Alternative Break: Tracking the Fracking

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In the first of a three-part series looking at student-led alternative break trips, students recount their experience on a trip to Pennsylvania’s natural gas regions.


On January 31, eleven Middlebury students—outfitted with cameras and field recorders—piled into a 15-passenger van and motored seven hours south to Bradford County, Pennsylvania, home to one of the most densely hydraulically fractured regions in the United States. Their week-long Middlebury Alternative Break (MAlt) Trip in Eastern Pennsylvania was structured as an opportunity to explore energy issues.

It was a leap into the unfamiliar, an attempt to humanize the social, political, and environmental dimensions of natural gas extraction.

Two of the participants, Zane Anthony ’16.5 and Sophie Vaughan ’17, chronicled their experience in “In Another County: One Week In America’s Natural Gas Mecca.” Read the full story at MiddMag.com.