 How do you get somebody interested in something so unknown? We're sitting on a mountain top about 12,000 feet on a property I purchased in 1982, and where I've been living ever since. Geographers do a lot of different things. What pulls us together as a discipline is this curiosity of the distribution of phenomena in space. Why am I sitting in grass here instead of in a forest? Pretty simple, simple-minded question, but a really wonderful, complex explanation. I've been teaching at UVM between 2010 and 2012, and when I came back to Ecuador, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to maintain the relationship with the geography department? Well, let's do something that is novel for students, but also a passion of my own. What would tie us together was this question of part of our origins. I signed up for this course because I thought that it would be really cool to actually go and experience what students are teaching us about outdoors and actually be learning through the environment. Is it simply the climate? Is it the rigors of climate? Or is there something else going on that we haven't really taken into adequate consideration? And that is the presence of human beings. Now, if you find charcoal in soil or sediments, deep sediments that represent a point 15,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, your question has to be what was burning and who burned it? If we include fire and specifically anthropic fire in our calculation of grass partimo, wow, it means that in fact fire is necessary to the conservation and health of the partimo grasslands. The strange fact is Ecuador law, Ecuadorian law, as is true in the other Andean countries, prohibits the burning of grass partimo. So what we need to do is not only understand the science of grass partimo, the history and the science of grass partimo, but convince the society of what we've learned. You need to burn partimo in order for these seeds to get to the ground in Germany. If I just imagine a partimo that hasn't been burned in 15 or 20 years, the seed falls on it and none of the seeds actually even reach the ground. The idea of going to these three national parks is to see the whole range of expressions of grass partimo and partimo in general between the forest line where it starts and the snow line where it ends at higher elevation. We are on Chimborazo. We just hiked up here. We're now at 5100 meters and there's not a lot of oxygen. It's really a special privilege to go someplace on the earth that is so extreme that flowering plants can no longer exist. You could go to Antarctica to see the same thing in terms of latitude, but here we're seeing it in terms of altitude. If I were to ask what would be my favorite part of giving this course, I would have to say it is seeing students out of their element in essence defeating all of their personal demons about being outside their elements. What is Stu teaching us? Patience, adaptability, and also all about this paramount landscape we found ourselves in. Look at that. That's reason enough to come for me. So there's a lot of new things that sort of knock you off your spot and I love, within limits of course, but I love that students are knocked off their spot and that they deal with it and they come out at the end of the course transformed and much more confident in themselves, but expectant that whatever is new and stretches them in some way is attractive and not to be avoided. It exposes you to a ton of different stuff you never really knew you were interested until you did it. For example, taking this course has made me realize I want environmental sciences to be my double major and I think I never would have decided that unless I had come up here and hung out with Stu and learned all about it. As I hope, it has transformed lives. I think students have been affected deeply in their own personal ways by this experience of just a week over spring break.