviation to come together and celebrate that.”
“Having an interest club is sort of like a spring board for people to get involved with flying individually,” Cating said.
The club stemmed from Cating and Feinman’s shared interest in supporting new potential pilots and fostering growth in the larger aviation community.
“Some people find aviation on their own, some in families. My father is a pilot,” Feinman said. “So if you wanted to make it spread, you would have to get exponential growth, so the demand is already there.”
As part of their aim to make aviation more accessible to the College community, the club has purchased pilot license studying material, connected members with available discounts and cheaper materials, directed students to nearby flight instructors and rental planes. Apart from creating an educational space at the College, they also plan on going to air shows, building model planes, and flying remote control planes and helicopters.
“It’s really great to have a group of students as a learning resource. Getting [a pilot license] by themselves would be difficult,” Cating said. “We really focus on providing an educational community, but we also are trying to find creative ways for people to do it.”
Elana Feldman ’17.5, one of the new members of the club, attained her pilot license in Jan. 2014 and has enjoyed being part of a new aviation community away from home.
“The Aviation community is a great group of people and I missed it while being at school,” Feldman said. “I’m excited because aviation is one of those things you constantly have to be doing or else you’re going to forget it … To have a group that’s promoting it is pretty exciting.”
They have six members, four of whom already have their pilot licenses. In the future, the club plans to increase membership, develop a J-term instructional workshop, and connect with other projects on campus, such as aerial mapping projects in geography or working with physics project on pilot implementation. In these areas and other fields of science, aviation skills can be incredibly useful.
“As a conservation biology major, I assume at one point in the future I will be doing research, so hopefully I can use my pilot’s license for surveillance,” Feldman said.
Although the club itself cannot pay for plane rentals due to liability reasons, the cost of plane rentals is relatively cheap: from $100 upwards depending on the quality of the plane. Both Cating and Feinman have rented planes from Shelburne, Vermont, and have flown around the area, taking friends or other club members with them and even going as far as Maine. In this way, flying offers a whole new host of activities and travel opportunities for students.
“[As pilots], we can take our friends. By having this community, it’s more visible – a thing that can be part of people’s consciousness,” Cating said.
Aviation adds an entirely different way to view the world: the sky is a series of virtual highways, off-ramps and on-ramps that must be navigated carefully through a system of instrument approaches.
“A lot of people like being a doctor because they are providing help where others might not be control of situation,” Feinman said. “Being a pilot is the same thing: you’re using complex knowledge and skills to get people from one point to the other safely.”
Furthermore, there is simply the perspective of looking down from thousands of feet in the air.
“The way you perceive a place completely changes once you’ve seen it from the air,” Feinman said. “When I walk around campus, I know exactly where everything is because I’ve seen it from the air.”
(03/18/15 5:39pm)
Last summer, Abby Woolf ’17.5 came across a book about winemaking and decided to buy it on a whim, thinking it might be a new hobby to invest in when she returned to Vermont in the fall. Although instead she ended up making cider and, most recently, beer, the process of brewing stretched from October to January and left her with about 40 bottles of cider and a possible business opportunity.
Woolf, a double biology and film major from California, had no previous experience of brewing and taught herself according to what she had read. She began by driving to the Vermont Home Brew Supply Store in Winooski, Vermont, to buy the necessary equipment, and then went to Happy Valley Farm in Middlebury to buy five gallons of plain apple cider.
“At first I said I was making wine because at the time I thought it wouldn’t be that hard, but it’s so much harder than cider or beer. There’s more equipment and it takes more time,” Woolf explained. “So then I decided to do cider instead, because the apples were in season.”
The brewing process began with pouring the five gallons of cider into a bucket and adding yeast, which then ate the sugar to produce carbon dioxide and alcohol. The cider-yeast mix then sat in the bucket fermenting for two and a half months, with an airlock on top of the bucket to let the carbon dioxide out.
Once it was done fermenting, Woolf siphoned it into a different container called a carboy.
It sat there for another few weeks, allowing the yeast and other particles to settle out in the bottom. This product was then siphoned again into another bucket, before finally being bottled for consumption.
“That will produce still cider, because the way you measure how much alcohol is in the cider is with a hydrometer, which measures the specific gravity,” Woolf said. “When it’s done fermenting it will say 0% potential alcohol, which means all the sugar is gone. If you want to have carbonated cider, you have to add priming sugar to the bottle, so that whatever yeast is left will ferment that little bit of sugar.”
