Trancos (Outdoor House)

Trancos is home to Stanford's Outdoor House and is one of the eight houses in the Wilbur Hall housing complex, located on the east side of campus. Outdoor House (ODH) is your home for exploration, thought, and play focused on natural systems, sustainability, and conservation.

Find Trancos on the Stanford Searchable Map here

About the Outdoor House Theme

Outdoor House (ODH) is a center for exploration, thought, and play focused on natural systems, sustainability, and conservation. The experiential and academic components of our house are essential to this mission, with adventure and community driving our collective transformational learning. We work with faculty to bring intellectual rigor and academic expertise to our community in order to deepen the meaning of the time we spend outside.

As Outdoor House, we have the important responsibility to do the much-needed internal work as a community to reshape and redefine a more inclusive and welcoming outdoor experience, including actively disrupting biases, norms, and practices that promote exclusion. Inclusion and a sense of belonging for all are central values of our house, and as a community we have much more work to do to fully live these values.

One of Outdoor House’s primary institutional sponsors and sources of academic support is Stanford Recreation and Wellness, specifically the Stanford Adventure Program (SAP) and the Stanford Outdoor Education (SOE) program. SOE supports Outdoor House’s development of outdoor recreation knowledge and leadership skills to support our intentions of building meaningful and safe relationships with the natural world. Stanford Recreation and Wellness provides human and fiscal resources to help with supporting the mission of the Outdoor House.

Outdoor House pre-assigned residents are expected to meet the following requirements:

Attend 2 house retreats
Attend 5 house events
Organize 1 house event or house project

Optional, but strongly encouraged:

Enroll in OUTDOOR 106
- Thinking of applying to be an Outdoor House RA in the future? Many of our RAs have taken OUTDOOR 106.

All Outdoor House community members:

contribute to the development and maintenance of the community throughout the year. At a minimum, all contribute to the collective creation of community norms in ways that are meaningful to them. This occurs at the beginning of the year.
ensure that all house and event guests adhere to the community norms.
strive to create an inclusive and empathetic outdoor community.
support house programs and aid in planning and implementation.

We are seeking to build a community that shares a common passion for 1.) developing deep, mutualistic relationships with the natural world and 2.) creating a diverse, inclusive, and sustainable outdoor community at Stanford.

Our leadership is composed of faculty members and students who share a passion for the outdoors and believe that an Outdoor House can be a positive hub for engagement in the topics of sustainability and experiential outdoor education. Faculty will ensure the continuity and longevity of the house by advising student leaders, helping author and review written reports, providing leadership, teaching Natural World themed house/neighborhood led courses, and spending time around the house.

Our team includes faculty who are well known for their work at the confluence of their respective fields and the natural world.

Rob Dunbar, the Keck Professor of Earth Science and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. He spent 12 years living in student residences at Rice University and is a strong proponent of intellectual engagement through ResX. Professor Dunbar will support Outdoor House by participating in House leadership, stewarding/enhancing broad and diverse faculty engagement, and maintaining learning goals of the house.
Roz Naylor, William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Roz has deep expertise in conflicts between farming practices and conservation throughout the globe and is also an accomplished outdoors person with a love of outdoor education.
Margot Gerritsen, Professor of Energy Resources Engineering, School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences, Associate Director, Stanford Data Science, and Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Margot regularly leads educational outings for Stanford alumni and student trips to locations such as Mount Kilimanjaro and Alaska’s North Slope.
Jorge Ramos, the Executive Director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, and a Lecturer in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, provides an important community connection