Mary Dawson, a Middlesex Township resident, is curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.I worked at a girls camp in Wyoming. It was called Teton Valley Ranch.A lot of the kids that went there were from the Eastern parts. We took the train out and picked up kids along the way. There were a bunch of kids from the Detroit area and the Chicago area.It was one of these camps that was not structured, so the kids could do what they wanted, but the thing that stimulated them to take part was a rough rider program (in which they) progressed so many degrees in shooting, riding, etc.They got points, so it was a big deal for the girls to become a rough rider. It was actually sealed with a trail ride, without saddles.I was teaching various aspects of this, and I was one of the counselors in one of the cabins. My girls were the early teenagers, the 13- and 14-year-olds, so it was a wonderful age, because they were real into it.

We went up on pack trips in the mountains with mule trains. We climbed up to the tops of some of the lower mountains — no real mountaineering, but we did a lot of hiking.Because it was outdoors, it was tenting, a lot of hiking. As a paleontologist who went in the field frequently to do the fieldwork, it was the same sort of skills. You were hiking, you were tenting, you were using the backpacking skills that I learned pretty well when I was teaching at that camp.I’ve gone into fairly remote areas on horseback in order to collect fossils, and I certainly used the skills that I learned at camp.