Woolf bottled all the cider, but found that it tasted very intense at first.
“Two weeks after I bottled it, it was very intense and bitter. So I let it sit a little more and it started tasting better and better,” Woolf said.
Woolf also experimented with adding different flavors to her cider through tinctures, a method in which she took lavender, ginger, and cinnamon sticks and put them separately in three different jars filled with vodka, which sucked up the nutrients from the sticks.
She then added the flavorings to her bottles and found that the lavender tincture was the most popular.
The hardest part of brewing for Woolf was waiting for fermentation to take place and planning when to go down to the Old Stone Mill to check on it.
In the past month, she switched to brewing beer. While she was waiting for it to ferment, it exploded in the carboy.
“What happens with beer is that once it’s in the carboy it bubbles up and you need to watch it. But I didn’t get a chance to go check on it enough, so it overflowed,” Woolf said.
Despite the mishaps, Woolf has been successful in her brewing endeavors to create a final bottled product.
The bottling is actually her favorite part of the process.
“Just because you’re winding it [the process] up. You still have to wait after that for it to taste good, but the act of bottling is fun,” Woolf said.
Woolf, however, is not the only one in her family who is interested in brewing. Her brother, who recently graduated from college in Australia, is also experimenting with brewing beer. He called her out of the blue one day to tell her that he and his friend were organizing a brewing company in California called The Fringe, which would specialize in flavored beer. They plan to promote local artists with advertisements underneath the label, giving a unique local design to each bottle.
“They are tapping into an untapped market in America, which is flavored beer. It’s really big in Australia. They have made a lavender beer, fennel beers, those are the good ones,” Woolf said. “Right now all they have is a label and a name and some flavors that they’re working on.”
“I definitely will keep [brewing] and it would be really cool to start a brewery. I actually am kind of working with my brother and his friend, so if that takes off that would be awesome,” Woolf said. “My career path isn’t along the lines of business, but I’ll always brew.”
(02/19/15 1:28am)
Middlebury students left the frigid winter temperatures of Vermont and travelled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to participate in a women’s empowerment MAlt trip over February break. Over the course of the following week, they engaged with an organization known as Iniciativa Comunitaria, or Community Initiative (IC), and worked with women and transgender sex workers to participate in hands-on, alternative approaches seeking to aid Puerto Rico’s prominent drug abuse problem.
Trip leaders Camila Fernandez ’15 and Ryan Coates ’15 originally chose the location due to their interest in Puerto Rico’s rich cultural and political history, and then expanded the trip to focus on their other shared passion of female empowerment and women’s rights.
“Puerto Rico is interesting because it’s part of the United States and Latin America at the same time, and we wanted to see how that played out,” Coates said. “We made an effort to integrate into the Puerto Rican culture to get a better cultural context of the community we were working with.”
During the first few days of their trip, they attended training sessions and cultural competency workshops facilitated by IC, where they were able to speak to many of the volunteers and learn more about what the organization is about.
“Speaking with volunteers was fascinating because these are people from San Juan who wanted to give back to their community,” group member Jiya Pandya ’17 said. “They’re all really passionate about what they’re doing.”
With a slogan that reads “Somos un gran abrazo,” or, “we are a big hug,” IC was founded by a doctor who attended medical school in Puerto Rico and was disappointed by the current solutions to help the social injustices of the community. Through IC, alternative solutions are brought to the table: clean needle exchanges to prevent the spread of infection among drug users, outreach programs to women and transgender sex workers, food, water, and medical supplies offered to homeless populations, and child developmental programs. Some of the most important tenants of their programs are empathy, compassion, and “amor” — love — and they strive to create a happy and healthy community.
After the MAlt group finished their training, they were able to participate directly in the services IC provides. From 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Friday night, their last night in Puerto Rico, the group split, with the first half working with women and transgender sex workers and the second half engaging in the clean needle exchange program.
Working with the program’s head coordinator Ivana Fred, some of the MAlt trip participants followed Fred’s vehicle as she went to certain areas and neighborhoods of Puerto Rico where many sex workers congregated, giving out baggies of condoms and lubricant and speaking to women and transgender sex workers about the organization. They were surprised to find out that there had been a police raid in that same area the night before.
