20 Best Outdoor Colleges In America

Only an hour from Olympic National Park, Evergreen State College is an experimental public liberal arts college where there are over sixty emphases to choose from, covering everything from biology and art history to somatic studies and sustainability. Not only is Evergreen considered one of the best colleges on the West Coast, as ranked by The Princeton Review and the U.S. News and World Report, but Evergreen has over a thousand acres of land that serves as a natural lab for scientific field research. Whether you’re inspired by the Puget Sound, the Pacific Ocean, Mount Rainier, or all three, Evergreen is in the middle of it all.

Boise is home to many ski resorts, miles of hiking and mountain biking trails, gnarly rock climbing walls, and zippy rivers. Outside Magazine named it one of the “Best River Towns in America” and Boise has been ranked as one of the healthiest, most active cities in the U.S. A major public research university, Boise State University has an enrollment of nearly twenty-three thousand undergrads and offers over two hundred degrees. In and near Boise there are over 130 miles of hiking and biking trails, twenty-five miles of Boise River Greenbelt, over two thousand acres of skiable terrain, and nine mountain summits of over twelve thousand feet, called the 12ers.

A land-grant, space-grant, research university, the University of Arkansas is situated in the middle of the Boston Mountains, part of the Ozark Mountain range. Like some of the other schools on our list, the University of Arkansas encourages their students to get outside by renting out camping, hiking, and climbing gear. One of the main colleges within the university, the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences, encompasses the School of Human Environmental Science and offers nearly five hundred scholarships annually. There are hundreds of hiking trails, swimmable lakes, and kayakable rivers in the Ozarks.

The flagship university in the University of California system, UC Berkeley is a public research university and is considered one of the best in the world, and in under four hours of driving you can stand in one of the most beautiful, inspiring valleys in the world: Yosemite. If climbing up El Capitan isn’t of interest, and you’d rather pull on a wetsuit, California’s coast offers an array of surfing and snorkeling options. Or, if you don’t want to venture too far, Berkeley’s campus contains many wooded areas, including its renowned eucalyptus grove, which has the tallest stand of hardwood trees in all of North America. UC Berkeley is a world-renowned institution; faculty and alumni have won seventy-two Nobel prizes, eight Field Medals, and eleven Pulitzers, in addition to Turing Awards, Olympic gold medals, and more.

Portland, Oregon is only a short drive from innumerable hiking trails, climbing routes, ski resorts, and major national parks and forests. Reed College is a very small (there are only 1,400 undergrads) private, liberal arts college known for its forested canyon nature preserve at the center of campus. The Reed Outdoor Programs and Education (ROPE) center offers students the opportunity to get outside in a number of ways, from gear rental to student-led backpacking trips, from whitewater kayaking trips to rock climbing ventures. Through the backpack co-op, students are free to rent all kinds of gear—snowshoes, clothes, trail anthologies, maps, and so much more—to get them out into the Pacific Northwest landscape.

Middlebury College is a small, private, liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont. With an acceptance rate of less than twenty percent, Middlebury is highly competitive. Despite the small size of the undergrad population, however, students come from all over the U.S. and from dozens of countries all over the world, and it was ranked fourth best liberal arts college by U.S. News and World Report this year. Located on the foothills of the Green Mountains and east of the Champlain Valley, Middlebury College places strong emphasis on sustainability and even offers the opportunity to live in a Solar Decathlon home.

Only a little over an hour’s drive to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff’s mild weather and varied terrain brings in a slew of hikers, climbers, campers, runners, and mountain bikers. Northern Arizona University’s Flagstaff campus hosts twenty thousand undergrads with the largest amount of students enrolled in elementary education, biology, and nursing. Northern Arizona offers its students many opportunities to get outdoors, even renting gear such as mountain bikes. There are also numerous certifications and trips for the outdoorsy, including backpacking trips in the Grand Canyon, wilderness first responder courses, Verde River rafting expeditions, Havasupai Falls backpacking trips, challenge course facilitator certification, and Leave No Trace training. Northern Arizona University is unique in that it offers its students the Pledge Program, which guarantees the same tuition rate for all four years.

Known mostly for its dense Mormon population, Salt Lake City is in the nexus of several mountain ranges and glacial-carved canyons. Winter sports—notably, snowboarding and skiing—are extremely popular, and so there are numerous ski resorts in or near Salt Lake. But if snow isn’t your thing, the mountains and rivers of Salt Lake provide the opportunity to hike, camp, rock climb, mountain bike, fish, boat, and more. The University of Utah is situated right in the middle of it all. With more than one hundred undergraduate majors and nearly one hundred graduate programs, the university is a major public research institution known for its scholarly achievements: numerous Rhodes Scholars, Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and more have graduated from the University of Utah.

The flagship campus in the University of Alaska system, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) is a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant institution. Being that the campus is located only two-hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, it is a university known for its arctic and northern research. In fact, UAF is comprised of several major research units: the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station; the Geophysical Institute; the International Arctic Research Center; the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center; the Institute of Arctic Biology; the Institute of Marine Science; and the Institute of Northern Engineering. With the White Mountains, the Alaska Range, and the Yukon River all in reach, UAF students find themselves proximal to a specific kind of adventure—that of untramped wilderness.

Situated between the edge of the Redwoods and the Pacific coast, Humboldt State University is comprised of three colleges: the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences College; the Professional Studies College; and the Natural Resources and Sciences Colleges. Additionally, Humboldt boasts a number of off-campus facilities, including a wildlife care facility, a natural history museum, an art gallery, a mountain-top astronomical observatory, a marine biology research center, and more. Humboldt offers nearly fifty undergraduate majors and has notoriously small classes with an average twenty students. For those looking to be close to the ocean and thousand-year-old forests, Humboldt is an affordable choice.