Botany and Ecology of the West Champlain Hills
Three Weekends: June 6-7 | July 11-12 | August 29-30
Instructors: Jerry Jenkins, Brett Engstrom, and John Davis
$1300 (or $450 per weekend if space is available)
Food included. Camping or bunkhouse lodging depending on field base
Headquartered in Wadhams, NY
The West-Champlain Hills are a group of 35 to 40 medium-elevation, igneous hills found along the west shore of Lake Champlain from Ticonderoga to Port Kent. They are thin-soiled, ice-plucked, steep, summer-dry, and cliffy. They have ancient rocks and an oak-zone flora rich in calcium and xeric indicators. Considered in combination with the marble hills of east Vermont, they arguably contain more ecologically specialized species and regional rarities than any other community in the eastern half of the Northern Forest Region. They are also wonderful places to be, summer and winter: lovely glades and cliffs, rich forests, open summits, views east to the Greens, views west to the High Peaks.
John Davis has lived and rambled in them for thirty years and knows them inside and out. Jerry discovered the calcareous flora — which was not supposed to be here—in 2003 and have been returning ever since. Brett, a grass lover from the sand hills of Florida, thinks they have the richest graminoid flora in the eastern NFR and can’t stay away. We have wanted for years to teach in them.
Last year, the Traveling School of Botany visited North Boquet, for a taste. This year we will return for three weekends, using a single field base, and will study four hills and perhaps 150 indicator species, 70 of them regionally rare or uncommon. It will be, we can promise, some of the richest and most fascinating botany you can find in the north.
The course will be taught as a series of exercises, in the field and in the lab, involving exploration, plant hunting, drawing, comparison, guesswork, and diagnosis. There will also be short daily lectures on biogeography and pattern. We will focus on three or four hills, rotating between them and following the progress of the season. We also plan an informal 10-mile paddle, open to all, along the shore of Split Rock in mid-September, to see the late summer flora and view the shores and cliffs from the lake. We will start at the beginning, with the structure and ecology of the commonest species and go from there to harder and less common ones. There are no prerequisites, but we warn you that this is a mid-level course and there will be a lot of ecology and Latin flying around; some background in botany will help.
Offered jointly by the North Branch Nature Center’s Biodiversity University, Northern Forest Atlas Project, and Champlain Area Trails.
Course Details
About the Instructors
Brett Engstrom is a Field Naturalist graduate, a working botanical surveyor who has lived in and studied rocky hills for 30 years, a co-teacher, with Jerry Jenkins, of many Biodiversity University and Eagle Hill courses, and a co-author, with him, of the Grasses of the Northern Forest.
John Davis is an author, naturalist, long-distance trekker, and conservationist who lives at the foot of Coon Mountain and has worked for and with Adirondack conservation groups for many years. His treks have taken him over 15,000 miles, by foot, boat and bicycle, in North America, looking at landscape protection and wildlife corridors.
Jerry Jenkins is a botanist and ecologist who has worked in the Adirondacks since 1978. He free-lanced as a survey biologist for many years, and then did research and produced imagery and books, first for the WCS Adirondack Program and now for the Northern Forest Atlas Project. He is the author and illustrator of the Atlas field guides and digital projects. He did the first botanical surveys of the Champlain Hills in the 2000-oughts and has been studying them ever since.
Recommended Reading
- Field Guide to the Woody Plants of the Northern Forest – Jerry Jenkins, 2025.
- Digital resources, crib sheets, and Atlas Guides available at Northern Forest Atlas.
- These resources and more will be supplied for students during the course.
- Learn more about the ecology of the Champlain Hills region here.
Location & Timing
The course will be residential at a field base in Wadhams, NY, with hills out the door. Field sites will vary each day. The facility has an indoor classroom and a kitchen, and camping or a bunkhouse, depending on which field base we use. We will run a shuttle from the from the Charlotte-Essex ferry if you want to come over on foot.
The course begins 8 AM on Saturday and concludes each day by 5 pm.
Meals
Food is included, and will feature local, organic, mostly vegetarian group meals prepared on site by our chief of camp, first mate, quartermaster, and general roustabout John Davis. Dinners will feature our traveling pizza oven.
Lodging
Lodging is either camping only, or with possible rustic cabins available depending on the field base.
Physical Requirements
Participants must be able to walk about 2 miles over the course of each day, sometimes off trail over uneven and potentially muddy terrain. Participants should be comfortable outside in potentially hot, muggy, wet, and/or buggy conditions for long periods of time. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about mobility and/or other accessibility needs.
Academic Credit & Professional Development
This course may qualify for 3 graduate-level credits for an additional $450 course fee. All BioU courses are accredited by Vermont State University’s Center for Schools. Participants interested in receiving credit must contact us immediately after registration so we have time to arrange course accreditation. It is the student’s responsibility to ensure that home institutions will accept the credit. Participants pursuing academic credit will be required to complete an additional assignment above and beyond the course hours, including literature review, reflective writing, or a field-based project.
This course qualifies for 48 hours of professional development hours and continuing education units. Certificates of completion are provided upon request at the conclusion of the course.
Financial Support
We have financial support available for most courses! Please head to our Financial Support page to learn more and request financial support. Support is limited, but we do our best to make sure that participants are not turned away for financial reasons. Since many courses fill quickly, we suggest submitting your financial support request after registering for the course if you are able. Or you may email us after submitting your request to ask us to temporarily hold a space for you.
Cancellation Policy
While we realize that unexpected circumstances arise that are out of our control, North Branch Nature Center cannot guarantee refunds for registrations cancelled within 30 days of the course. If a cancellation occurs within this window, NBNC will attempt to fill the space from our wait list and provide a full refund. If the course needs to be cancelled by NBNC, we will provide a full refund.