208 Dam. The students were all seated but had left a seat for me at the head table. As I came in, I said, My! What a big family I have, and received the nickname, Uncle Walt which stuck for the rest of my years at Weber. No one will forget the comments made in camp about visitors at the lodge in Yosemite who dressed formally for dinner, nor the bears around camp in Yosemite and in Glacier or the porcupine in the restroom in our camp at Lassen. They will always remember those who slept, or rather tried to sleep in snow caves at Crater Lake, the experience of sliding down the front of the glacier on tin pants (pants with several layers of canvas on the seat) at Rainier, of a bus with so much baggage on top that we had to watch the clearance in service stations, and the food and utensils under the seats and in the aisles or perhaps on a lap until we could get to camp. If I remember correctly, the cost was 135.00. This included transportation for 5,800 miles, food, including at least one meal a week in a cafeteria, so we would not get tired of our own cooking, entrance fees to parks and museums, a boat trip to Catalina Island to go on glass-bottomed boats for a first hand view of marine life, and other group expenses. In the summer of 1947, Weber had another, more ambitious College on Wheels, a trip to Mexico to see the new volcano, Paricutin. Victor Hancock, of modern languages, had become my office mate in the fall of 1946, and we, together with Ross Hardy of zoology, planned a six week tour, about three weeks of it in Old Mexico. Students could take a combination of geology, zoology, and Spanish. More than 60 expressed interest in the trip but we ended up with 37 students, four faculty, Hancock, Hardy, and Buss, with Merle Chipman from home economics as chaperon and Jim Moss as the bus driver. This was more than the capacity of the bus, to say nothing of the suitcases, sleeping bags, and cooking, and other equipment we needed, so we chartered a truck owned by one of the students, and the college allowed us to use one of the school cars. The car turned out to be a life-saver, for we used it many times to get supplies from town to camp, obtain repair parts for the truck, and even to haul water in five gallon cans from faucet to camp. Like the trip the previous year, we camped out and did most of our own cooking. This served a dual purpose, holding the cost down and, particularly in Mexico, providing safe food. We even had to boil all our drinking water in Mexico except when we bought distilled water from soft drink bottling plants. It became even more of a necessity when we found that Mexico was in the middle of an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease. Many times, everyone had to get out the walk through a trough of disinfected sawdust and the car, truck, and bus drove through a shallow vat of disinfectant. Supposedly, the truck was in good condition when we left, and it was for four days. Then, going into the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a connecting rod in the engine broke and punched a hole in the block. This necessitated having it towed more than fifty miles to Flagstaff and a new engine. We took the students to camp, then took the bus and car back for baggage, and supplies. Fortunately, they were able to install a new engine by the next afternoon, but we had to drive to Flagstaff to pick it up. This was just the first of several episodes of needing the car for transportation of parts. Apparently, the old head of the truck engine had warped a little, for periodically over the next four weeks, it would blow out head gaskets and changing them became an almost daily chore. Another time, a universal joint broke and we had to backtrack fifty miles for a new one. Though fatal to our planned schedule, these truck breakdowns provided some interesting and enjoyable interludes. We planned to cross the border into Mexico at Laredo, Texas, at that time the terminus of one of the two paved roads to Mexico City. Enroute to Laredo we stopped at Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, White Sands, and Carlsbad Caverns for campsites. In Mexico, we went south towards Mexico City, then turned west at Antiguo Morelos towards Guadalajara, south and east to Uruapan and Paricutin, the new volcano and east into Mexico City. Originally, we had planned to go on to Acapulco, but with truck breakdowns, and so many interesting things to do and see, to say nothing of the extra time it took to buy supplies as compared to the U.S., we averaged only about 150 miles per day. As we were passing through the small town of San Juan de los Lagos a hundred miles or more east of Guadalajara, about 3:00 one afternoon, a universal joint on the truck broke, so we had to stay put for awhile. We found a place where we could get the group and the vehicles into a walled courtyard on the edge of town and set up camp. Then we started to look for parts, only to find that the nearest source was in Leon fifty miles away. However, a big fiesta was in progress in San Juan, so after dinner and everyone was settled, most of the group went back to enjoy the parade, the sights and sounds, and the fireworks. Though we usually carried considerable water, we did not have the capacity to carry all we needed for a full day. As near as I could determine there were only two water faucets in this town of several thousand, so we had to wait our turn to fill our cans. Many men made their living carrying water in two five-gallon cans hung from a pole across their shoulders. Our visit to Paricutin Volcano was an outstanding experience. It was still erupting, blowing dust and large rocks out of the cone and spewing molten lava from a vent on the side. Because the roads were quite poor and not on our maps, we chartered two local buses and were glad we did. Bridges across quite deep gullies were merely two flat-topped logs for each track. At the volcano, we walked along the edge of the flow and could feel the heat and, after dark, could see red hot rock. Mexico City is built in an old lake bed and the withdrawal of water and weight of the buildings has caused settlement of many feet. For example, going into the great cathedral built about 1580, one goes down two or three steps instead of up a dozen or more. I could go on and on about this trip which neither the students nor the faculty have ever forgotten as a time of great learning, not only of geography and things, but of peoples and cultures, and of a realization of the need to put the welfare of the group above that of self. A second College on Wheels to Mexico was conducted in the summer of 1949- The route was basically the same, the group was somewhat smaller, and we had no trouble with the college-owned truck. We also went to Cuernavaca and a little beyond Taxco. Ross Hardy had left Weber for another job so Robert Pendleton went as