The first national park ever designated is soon to be the site of the first-ever field station for Weber State University.
There, within the gates of Yellowstone National Park, Utah students will have access to an entire ecosystem as a classroom.
“They’ll be able to do hands-on research, collect long-term data on ecological issues,” said Andrea Easter-Pilcher, dean of Weber’s College of Science and a professor of zoology. “And it’s not limited to just math and science.”
Easter-Pilcher imagines students from all disciplines spending time at the research spot and interacting with nature. Biology students could study anything from bison and bears to the extreme microorganisms that maintain life in the park’s unique geysers and hot springs. Those in chemistry could look at the impact of water quality on native cutthroat trout or how wildfires impact air quality.
Astronomy students would have access to the park’s dark skies. Film students could make documentaries about the carving out of canyons. Humanities students might be inspired to write about the beauty of the towering lodgepole pines or the meandering Yellowstone River or the fleeting mountain chickadees. There could also be collaboration across fields.
“The point is to get students passionate and engaged in what they’re doing,” she told Weber’s board of trustees in a presentation about the field station earlier this month. “I just think [the] result is going to be pretty outstanding.”
And there is no place more old and faithful for it.
The hope would be to start construction soon and open the station on property in a community on the periphery of the federal park by fall 2026. The school currently has been looking at a 47-acre plot west and south of Henry’s Lake in the area; that price tag for it is $980,000.
Current blueprints for the building show classrooms and gathering spaces, a laboratory and a kitchen. There would also be two dormitories for students, with 24 to 28 beds total, and three separate faculty rooms. The school would hire a year-round station manager, who would also live there, and have a space.
“But I don’t think we’ll have that exact furniture,” Easter-Pilcher joked as a rendering of the building showed on screen to the trustees. “That’s not the most attractive.” The room filled with laughs.
It’s not clear yet exactly what the cost would be to build, but the dean said the College of Science has raised “a significant amount” in a short time. It held a fundraiser in Yellowstone in July, too, where donors could go fly fishing with the chair of the physics department and watching watch a professor and student band birds they caught to track.
(Ryan Ash | Weber State University) Weber State University held a fundraising event in July 2024 at Yellowstone National Park to help open a field station there where students and faculty can do research.
So far, she said, they have raised about $2.5 million. The College of Science also has property at Powder Mountain that’s been appraised at $3 million that it could sell to roll into the cost.
“That will bring a lot of cachet to Weber State,” Easter-Pilcher added, and could enhance both recruitment and retention for faculty and students.
In recent years, Weber State in northern Utah’s Ogden has been growing. With a student population now nearing 33,000, it is the third largest of the eight public colleges in the state. But it is one of only two that doesn’t have an off-campus station for hands-on, in-the-field research (the other being Utah Tech University).
The University of Utah — the flagship research institution in the state — has six field stations, including one in Moab and another in Montana also near Yellowstone (that it shares with a non-governmental organization). Utah State University has one in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest by Logan. Both Utah Valley University and Southern Utah University have spots near Capitol Reef National Park. And Snow College, the smallest school in the state, has one in the Great Basin.
Brigham Young University, a private school, also has a station at Lytle Preserve in Utah’s southwest corner.
Easter-Pilcher said she has dreamed of Weber State having a field station since she became dean, and it was on the cusp of moving forward in 2020. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the project was paused.
“We finally are getting some traction” again, she said.
(Ryan Ash | Weber State University) Weber State zoology student Connor Johnson speaks to faculty and donors at a fundraising event in July 2024 at Yellowstone National Park where the school looks to open a new field station.
Currently, Weber State faculty members will take students out on short trips to conduct research in nearby locations, such as Ogden’s foothills, for a few hours at a time. But having a permanent building with dorm rooms, the dean said, would allow for longer studies, including weekend trips, weeklong excursions or year-round classes.
The school looked for places within four hours of driving distance from Ogden to accommodate the shorter trips. The dean also wanted a place that could be accessible all year. That’s a challenge in Yellowstone, she acknowledged, which tends to have severe winters. The U.’s field station in nearby Centennial Valley, for instance, is only accessible four months of the year.
But a big part of a field station, she said, is seeing an environment at all times of the year. The school is currently working out plans for access and snow removal.
John F. Cavitt, a professor of ornithology at Weber State, also said that yearlong access is crucial. He studies songbirds in Weber County, and being able to track the patterns and habits of a species requires observing them in different seasons.
He mentioned, too, the work of his student, Connor Johnson, who also spoke to trustees in support of the field station.
Johnson, an environmental studies major at Weber, started doing field work under Cavitt inside the county. But Johnson became fascinated with boreal owls, which tend to populate the Wasatch Mountains, the Bear River Range and the Uinta Mountains, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
No one had ever been able to confirm that the birds mated in Utah. Johnson had a suspicion, though, that they did. He applied for an undergraduate research grant with funding from Weber State and got it. Then, last winter, he trekked into the frozen, snow-covered Uinta Mountains for his own field study.
The roads through the range are closed by November — which is part of why the owls’ mating habits here had not been documented, Johnson believes, as they court in the winter — so he snow-shoed and snowmobiled in over 19 days to do surveys.
Not only was he able to confirm the owls’ courtship, but he also captured the first-ever recording of a boreal owl singing in Utah.
He since has presented his findings at conferences and sent a report to the federal government. Field research, Johnson said, made him realize: “I could do science.”
“I learned so many valuable skills in the field, actually doing something,” he said. “It lets you know if it’s right for you. Going through those experiences, let me know it was right for me.”
Johnson now is an advocate for other students doing field research and is pushing for Weber to build the Yellowstone field station so others have the same opportunities.
The hope from Weber would also be to use the facility for administrative retreats and to connect to the local community — hosting faculty lectures or star-gazing parties for local students in K-12 schools.
Research inside the park will require Weber State students and faculty to get permits from the National Park Service. According to its website, Yellowstone issued 131 of those in 2023. The majority of the research — 27% — focused on biology; the next highest was geology at 24%.
“In part because Yellowstone National Park was established by Congress in 1872, early in the European American history of the West, the park is one of the last, nearly intact, natural ecosystems in the temperate zone of Earth,” the park notes about the appeal of scientific study there.
Weber State President Brad Mortensen said it is a history he and Utah are familiar with. And it’s another first for Weber and its connection to the park: In 1871, the first scientific survey team that ultimately led to the designation of the park departed from the school’s hometown of Ogden.
Now the school hopes to carry on that legacy — and that there are more firsts to come.
(Ryan Ash | Weber State University) Weber State University held a fundraising event in July 2024 at Yellowstone National Park to help open a field station there where students and faculty can do research.