“Not many transgender [sex workers] were coming to the car … because they [the police] had arrested them the night before. There is a lot of police brutality against them; they cut their hair and hold them down,” Fernandez said. “It’s pretty surprising to see and hear about the direct targeting of transgender women where in a neighborhood two to three blocks away, there’s a very big drug area.”
“[The police] would come dressed as normal people and offer a price [for sex], and a lot of the women caught were put in jail and charged fines of $250 minimum. They can’t afford to pay that,” said Ellen Sartorelli ’17, another participant of the trip.
Other students travelled with IC’s program Operación Compasión, where they drove with fellow volunteers in a truck with food and medical supplies to prominent San Juan homeless communities, distributing food, water, and clean needles to prevent illness, particularly HIV, which in Puerto Rico is spread more commonly through needles than sexual contact.
“Most of what people do who volunteer is talk to the people there, see what they need. It’s really about building relationships and making them feel wanted, included, cared for,” Pandya said.
Pandya explained how she met David, a man suffering from a drug addiction and who had been on the streets for about two months. Any money he earned, however, was spent either to call his family or buy more drugs.
“He told us he knew he could save up money and travel to the drug recovery center that the organization had,” Pandya said, “and he told us that he wanted to, but he couldn’t: he didn’t have the will to do it.”
Another man Pandya encountered had a mosquito bite that he had scratched open, and because he didn’t have access to clean water, it had not healed properly. She had to hold a flashlight as three medical student volunteers peeled off his sock and washed his wound.
“We don’t think twice about those things, but for someone who doesn’t have access [to clean water], that’s a much bigger deal,” Pandya said.
When they were not working with IC, the MAlt trip was exploring Puerto Rico and the cultural community.
“We were experiencing Puerto Rico as a real Puerto Rican would,” Sartorelli said. “We weren’t limited to the organization. We learned about living in Puerto Rico.”
One of the many interesting points the group learned as they experienced life in Puerto Rico was that grocery prices were much higher because Puerto Rico only produces 13 to 15 percent of its own food while the rest is imported because of the limitations of United States trade agreements. Some locals also referred to Puerto Rico as a colony, others as a country: it was never called a territory even though the locals know it is considered part of the United States.
“It was interesting because as you’re driving through there’s Spanish on the radio, on the billboards, and then a Walmart just jumps out at you,” Sartorelli said.
“It’s the United States in some ways and then in other ways it’s not,” Coates said.
A cultural, political, and social immersion into Puerto Rico itself, the San Juan MAlt trip provided for many of its members another look at women’s empowerment as well as a chance for an interactive and collaborative service trip experience.
“I’ve always considered myself passionate about female empowerment,” Sartorelli said, “But now, after doing this, I think I want to get more involved with organizations like WomenSafe or MiddSafe in the future. It was a great opportunity to do work that people always say they’re passionate about.”
(01/22/15 1:14am)
Madison Stebbins ’14.5 grew up in Col- orado eating homemade sourdough waffles on Sunday mornings. A Geography major at the College, Stebbins’ future plans lie in land management, yet he uses his space at the Old Stone Mill (OSM) for baking bread. This project developed from his love for geography, his belief in the value of self- production, and his desire to continue his family’s Sunday tradition.
Last summer, Stebbins worked as a wild firefighter in Wyoming, where living alone not only forced him to cook much of his own food, but also to consider the costs of his own consumption levels.
“I’m definitely trying to live more con- sciously and produce whatever I need to in life,” Stebbins said. “Living alone this sum- mer fighting fires made me ask how much of what I’m buying can I produce myself.”
When Stebbins returned to the College in the fall of 2014, this question of produc- tion value, combined with a spontaneous conversation with a friend who brews beer at the OSM, led him to become a tenant at the OSM. “I’m fairly confident that I can cook for myself for the most part, and I thought it would be interesting to learn to bake bread,” Stebbins said. “I’m very in- terested in hard skills like carpentry and metal welding, and the OSM is one of the few spaces to really teach yourself a craft.” He added that, economically speaking, he could bake a better quality pound of bread
OLD
STONE
MILL: MIDD’S CREATIVE HUB
for $1 versus buying a loaf of bread for $2, another benefit of self-production.
