Student government teacher Brent Mattix has been given the chance to run a brand new outdoor adventure class this upcoming spring. 

“So last year was the first time that we had the opportunity, I only had a week to showcase Outdoor Adventure and let students know about it, and we had over 90 students that signed up for it,” Mattix said. 

With so many students signing up for outdoor adventure and only one class each term to choose from, Mattix needed to decide how to balance his classes out. 

“Being the activities director, I have what’s called a release period. So most teachers are gonna teach 3 courses per semester and I teach 2. So I only have capacity for 2 classes so that’s 4 total for the year, and 2 of them have to be student government because those are the students who run the activities and events for the school, we gotta have a class for that. So that only gives me capacity for two extra classes, so this year we decided we were gonna do the outdoor adventure class in the spring and  that left me room for the leadership in the fall, and we’ll see if we have as many signups as we did last year and things go well we may look at 2 outdoor adventures next year,” Mattix said.

Having already attended many Yosemite trips over the years, Mattix is stoked to showcase what his new class has to offer. 

“So the outdoor adventure class focuses on 6 areas, its hiking, backpacking, camping, fishing, archery, and wilderness survival. So those are gonna be the 6 different units that we go at. And well do all kinds of cool activities hat correlate with those topics, but were also looking for providing two or three outdoor overnight trips and three day trip hikes,” Mattix said.

RHS Student Dayton Henderson expresses his reasoning for signing up for outdoor adventure.

“I signed up for outdoor adventure class because I have never really done any of the stuff that I saw Mr. Mattix put for the requirements, like I had never gone fishing, never gone camping, and I’ve probably never made a smore,” Henderson said.