“Once You’re in the DOC, You Never Really Leave”

They told me to run up the mountain.
What I didn’t expect was to fall for it — completely!

My relationship with the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC ) began the summer after my first year, thanks to a gentle nudge from my cross-country ski coach, Martha Rockwell. She suggested I spend the summer working at Moosilauke, running up and down the mountain to train for race season. I said yes, assuming I’d come away stronger, faster, more race-ready.

But what I found was so much more than physical conditioning.

I fell in love with the mountain. Not just the peak, but the misty mornings, the smell of pine, the creak of bunk beds, the laughter echoing from the Lodge kitchen. I fell in love with the people; earnest, muddy, hilarious, tender-hearted. And I fell hard for the DOC itself; this crazy, wonderful club that seemed to run like invisible mycelium under the entire campus: surfacing in cabins, trip logistics, trails, paddles, gear piles, and stories that everyone seemed to carry like talismans.

When I got back to campus that fall, there was no going back. I became a director of Trips for Cabin and Trail, joined the Timber Team, learned to run whitewater with Ledyard, and served on the Trail Crew that built the Al Merrill ski loop. I kept skiing for Dartmouth. Back then, the ski team was still proudly nestled within the DOC  and I eventually spent a year as DOC president. The week after I graduated, I found myself sea kayaking off the southern coast of Korea, paddling 600 miles from Mokpo to Busan with a group of Ledyard friends.

It sounds like a whirlwind — and it was — but it also felt inevitable. Once you’ve known the DOC at its best, there’s no real exit. You just keep finding new ways to show up.

Now, all these years later, I still feel most like myself in DOC spaces. I host VHOC feeds at my house each term. This past winter, a group came by after skiing under the lights at Oak Hill. There was chili, and cider, and the same kind of laughter that once rang out at Moosilauke decades ago. I serve on advisory boards for Ledyard, Oak Hill Outdoor Center, and the Moosilauke Advisory Committee. These aren’t just meetings. They’re touchstones and   reminders of the community that raised me.

What I love most about the DOC is its multi-generational magic. Sitting at a dinner table at the Lodge, sharing stories with students and alumni of all ages, I’m always struck by how the club continues to evolve while holding true to its roots, connection, stewardship, adventure, and trust.

And the outdoors? For me, it’s never been just about fresh air or exercise. Being outside sharpens my senses and softens my heart. Meals taste better. The sky feels wider. The world makes more sense. Most of all, the outdoors has gifted me enduring friendships: the kind forged in wet socks, shared portages, late-night singing, and mutual reliance. Last summer, I paddled a remote river in Quebec with friends I met through Ledyard decades ago. We’ve kayaked the Grand Canyon together. We’ve navigated the Korean archipelago. And now, we still paddle, still laugh, still trust.

If I had any advice to offer today’s students (though, truthfully, I learn more from you than you could ever learn from me), it would be this:
Bring a journal. Even when you’re cold, tired, muddy — especially then. Write down a detail or two at the end of each day. Later, those pages will bring you right back to the rock you sat on, the joke someone cracked, the way the stars looked that night.
And finally: pack an extra chocolate bar. And a pair of dry wool socks. Someone will need them.

Maybe even you!

Blog by Emmanuel Dey' 28

                 Fiddles, Footpaths, and Forty Years with the Dartmouth Outing Club.

I was an outdoor enthusiast before I got to Dartmouth. We lived in Durango, Colorado during my formative years (my dad’s job was doing soil surveys on Indian reservations). My siblings and I were out backpacking in the San Juans before “backpacking” was even a thing. That love of mountains probably explains why Dartmouth was the only Eastern school I applied to.

Still, I fell in love with Northern New England,  and I never left, except for law school in DC. My wife and I now live in a small one-room schoolhouse about three miles north of campus, where we’ve been for over forty years.

I’d never been east of North Carolina before my First-Year Trip. I joined Cabin & Trail right away and never looked back. As a freshman, I walked the 50-mile Trailwalk from Moosilauke to Hanover and liked it so much I did it 15 more times, the last around age 50. At some point it stopped being about endurance and became about rhythm and belonging.

I spent a summer on Trail Crew (our foreman was Jim “Porkroll” Taylor ’74), then served as Trips Director senior year, organizing weekend outings. I led First-Year Trips every year, even as an alum into the mid-1980s, back when leaders weren’t in such high demand.

A huge change during my years was coeducation. My sister Ann was in the first class of women (’76). Some argued that letting women into the DOC would ruin the camaraderie. I thought otherwise: mostly because I wanted my sister to come. Fifty years later, its clear coeducation only strengthened the Club.

After graduation, I spent several summers working for the Outdoor Programs Office: at the Second College Grant (including sawing down trees for the Hellgate Gorge cabin), and at the old Ravine Lodge, which was nearly abandoned before Al Merrill revived it. I was trail crew head one year, Lodge Manager another (not a great one, I admit). I remember climbing Moosilauke at sunrise for the Bicentennial in 1976, waving the flag at the summit. Or shivering in late October, racing to finish a roof before winter, ducking into a walk-in refrigerator to warm up because it was 15 degrees outside.

Music was always with me too. My grandfather was a hillbilly fiddle player, and I picked it up at Dartmouth. I fiddled at Ravine Lodge dances and carried my violin eig

ht miles to Desolation on First-Year Trips, starting a tradition of musical trip visitations that lasted until COVID. One trippee later asked me to play fiddle at a NH Bar Association seminar I was speaking at — which became a 30-year tradition of mixing music with law.

Today my official DOC roles are modest: I coordinate Appalachian Trail boundary monitoring between Hanover and Moosilauke, and I’ve served on the Moosilauke Advisory Committee since 1980. A couple years ago, at 70, I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Hanover, it gave me a deep sense of how our DOC-maintained section fits into the whole.

What do I love about the outdoors? Beyond beauty, it teaches humility, improvisation, solitude, and responsibility. In truth, the worst crisis the Earth faces is climate change. And the best way to feel motivated to act is to have meaningful experiences outdoors. Dartmouth offers that in abundance.

As I wrote in my book-in-progress Cosmorality – Ethics Transcending The False Moral Frontier between “Us” and “Nature”,

“Wilderness can help dissolve the Frontier Mindset by planting in us a sense of kinship with nonhuman life. It awakens us to our moral obligations toward the living systems beyond ourselves. The point is not to escape into wilderness, but to carry that ethic everywhere.”

So my advice to students is simple: go outside. Often. Don’t worry how fast or far. Pay attention. Let the mountains, mud, and music work on you. That awareness will last far beyond your four years here.

Blog by Emmanuel Dey'28