Stebbins has made a variety of breads over the past few months but has focused largely on making artisanal breads, im- proving from his first few misshapen loaves to ones that you might see in a pro-
fessional bakery, tweaking recipes to make them his own. Many of his breads are “long rises,” meaning that Stebbins makes the dough, lets it sit for 12 hours to let the yeast rise and then bakes it after. He most often bakes several different sourdough and whole wheat breads. Stebbins explained that bread is divided into two parts: the crust and the inner crumbs. However, add- ing whole wheat into the bread can make it more difficult to create the ideal light and airy crumbs.
“The best trick to make it work is to cook the bread in a cast iron pot. For the first half the steam is held in the pot, which makes the crust hard, and for the second half you take the lid off which allows the moisture to evaporate,” Stebbins said.
Stebbins has also made his own sour- dough bread at the College. He mixes flour and water in a jar and leaves it out, allow- ing the yeast in Middlebury’s air to form in the jar, thus making the sourdough.
“San Francisco sourdough is famous because the yeast in the air is tangy. The yeast colony is specific to location, and as a Geography major I’m super into that,” Stebbins said. “I can make bread from the yeast in the air of the OSM.”
Once the bread is done baking, the ab- sence of preservatives allows it to go stale quickly. So Stebbins often gives it away
to people. “It’s great, you can bring joy to people that easily,” Stebbins said. “It would be cool to bake bread for my kids one day.”
Although Stebbins’ graduation is quickly approaching, he continues to bake bread and experiment with different reci- pes in his off-campus apartment.
“A lot of what you pick up in school stops being useful in the most direct sense, but bread baking is something I plan on doing for the rest of my life,” Stebbins said. “This stemmed from my effort to be more conscious of the world and my impact on it.”
(11/13/14 2:52am)
building located near Otter Creek Falls that was purchased and renovated by the College in 2008. While many students have probably visited the building to grab a cup of coffee at the ground floor business — the Storm Café — the top three floors promote a hub of student creative activity.
The OSM is used by the College to offer students a personal space to explore non-academic creative projects. Each semester, students can apply to be a tenant either at the OSM itself or in the Annex, the other building the program offers. The Annex houses messy art projects such as splatter paint or pottery, whereas the OSM provides space for projects such as novel writing, website coding and book club meetings. For many of its tenants, the OSM also offers seed grants to help support their projects.
“We want it to be a space that empowers students’ creative visions,” said Be n Clark ’16, one of the six OSM board members. The OSM is still accepting applications for next semester at osm@middlebury.edu.
There are many projects at the OSM each semester and sometimes they can continue for over a year. It has grown from an original group of six tenants in its first semester to about 40 tenants this semester, six years since its inauguration. This year’s tenants include a diverse range of projects; from sewing to music rehearsals, culinary pursuits to computer programming, the OSM is undeniably one of the most creative, innovative places on campus. The role of this new, monthly column will be to feature individual projects at the OSM.
One of the OSM’s current tenants is Henry Linehan ’16, a junior at the College who uses his space in the Annex to create spray and splatter paint stencil artwork. An Economics major and Math minor, Linehan is from a small town in Colorado and began working with stencils in the Annex about a year ago.
“I’m big into the Econ and Math scene,” Linehan said. “I felt like that was using one side of my brain and the art part was being completely left out.”
So last spring, after watching several videos on street art and wanting to participate in the movement, Linehan decided to apply for a space in the OSM. He began to experiment with stencils and spray paint by creating the stencils on his computer, printing and cutting them out three pieces of paper thick and then laying them down and spray painting over them.
Recently, Linehan experimented with spray paint and newspaper to create three-dimensional, texturized planets. As we talked, he pulled out his phone to show me a picture of the final product, a beautiful design with a stencil-made image of two people holding hands, a dark blue sky and several planets.
“My creative process is looking around at different things and trying to get my brain to think of them in an artistic way and come up with different ideas, whether that’s just to make somebody laugh, whether it’s a political statement, or whether it’s just a cool thing,” Linehan said.
Over the year, Linehan has tweaked and improved his technique. He found that in his first painting, the paint had soaked through the stencils because he hadn’t made the stencil three pieces of paper thick. He is also considering drawing his own stencils instead of designing them on his computer.
