Rachel Gross ’08 notices those logos on your clothing. Your Patagonia rain jacket, REI hiking pants, and Chaco sandals are more than just pieces of equipment to her. Gross, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado, Denver, is an outdoor gear historian who studies the business and culture of brands.

GUITAR HEROES 

You recently were named to the Presidents’ Council for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. What made you decide to play a leadership role in that effort? 

Florence Nightingale was the ultimate multi-hyphenate: a nursing pioneer, visionary statistician, social reformer, researcher, author, and adventurer, all at a time when women in Victorian England had few rights of their own.

As a high school senior, Galvin Guerrero ’96 couldn’t wait to escape the stifling familiarity of Saipan—an island within the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, roughly 450 miles north of Guam—for the relative obscurity of college. But come move-in day at Puget Sound, Guerrero found himself fighting back tears as he watched his mother disappear into a cab outside Anderson/Langdon Hall.

Five weeks before endurance cyclist Lael Wilcox ’08 began the Tour Divide—a 2,700-mile bicycle race crisscrossing the Continental Divide from Canada to New Mexico—she warmed up by riding nearly 4,000 miles from her Tucson, Ariz., home to the race start.

The 2023 Tour Divide, held last June, was her fifth, and she completed it in 16 days, 20 hours, 17 minutes. She won the women’s division and finished 13th overall.

Straight from the Dalai Lama

When Shannon Hughes ’92 and Karen Moore Sales ’92 were students at Puget Sound in the late 1980s, they knew of each other, but they weren’t much more than acquaintances. They were both interested in business careers, but Hughes majored in business administration and Sales was in the Business Leadership Program. They both lived in Anderson/Langdon Hall, but Hughes was on the basement floor and Sales was on the second. They were both in sororities, but Hughes chose Pi Beta Phi while Sales opted for Alpha Phi. Today, each has only a vague memory of the other.

The idea seems quaint now, but in the early 20th century, going to a campus dance often meant picking up a “dance card” at the door. The small booklets gave the students—usually the women—a way of keeping track of the night’s dances and dance partners. The idea was to not dance with the same person all night long; instead, proper etiquette called for mingling.