Junior Matt Steible spent his spring break paddling the 110-mile Haw River, which passes through Haw River, N.C., with nothing but the food in his canoe and a tent to sleep in every night. However, he didn’t make the trip for himself; he took it for the river.
“We’ve got a great campus and these wonderful surroundings and you want to become complacent in them,” Steible said. “While we live in a botanical garden, there are some pretty amazing sights in nature itself, just miles away. For students to realize they have banks of a river to sit on or read so close to us it’s a very important thing.”
Junior Matt Steible, maneuvering his canoe around a waterfall, spent his spring break paddling the 110-mile Haw River, located just six miles from campus.
“As much as I may be a random student from Elon University, at the same time we both share a connection from the river itself,” Steible said. “Caring for the same thing is like a universal language, and I would do the same thing if I lived on a river. They talk about trail magic, where they offer you food or a drink of water. What we experienced the entire trip was river magic, with capital letters.”
The bubble of Elon has kept many students from experiencing the areas around the school, but from this trip he hopes to change the perception of the surrounding towns.
“We talk about bursting the bubble here at Elon and a lot of students here have a certain perception about the towns around here,” Steible said. “What they see in those towns, they may not know that they have a beautiful river there.”
While Steible’s trip ended last weekend he hopes that it will encourage students to experience the world around them.
The adventurous Steible ran into almost no problems on the river and believes that it should be a daily getaway for Elon students.
“Could anyone at Elon do this?” Steible said. “I think so. And that’s a big reason why I did it.”