“Generally, I’d like to say it usually looks like I imagined it to look, but every time I do it, you never know what it’s going to look like,” he said. “It’s really cool to see the definition between where you put the paper and where it isn’t. It’s such a clean cut, I like that precision.” He admitted this might be due to his interest in economics and math.
Often, Linehan is able to work in his space with the entire Annex to himself, playing music on his speakers. “The Old Stone Mill gave me the opportunity to have this space, which is the biggest thing,” he said. He usually tries to go to the Annex once or twice a week for a couple hours, which has helped him also with his time management. “The more I keep myself busy, the more efficient I am, so having a spot and forcing myself to go in there makes me more efficient with my schoolwork,” Linehan said.
Although Linehan doesn’t have a favorite piece, he said, “Whatever I’m doing in the moment I get really into that, and then it’s all into the next thing.” The best part of the process for him is laying down the stencils and spray painting over them.
Linehan could see himself continuing his stencil art in the future, not for a living — he is planning on going into Economics — but definitely as a side project and especially during his college career. “College and classes [do not have] tangible results, whereas the results in OSM after you spray it down, it’s right there, that’s the final result,” Linehan said.
For many of its tenants, the space and seed grants provided by the OSM greatly help foster artistic and innovative talents that may be overshadowed by academics, athletics and other school related programs.
“I think really it’s just having a project outside of school. Everyone needs to have one,” Linehan said. “A lot of people get that project in community service or writing for the Campus — whatever it may be, and I find that for me at the Old Stone Mill.”
(10/08/14 11:42pm)
In a letter written in 1819 by Romantic poet John Keats to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, Keats said that “nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced — Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life hast illustrated it.’
The College’s community of poet-performers, Poor Form Poetry, captures this “realness” of poetic experience in their spoken word presentations. They bring to poetry a fourth aspect: performance. Designed to connect with the audience, Poor Form’s poetry is written, work-shopped and then performed in the spoken word style during their on-campus events or, as it has been in the past, national poetry slam competitions. As opposed to spoken word, which involves more storytelling, slam poetry has a much more theatrical element.
Last year, Poor Form Poetry was not as active due to the group’s graduated seniors and the number of juniors studying abroad, but now they are back and already preparing for their upcoming show in November. They are focusing more on the spoken word element but depending on the group’s interests may compete in slam competitions later on.
Meagan Neal ’15 is a senior in the group and, having been involved with the group since her sophomore year, is one of the leading forces this year. Although in her first year of Poor Form the group focused largely on participating in the wider slam poetry college community, Neal said, “we’re making more of an effort to reach out to the college community. We want to have a solid group of poets that really care about each other and each other’s work and then share that with the campus.”
Poor Form’s efforts to integrate themselves into the campus can be seen in the auditions held last month for new members. Out of the nearly twenty people who auditioned, seven were accepted. One of these new members is Andrew Snow ’15, who is also a prominent member of Middlebury’s open mic group Verbal Onslaught.
“As a freshman I was blown away by their skill,” Snow said. “You get to workshop with some amazing poets and I really wanted that atmosphere.”
Emily Luan ’15, another leading senior in the group, was impressed both by the amount of people who showed up and by the poetic skill that she saw.
“There were a lot of really great people, which was a really pleasant surprise,” she said. “We looked for a certain quality of poetry but we also wanted a wide range of voices and styles.”
Now, with more new members than old, Poor Form has done just this: drawing from the student population to create a myriad of talented voices and capping the group at eleven members. Having more poets allows for a more extensive workshop, one of the integral elements of Poor Form.
Workshop, a process practiced in many of the College’s creative writing classes, involves sharing one’s personal, written work with the group and listening to different reactions, praises and critiques. Having a consistent group of people to workshop with twice a week allows for much personal growth as a writer as well as an opportunity to connect within the group and build relationships outside of the College’s traditional academic writing classes.
Poor Form’s members thus develop their writing into spoken word presentations, bringing in the element of performance to create a much wider poetic experience for the audience and, by John Keats’ standards, making it very real for everyone who listens.
It is not easy to perform a personal collection of words in front of an audience. “You don’t know how people will react to your words, especially if it’s personal,” Snow said.
But the upside? “Having that constant inspiration to write is so helpful,” Neal said. “Learning when to raise and lower your voice, when to preserve those sacred, quiet moments in the poem and to transmit feeling and emotion in a way that for me personally isn’t always possible when it’s just words on a page.”
