A couple of outside videos nicely lay out the topography of the campus and put Jen's photos in context. This aerial video, focusing on Memorial Chapel (the building with the golden dome in the upper-right quadrant of the above photo), shows the tiered layout of the campus. To the left of the Chapel in the photo is Lawrence Hall, whose roof features a white tower with black spire in the center. Lawrence Hall hosts classics, humanities, and various forms of cultural studies (national, ethnic, religious, etc.). As this second video describes, the Chapel and Lawrence Hall are part of the Academic Quad on the most highly elevated Upper Campus. The wide building with green triangles on either side, lower down from the Chapel and Lawrence Hall, is the Case Library. Below is the same general area of campus, but this time in winter!
Spring is when the trees blossom. So extensive is the blossoming that the university puts out a guide to the different trees and flowers blooming in the spring. Here are some photographs of the beautiful blossoms on campus.
To get through these verdant areas, walkways are available.
Colgate is not all academics and nature, however. The campus and town provide entertainment and festivities, as well, in the form of athletics...
...movie theatres...
...and special on-campus celebrations.
The addition of holiday lights to the tree trunks is part of a tradition known as "Nerd Nite."
Several years ago, I read the 2000 book The Last Amateurs (by John Feinstein), which delved into the Patriot League, a college athletic conference (including Colgate) that, at the time, did not allow athletic scholarships. I remembered there being a passage in the book about Colgate's geographic isolation. I've gone back and found the passage:
Colgate is the league's most far-flung outpost... The school itself is very pretty, built on a hillside, the prototype for a small, idyllic college campus... But there is no easy way to get to Hamilton. The last sixty miles of the trip from just about any direction is two-lane road, and when the weather gets bad (always) it makes for some seriously unpleasant driving.
Perhaps there has been extensive road construction in the nearly twenty years since publication of The Last Amateurs, I don't know. Many people on discussion boards for prospective college students still refer to Colgate as being isolated, although it seems that some current students like it that way.
