Description
A Walking Culture: Hut Systems from Across the World to Sonoma County
An evening with Hut Aficionado Sam Demas
Tuesday, June 18
5:00-7:00pm
A multimedia presentation, followed by Q&A and refreshments
Join Sam Demas, a worldwide researcher and aficionado of hut-to-hut trekking systems, as he takes his audience on a journey around the world with photos and tales of innovative hut systems. Sam has first-hand experience with dozens of hut systems and will be visiting Sonoma County to envision how a trekking system could benefit our local community, ecology, and economy.
Location: Santa Rosa Community College (SRJC), Lark Hall, Room 2004
Directions & parking: Lark Hall is home to the SRJC Planetarium, located on the main campus. Permit parking is located on Planetarium Way, adjacent to Lark Hall. Free street parking is located a five minute walk away on Armory Drive. Please carpool if you can! You can find a campus map HERE.
This event is hosted by LandPaths and the SRJC Bio Club
What's the Big Deal About Huts?
Hut systems allow people across the world to undertake long distance walking trips without carrying their homes on their backs, but they represent much more than simple shelter. Hut systems can be used as infrastructure for educational and therapeutic programs, as agents of economic development in rural areas, as portals for nature immersion experiences for under-served minorities, as supports for emerging spiritual development of a new generation of environmental pilgrims, as programs for developing outdoor and stewardship skills, and as agents in community-building around responsible land stewardship.
Sam will present a clear and simple picture of how huts, a comparatively small presence in USA, can contribute to the civilizational imperative of cultivating a sense of bio philia in American citizens. His message will be supported by photos, data, and examples from the field--as well as an overview of trends in the development of new hut systems in USA, New Zealand and Europe.
Who is Sam Demas?
Sam has researched and experienced hut-to-hut travel in its many forms across the globe.
After over 40 years working in college and university libraries, Sam’s reinspirement project is studying huts. He travels the world learning how other nations shelter long distance human powered travelers. He writes about what he learns and puts it on his website, hut2hut.info. The hope is that it will inform a small but growing conversation about the future of huts in the USA. He and his partner Laurel Bradley are visiting every American hut system as research for the first-ever guidebook to huts in the USA, to be published in 2020 by Mountaineers Books of Seattle. Sam’s hope is that through artful environmental education we can more intentionally leverage the phenomenal American interest in recreation to create a new generation of outdoor citizens committed to land conservation and to an ethos of biophilia in our society.
Sam enjoys visiting communities to present illustrated talks and lead discussions about hut systems around the world, how they operate, and how they are rooted in the terrain and culture of the places they exist. He believes hut systems are successful to the extent they reflect and grow out of an authentic sense of the place through which they travel and in which they offer immersion experiences. Sam also does occasional consulting on management and program planning, strategic planning, and organizational development with folks who are planning and operating hut systems.