Without campus organizations such as Verbal Onslaught or Poor Form Poetry, there is no available environment to hear what other writers are working on across campus and to hear their sentiments expressed out loud. “It’s absolutely mind blowing to me how good they are,” Snow said. Writing poetry is often a personal experience but poetry itself is an art with the power to inspire, affect, and move others; through Poor Form Poetry, this can happen right at Middlebury.
(10/01/14 11:29pm)
It starts off as a tick in your head: ‘We should definitely do this one day, guys.’ One day — maybe when we’re older, maybe when the circumstances are different and everything seems more nearby. This — an adventure you envision but know you will probably, despite your extreme excitement at the time, never do.
For Stephan Köenigsberger ’16, there was never an implied maybe. After Köenigsberger was inspired by a series of longboarding videos, on Wednesday, Sept. 3, he set out on his longboard and departed from Middlebury for the 5.5 hour trip to Burlington.
“People [told] me I [was] not going to do it, but I love proving people wrong,” said Köenigsberger. “As soon as I got there it hit home. My friends were like whaaaaat?”
When I had the opportunity to sit down with Köenigsberger, he brought his board with him, complete with new purple wheels he had bought at a skate shop during his trip to Burlington. Köenigsberger received a longboard from his grandfather as a high school graduation present and proceeded to master it on streets of his hometown, New York City.
When asked about his passion for skateboarding, Köenigsberger replied, “I couldn’t exactly tell you why. It’s a natural thing. I’m so happy when I step on it,” Köenigsberger said. “You’re not flying, you’re rolling, but you feel like you’re off the ground floating along, and the wind is in your face.”
Bringing only his longboard gear, a GoPro, and a backpack with six bottles of water, four sandwiches, and an apple, Köenigsberger skated through 35 miles of paved back-roads and strips of highway to make his way to Burlington at speeds as high as 45mph.
With no headphones or GPS, Königsberger demonstrated how to unplug in an age when getting from point A to point B is far from independent.
“I wrote down turn at this road, turn at this road, and I stopped a lot of times to ask for directions. It’s sweet to have a destination remembered by directions. If Route 7 ever closed, I’d be like, I got you,” Köenigsberger said. “I just wanted to be there. I didn’t bring headphones on purpose. I was looking around all the time, it was the most beautiful day.”
For Königsberger, traveling alone is often overlooked. “I loved going by myself. You get to know yourself better.”
Königsberger’s journey proved that two of the many great things about adventures are their spontaneity and unpredictability. Not only did Köenigsberger have the opportunity to converse with “Joe,” a Vermont garbage disposal man whom he met during the trip, but after Köenigsberger arrived at Church Street, Burlington, he ran into a friend and a New York Times photographer. After asking a girl to take a picture on his phone that disappointingly turned out to be only of his feet, Köenigsberger was able to get a real photograph of him holding up his longboard.
Köenigsberger epitomizes the need for a persistent positive attitude. “In the universe, awesome attracts awesome,” Köenigsberger said. “If you do things you like, a lot of good things will happen along the way of doing those things.”
A Geology major, Köenigsberger compared his love for longboarding to his love for rocks. Mentioning a massive rock collection, he explained that “I couldn’t exactly tell you why I like rocks either.” He was able to stop and look at some particularly cool ones during his trip.
Köenigsberger’s plans for future longboarding pursuits don’t stop with Burlington: Montreal, Toronto, New York City and even north to south Germany are all potential destinations for the near future.
Montreal could even be happening this coming fall break, but this time Köenigsberger may be joined by two other friends, verifying longboarding’s growing popularity as a campus and group activity. In fact, according to USA Today College, in 2011 a number of student newspaper reports across the nation confirmed longboarding as a frequently used mode of transportation, due mainly to its high speeds, smoothness, and gliding ability, traits that give it an edge over traditional skateboarding.
Königsberger summarizes his experiences so far by saying, “This is possibly the most awesome adventure I’ve ever done. I just want to do ones bigger and better”.
In the meantime, keep a look out for an upcoming video of edited GoPro clips from Köenigsberger’s trip to Burlington. And if you see a guy flying past you on your way to class on a longboard with purple wheels — it is probably Köenigsberger, chasing adventure.