For generations, Fountain Valley students have ventured into the mountains to experience the West, but for the past 30 years, the Western Immersion Program has invited freshmen to look more closely: studying its landscapes and ecosystems, exploring the stories of those who came before them, and discovering their own place within it.

“No place is a place until it has had a poet.”

Those words from Western novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner appeared at the top of the original Western Immersion Program curriculum when Fountain Valley School launched an ambitious experiment 30 years ago.

The rest of the passage explained what Stegner meant. “No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had the human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.” And we must learn not simply to own a place, but to belong to it.

That idea became the foundation of WIP.

In November 1996, the entire 10th-grade class left the Prairie for the Class of ‘69 Mountain Campus at the base of the Collegiate Peaks where traditional subjects gave way to an interdisciplinary exploration of the landscape itself.

The intention was for students to pay enough attention to begin understanding their place within the West. Thirty years later, Fountain Valley students are still heading into the mountains to find it.

The idea came largely from FVS science teacher Rob Gustke, who spent months working with colleagues across academic departments to create a program unlike anything students experienced during a normal school week.

Science, history, art and literature would no longer be separate subjects. In the mountains, they would overlap.

A tree could become a biology lesson, a drawing and a poem.

An abandoned mine could open conversations about geology, economics, environmental change and the people who built communities around it.

A hike could become an exercise in observation.

And everywhere they went, students carried field journals.

Today, Fountain Valley freshmen carry on many of those same traditions as part of a ninth-grade curriculum deeply rooted in the American West. They still walk through Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery, where the stories etched into gravestones bring them face-to-face with the harsh realities of life in the American West: babies who never reached their first birthdays, mothers who died in childbirth, and miners who came to Colorado chasing a better life, but never made it back out of the mines.

Baby Doe Tabor still “visits” the Mountain Campus, bringing to life the Tabors’ spectacular rise and fall, from striking it rich in Colorado’s silver boom to losing it all. In WIP’s early years, an actress instead portrayed Horace Tabor’s first wife, Augusta, sharing the story of a woman who emerged from the marriage with her own fortune and went on to build a life on her own terms.

Students still wander among Leadville’s abandoned mines, hike along Cottonwood Creek and stop beside the water to write poetry. 

Thirty years later, WIP itself has become part of Fountain Valley’s poetry of place: generations of students walking some of the same trails, studying the same landscape and, in the words of FVS’s first headmaster, Francis Froelicher, “writing their own history” along the way.

VIDEO: See WIP Through Our Students’ Eyes