Santa Barbara is a modern day Elysium for any college student, and all you have to do is step outside your door to figure out that much. Isla Vista has A-OK weather, prime placement between the beach and mountains, conveniently located convenience stores and a population of good-looking and amiable students. It’s easy to fall into a routine here, and it’s even easier to take our unique niche for granted. To fully appreciate all that is offered here, it helps to experience the end of the spectrum. That’s where Death Valley can assist.

Death Valley National Park is Isla Vista’s antithesis, as their only common denominator is sand. The air is dry, the roads are washboards, the surrounding mountains are daunting and the valley is one of the last places you would ever want to be stranded. Cell phone service is nonexistent, as is water and any humidity. The park rangers have never heard of games like Gaucho Ball or King’s Cup. The only game they play is survival. The skunks and raccoons that plague Isla Vista are welcomed friends compared to the coyotes and mountain lions that roam the valley’s mountainsides.

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There is a point in some hikes when doubt creeps in and you question whether you are on the right trail or not. When you choose a path at a fork in the road, sometimes a premonition will creep in and, if it is strong enough, convince you to take the other route. It’s a similar sensation to the itchiness that comes upon the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. It’s as if you inherently know what is likely to happen. However, this isn’t always the case.

Sometimes you fail to take the right path and are forced to rely on your bearings to navigate home. Sometimes you end up on a road four miles from your car and have to run back because the sun is setting. Sometimes you’re Liam Neeson, lost and fighting off a pack of wolves in the Alaskan wilderness. Let’s hope that last one isn’t the case. It took me three times to successfully navigate this week’s trail, but this set of directions will allow you to do it in one.

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It’s a new year and only two weeks into the new quarter you may have found yourself already behind schedule on the 2 million pages of reading your professors have so thoughtfully deemed necessary. Time management is the name of the game with a heavy winter course load, and it can be an anxiety-inducing struggle to balance your academic, social and professional lives. This is where I tell you to shrug priorities off for a bit and spend several hours sauntering around our resplendent wilderness. At this point, you may ask, “Why should I spend my precious weekend hours hiking in the woods?” Let me count the ways:

Sunny skies. This incredible weather won’t last forever, and eventually the winter rain and spring wind will be upon us. Take advantage of the 70 F weather and sun while you can. That’s not to say wait until poor weather to study or attempt ceiling-less outdoor snappa, but plan your weekend to hit the mountains on Saturday and the books or beers on Sunday, or vice versa.

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Walking through Isla Vista, one notices a common theme draped across balconies and hung up in living rooms: the American flag. It makes me proud to see that “The Stars and Stripes” have become a staple piece of décor in our patriotic city by the sea. As we go into this unique American holiday, it is important to spend some time remembering where we have come from and what it means to be an American. With such a diverse population, it can be difficult to assign a singular identity to an immense group of peoples. However, every American, from Columbus to I.V.’s own Pirate, share one thing in common: America’s landscape. The concept of our environment has evolved since the first Thanksgiving, and with it, the collective identity of Americans has adapted.

In the late 1700s, with the emergence of the Declaration of Independence and our government, Americans were assigned with the difficult task of forming a new identity from a vastly diverse pool of immigrants. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, a Frenchman who wrote of the New World for European understanding, aptly described Americans as Europeans transformed by the American environment. In Crevecoeur’s essays “Letters from an American Farmer,” he said both the American citizen and their environment were crude, unsophisticated and strongly steeped in inexhaustibility. Thomas Jefferson, our nation’s third president, took advantage of the idea of inexhaustibility with Manifest Destiny. He was our first president to shift focus from our European ancestors and look westward for expansion. With a new perspective on America’s landscape, toward expansion rather than colonization, our identity changed again.

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Everyone has their own personal well of strength that they draw from. They draw from its depths in everyday life and during hardships. It is the strength from this well that pushes us to not just survive, but to find our niche and thrive. While our personal wells may differ in depth and magnitude, we all have a common source that is open to all and rarely drawn from: the wilderness. It demands strength, and grants it. Summiting a mountain is no easy feat, but the pride swells in your chest when you realize there is nothing above you but the sun and the sky. Laboring through the brush or trail can be arduous, but nothing is as empowering as looking back at what you have accomplished.

If my small opinion is not enough, John Muir’s words surely carry credence. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” John Muir was one of America’s famous naturalists and preservationists, known for his writings on nature throughout America, but specifically in California throughout Yosemite and the John Muir trail, which was named in his honor. Credentials aside, Muir was an ecological thinker with a fervent enthusiasm and reverence for nature. The wilderness was his well of strength, and his writings inspired many to draw from it as well.

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Not to be completely obvious, but we live in a unique environment. Isla Vista crams around 12,000 students into two square miles filled with endless Snappa, fine eateries, carnal pursuits and good ol’ fashioned American debauchery. All of these qualities are as accessible as it gets, and all of this became an immediate reality when I was kicked out of the dorms freshman year for planning and carrying out a food fight with my floor. While a flying food frenzy in DLG seemed like a good idea at the time, it wasn’t. And for any of you who may believe otherwise, trust me — it’s just a guarantee that you’ll be sleeping on a crusty couch in I.V. before that last mashed potato grenade hits the ginger serving the pizza.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been deported into I.V. or if you willfully moved in with the help of your parents on a crisp summer day; it’s too easy to be comfortable with what is offered here, and with that comfort comes stagnation. I wouldn’t have Isla Vista any other way, but we aren’t forced to adapt and develop unless we are uncomfortable with our surroundings. Such easy access to immediate amenities develops a bubble effect that keeps many Isla Vistans content to settle within the vortex of drunkenness between El Colegio and Del Playa.

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