Paul Green, founder of EWU outdoor recreation major, retires

Wearing a Chouinard oiled-wool sweater, wool knickers and knee socks, a bearded Paul Green struggled for respect in 1978 as he defended his proposal for an outdoor recreation major at Eastern Washington University.

The former Air Force survival instructor, climbing and rafting guide who became a professor had just returned from leading students on a mountaineering field trip.

“I’d been at Eastern for nearly three years, but this was the time to make my case before the Faculty Senate and I didn’t have time to change,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t in the faculty Men’s Club. They wore ties back then; and they shaved.”

Despite objections to a curriculum that turned mountains into classrooms and backpacks into school supplies, Green’s arguments prevailed. Along with balls and gym equipment, the Department of Physical Education, Health and Recreation would also need tents, kayaks and carabiners.

“The first rafts we used were $87 Kmart specials with wood frames we made,” said Green, 66, who’s retiring after 40 years at EWU. “In some cases if we didn’t have enough paddles we’d pick up lumber and I’d carve one in the field with a machete.”

Students in those early rafting classes wore wool sweaters and pants rather than wetsuits.

“We’ve had remarkably few accidents considering that we taught things like rock climbing, whitewater rafting and winter survival,” he said. “The most accidents we had involved mountain biking. I was writing up five incident reports a quarter. I quit teaching that.”

“In most cases, we’re working with novices,” he said recalling a student from Chicago who strayed from the group while backpacking in the Bitterroot Mountains.

“She yelled, ‘Bear! Bear!’ A couple of (graduate assistants) and I ran her way. Sure enough, there, with her rag wool sock in its mouth, was a huge marmot.”

That’s just one of hundreds of teaching moments Green recalls in his work of training students for outdoors-related jobs.

“Recreation management is widely versed,” said Matt Chase, who helped teach EWU kayaking classes before becoming co-chair of the department. “Students have gone on to the private sector, the tourism industry, municipalities, the military, working with nonprofits like the YMCA or opening their own businesses.”

Green’s students open to packing guns have gone on to be Fish and Wildlife enforcement officers and park rangers. “I’m working today to try to fill a position for a ranger to lead the bear orientations at Brooks Camp (in Katmai National Park, Alaska),” he said Tuesday.

Eastern’s program will certainly evolve from the one that’s been shaped by Green as new people take over, Chase said. But Green helped blaze the trail of acceptance for outdoor recreation as a viable academic choice for students.

“(Green) and people like Paul Petzoldt were among the initial cadre to come online in academic circles with research on the value of outdoor education to the industry and what outdoor recreation means to the economy,” Chase said.

Green grew up in Florida hunting, fishing and learning watersports with his family.

“My dad was ahead of his time,” he said. “He had us picking up garbage when we were recreating; everyone else tossed it out their car window.

“I got into climbing on an old lighthouse that had missing bricks we could use as holds for a route.”

He was inspired by his first exposure to a climbing magazine and the highs climbers could reach. The next summer he was in Colorado to take a climbing course.

“I saw a rope in a Denver mountain shop window and they sold it to me for $30, which was a lot of money for me. When I got to the class, the instructors took it away and threw it in the trash. They said they just saved my life. The rope was faded, stiff and had probably been in that window decaying in the sun for years.”

After advancing to become a climbing guide, Green joined the Air Force and qualified as a survival instructor, which trained him in new skills including whitewater rafting.

His first inclination to become an academic occurred while serving in Vietnam.

“I was just in from the field and was told to be a driver for some university professors who were there for secret research,” Green recalled. “I was used to a lot of rough talk and F-bombs, but these guys were articulate, smooth and smart. I wanted to be like that.”

He sought guidance from higher-education instructors, including Jim Black at Eastern. “He gave me a list of things I needed to accomplish to get a college position including getting published,” Green said. “So I started knocking them off.”

He earned a master’s degree in outdoor education at the University of Northern Colorado and a doctorate at the University of Oregon in outdoor recreation by the time he helped start the outdoor rec major at Eastern.

“Paul knew students had to start from the ground floor in outdoor recreation, too,” Chase said. “They couldn’t just jump into a supervisory position without learning the entry-level skills like backpacking and rafting and working in the field.”

EWU’s curriculum also started from a basic level.

“When I came in 1975, the school had a trip to Upper Priest Lake, half hiking, half canoeing. The group had to make a 3-by-3-foot rock oven for cooking with fire and coals. It was old-school maximum impact camping. That’s all changed to leave no trace.

