Tenderfoot fair trade learning lab
sustainability | self-reliance | affordability in higher education
Category: Uncategorized
Purple for the People!
My high school commencement speaker told my graduating class that high school was the last time in our lives when we’d spend so much time co-mingling with people from every social status and sector of society. Look to your left, look to your right….
Falling Down Is For Everyone
by Lindsey Rudibaugh When you fall down in the woods, you get dirt and twigs in unfortunate places. It makes you angry. It leaves you bruised, scraped up, embarrassed. Feeling defeated. Feeling triumphant. The ‘ol fall-down-and-get-back-up adage is perhaps a little tired, but lately…
Excuse me, where’s your kitchen?
by Lindsey Rudibaugh It’s 4 am. I awoke at 3:00, painfully aware of some pressing biological needs. I tried ignoring all of them in favor of sleep, but after a short 5 minutes I (very) begrudgingly found my headlamp and TP in the dark,…
The First Third
We’ve hiked 870 miles of the Appalachian Trail. That’s more than one third! (By 140 miles if you’re looking for specifics.) Bill Bryson, considered an authority on the AT based on his wildly popular book A Walk in the Woods, only hiked a third…
High Alert & High Adventure
Realistic expectations are a good defense against disappointment, so when planning our thru-hike, we read as much as we could about what we should expect. Several previous hikers said that life on the Trail is constant misery, or at the very least mild discomfort,…
New Realities: The First Two Trail Weeks
We’ve been nomadic forest-dwellers for more than two full weeks now, the longest either of us has ever spent camping or backpacking. Two weeks isn’t much out of a 6-month stint, but it’s been enough time to notice our brains wrapping around our new…
Hitched and Hiking!
by Lindsey Rudibaugh My family has a long tradition of celebrating the first day of spring with a picnic. No matter the weather, my mom loads up picnic baskets with chicken salad sandwiches, a variety of other mayonnaise-based dishes, puppy chow, root beer, what…
Walking and Dangerous
by Lindsey Rudibaugh Once upon a time, Travis got a haircut he really liked. Then, as he reports happens too often, the woman who gave him this great haircut told him she was leaving that particular salon. He sat there in her chair, taking in…
Why Tenderfoot?
What’s in a name? Allow us to explain! Choosing a name for our non-profit was not something we took lightly. In fact, laboring over it set us back weeks in progress toward getting formally established. These weeks were punctuated by Lindsey walking through the…