Students took advantage of the Outdoor Adventures Center to get out of DeKalb to camp out and climb for the weekend at Devil’s Lake State Park, Baraboo, Wis.

The next outdoor adventure is a kayak and camping trip along the Mississippi River on Friday. Regular registration costs $70 and is due Tuesday. There is a trip meeting at 9 p.m. today at the Outdoor Adventure Center.

Daniel Dolan, sophomore mechanical engineering major, said the trip to Devil’s Lake is the second spring camping trip he has participated in.

“Being outdoors and going on trips, you get a sense of camaraderie,” Dolan said. “You get this unique chance to bond with other students, and at the same time you’re getting out and getting away from the hectic school life. You’re getting an opportunity to do something really fun with your gear, and it’s just an all-around awesome time. You get to do things that you don’t normally get to do when you’re hanging out in DeKalb. You get to see a different part of the country besides DeKalb.”

The registration fee for that trip was $75, though early registration cost $65.

“We go to the Smoky Mountains,” said Christine Lagattolla, outdoor adventures assistant director. “We stick to the area as well as Devil’s Lake, Mississippi River, Palisades, Macocha Caves and southern Illinois. We go east to [the] Chicago River, Indiana Dunes, Lake Michigan, and up in Wisconsin we go snowboarding at Devil’s Head and Cascade and the Kishwaukee River.”

The outings are led by student leaders who undergo leadership training in addition to 16 hours of first-aid certification training, Lagottolla said.

“We have all sorts of climbing and belaying knowledge, wilderness first-aid, and just situational training as well,” said Allison Dunnington, sophomore environmental geo-science major. “We do all sorts of work like briefing, debriefing and analyzing different situations.”

The Outdoor Adventures Center relies primarily upon word of mouth to promote its events. Every year sees many return students at the events, Lagottolla said.

“Every trip has got someone on it that’s been on a trip before,” Lagattolla said. “So if it’s 10 people, there’s one of them. So it’s at least 10 percent of our trips have a return participant on it. A study we did last year as a part of our evaluation [showed] the common student was the returning user. As soon as someone finds out about us, every year or every semester, they at least do one trip.”

Lagattolla said outdoor adventures has done clean-ups at Shabbona and a few of the forest preserves in the community.

“We went down to Georgia to so the alternative spring break trip,” Lagottolla said. “This year we went down to Memphis, Tennessee, for spring break. We’ve tried to go places that we haven’t been to…. Hopefully more people get interested and it keeps spreading so we can do more, bigger things…. It’s hard to do expensive trips. We try to do more free trips so that people can experience the outdoors without having to pay tons of money.”

The Outdoor Adventure Center is in the Recreation Center. Aside from outdoor trips, the Adventure Center also provides equipment rentals like snowboards and kayaks.