“Part of our goal is to educate students to educate the public about the outdoors.”

Green’s insight into recreation trends and public opinion spread from the university to the community.

He said he volunteered, with the help of his students, to lead more than 3,000 youth-at-risk, physically challenged youth and other kids on adventure activities during his tenure at Eastern.

He conducted a survey and research that laid the foundation for grooming cross-country ski trails and building the Selkirk Lodge at Mount Spokane State Park.

His legal research led to the acquisition of property for John H. Shields Climbing Park, better known as Minnehaha Rocks near Upriver Dam.

Steamboat Rock and Sun Lakes state parks were expanded after Green documented that unregulated camping was damaging riparian areas and fish and wildlife habitat in the channeled scablands. “I generated a lot of information to justify expanding the parks to concentrate camping and protect those areas,” he said.

Green helped Washington lawmakers write a bill that set standards for whitewater river guides after a drowning in the Wenatchee River.

He started the outdoor program for Fairchild Air Force Base. “The Air Force saw it as an investment in safety,” he said. “These are young adventuresome people.”

During his tenure, Green provided expert opinion in about 200 legal cases, including the case of a Gonzaga University student who died of hypothermia in a group kayaking trip to Rock Lake in 2012.

“I wrote a report that found everyone was at fault in that sad case,” he said, including the city parks, the university as well as the victim, who’d kayaked previously and knew about the hazards of the sport.

“Assumption of risk” is a term outdoor service providers should understand as well as consumers who purchase those services, he said.

“We learn from everything that happens, good and bad, every step along the way,” he said. “Risk management was unheard of when we started the outdoor rec major. Now it’s critical.

“It was about 1985 when insurance companies started hiring outdoor recreation experts for risk management analysis. When I’ve had students who were good at math, I’ve pointed them that direction.”

Risk management also factors into his classes.

He dropped an advanced whitewater rafting class after realizing the curriculum didn’t allow students to gain the skills for that high level of hazard.

By 2002, everyone in a raft had to wear a helmet. “There’s a danger of falling out of the raft and hitting a rock, although we learned that most head injuries on raft trips were from getting hit with a paddle.”

Gloves became a whitewater rafting requirement. “If your hands go numb, it affects your ability to catch a rescue rope or swim to safety,” he said.

“I don’t let people wear sandals on rafting grips for fear of foot entrapment.

“It’s all part of risk management. You can’t eliminate the risk of pursuing outdoor sports, but you can manage the risk.”

An unavoidable close call involved the Spokane sewage treatment plant accident that killed a worker in 2004.

“I was on the Spokane with students and we came around the bend into the stretch where 220,000 gallons of pooh was flushing into the river,” he said. “Frantic workers were yelling at us to look for the missing man. We tried, but he was not in the river; they found him up in the tank.

“When we got out at Riverside State Park, I took the students to where there was a fire hose. They had pooh between their toes inside their wetsuit booties. Everybody had to strip and get hosed down. Then the sheriff came down and arrested us as a hazmat issue. It was a while before we got released.

Courses offered by Green, including survival classes, have appealed to the public beyond the university.

He taught a Wilderness First Responder medical training class for 20 years. “It’s a tough class, required for majors, but we also had EMTs, sheriff deputies and others coming in to take it.

“Eastern may be the only public university that includes search-and-rescue management as a class,” said Green, who’s served on the board of directors for the National Association for Search and Rescue. “As a result, we have graduates working in that field.

“Our program has a good record with Fish and Wildlife. Our students like to go into the woods and that’s a plus. And our students who hire on with Fish and Wildlife like their jobs. If I were young, I’d like that job, too. They give you a truck. That would be cool.”

He said students have changed over the years noting “They’re more sophisticated. Information and the world are at their fingertips in the tech age, although I had to make a rule that if they bring out a cell phone in class or the field they lose 5 percent of their grade.”

Grading papers, projects and tests – about 100 of them in the last week of May alone – won’t be missed as he eases into retirement, Green says.

“What I’ll miss most are the students,” he said, noting that their energy and youthfulness kept him on his toes.

“But you can’t let your guard down,” he said.

“On one trip, we’d just pulled off the Spokane River and the guys were putting the boats up when a female student from Poland, instead of going over in the bushes, came up on shore beside them and peeled off her wetsuit and clothes.

“The boys were so distracted they heaved the raft up and clear over the trailer. Somebody could have been hurt.”