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Yolonda Youngs packed everything she owned in her car and headed west two days after her college graduation.
It was the beginning of an adventure.
She headed to Wyoming because she wanted to see big mountains and rivers.
“I was one of those students who said they were taking a year off and it turned into seven years,” Youngs said.
Youngs moved to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and worked as a cook, waitress and bartender to earn money so she could live in a pretty place. Then she realized she could get paid to guide people to do the things she enjoyed doing in her spare time, such as river rafting, traveling and kayaking.
Youngs has traveled much of the world, not only the western United States. She has also been to places such as Tunisia, Russia and Spain.
It is Youngs, a visiting assistant professor of geography, first time living in Oklahoma and her first semester at OSU.
Youngs’ travel experiences help her teaching style, said Dale Lightfoot, OSU geography department head.
“It makes her a better professor just because it gives her more breadth and depth of experience, not only in her field but just in the world and how it works,” Lightfoot said. “It’s kind of intangible things that you pick up while you’re traveling that are as valuable or more valuable than what you went there to study or learn about.”
Bill McBrayer, a third-year geography doctorate in Youngs’ geography of outdoor recreation class, said he enjoys Youngs’ down-to-earth teaching style and the friendly atmosphere of her classroom.
McBrayer said Youngs’ travel experience and guiding background give her credibility in the classroom.
“She’s been there, she’s done that. She’s been out and experienced these national parks and that works very well in class,” McBrayer said.
Youngs interest in traveling began as an undergraduate at Florida State University where she earned her degree in anthropology. She performed several archaeology digs, which she calls “Indiana Jones kind of stuff.”
She said she became proficient doing the digs in Florida and then lived in Italy for a while through the study abroad program as an undergraduate and participated in digs.
During her time in Italy, Youngs worked on small digs her university and the Italian government organized. The digs involved uncovering the Etruscans’ cities called the acropolis and necropolis, which are the cities of the living and the dead.
Youngs said archeologists get excited about digging the city of the dead first because they are built just like cities with avenues and houses but the habitants are buried underneath, inside their houses. The city of the living is mostly the same city pattern but the habitants are living, Youngs said.
Youngs got hooked on travel during her time in the study abroad program. She said she continues to be a big supporter of the program, especially for students who don’t have a lot of money, have never traveled or are confused about how to go about studying abroad.
When Youngs completed her undergraduate degree, she said she couldn’t wait to get out of Florida. She said as soon as she earned her degree, she could no longer focus on school.
“After a while, I fell into river-guiding and started to work with a really big company out of California so I could travel around the West, and that’s when I started doing a lot of the traveling I talk about with my students,” Youngs said.
She traveled throughout Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Arizona working the Snake River, Green River and other rivers and lakes.
After guiding and traveling for about seven years, Youngs said she decided she wanted to go back to school and work toward a degree focusing on national parks, especially Yellowstone because she spent so much time guiding. She attended Montana State University and earned her master’s in geography.
“That’s when I fell in love with geography, and I realized that I was a very visual thinker and a spacial thinker, and geographers are really fun,” Youngs said.
Youngs said she got into teaching because of the multiple-day trips she used to guide. She said the groups she guided would get on 18-foot rafts and would have a bunch of food and people and they have a couple days of white water, which is the type people see in movies and pictures.
“The white water days were where we were doing something kind of dangerous and we would have to prepare everyone for safety, but those were maybe four or five days out of a three-week trip,” Youngs said. “And the rest of the time is what we call flat water; it’s really beautiful, but it’s more time to sort of take in the birds and the way it smells and you enjoy where you are outside.”
Youngs said she would like to continue to teach geography. Youngs will also continue her travels and research. She’s going to Chile this fall to oversee national park work.
Home for Youngs is wherever she is, and for now, that is Stillwater.
Youngs said, in terms of her home as in “home is where the heart is,” most of her community is back in Montana around the Yellowstone region.
If she gets some free time, that’s where you can find her.
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