Laine Hickle joined UTA in February as an outdoor trip assistant for Campus Recreation. Hickle was hired part-time and said she will look for seasonal work after the spring semester.
Before she knew the busy city life, she knew the smell of creosote bush — earthy, sweet and metallic, rising from the ground as a sign it was going to rain.
That was the backdrop of her childhood: life inside a national park, where the landscape stretched freely and nothing fenced in her days.
Laine Hickle brought her knowledge of the outdoors to UTA’s Campus Recreation, helping bring back the outdoor adventures program.
Hickle grew up in Big Bend National Park in Texas, where her parents lived, met and started their family, she said. Her mother was a park ranger and science teacher who studied geology and geography, while her father was a musician and river tour guide, she said.
“My dad’s more like, ‘Let’s do this rapid. This is so fun. I want to go down this canyon,’” Hickle said. “And my mom is more like, ‘Oh, this canyon, the rock layers are so interesting. Let me go look at them. Let me hike here to go look at this.’”
Hickle followed both of their paths, earning a Bachelor of Science in geography with a minor in geology and gaining an interest in going on solo trips outside the country.
However, she did not always want to go down that route.
At around 13 years old, she moved to Austin, where she went to high school and stopped doing outdoor activities as she traversed city life.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, there’s an HEB down the road, there’s a movie theater nearby,’ when all of those things used to be five-plus hours away from where I lived. So I kind of became a city girl for a second,” she said.
Throughout high school, she worked at Inner Space Cavern in Georgetown, Texas, as a tour guide, and she continued to work there as she started college as a French major at the University of North Texas. Working there brought back her interest in the outdoors and made her change her major to geography, she said.
“That really roped me back into the outdoors world,” she said. “So I was about 16 or 17, and I just fell back in love with everything outdoors related. I wanted to go camping again, hiking. I got really into caving, and I kind of just went from there.”
She said her partner sent her an Instagram advertisement for North Texas’ outdoor program, Outdoor Pursuits. She said she wanted to go on the caving trip, but her schedule didn’t line up with the dates offered, so she signed up for their backpacking trip instead.
Hickle met her trip leaders and loved them, and one of them suggested she apply for the program, she said. She waited until the applications opened, applied and got the job.
“I just knew that I wanted to keep trip leading. I loved watching the trip leaders, and I was like ‘I could do that for sure,’” she said. “The trip leader who told me to apply ended up being my mentor, so it really was a full circle moment for me.”
However, she didn’t start as a trip leader. She became a student attendant in February 2022 and worked with the climbing wall and the outdoor center, mainly doing equipment rentals. Throughout the span of about a year, she made her way up the chain, becoming a trip leader seven months later, followed by supervisor, then trips and clinics manager in 2023.
Laine Hickle, Campus Recreation’s outdoor trip assistant, helped program five outdoor activities for the spring 2026 semester. The activities included horseback riding, ziplining, swimming, paddling and hiking.
When she graduated in December, she stumbled across a job listing for the trip assistant position at UTA, something she found odd because she saw that UTA didn’t have an outdoor program, she said.
She was not entirely wrong. UTA’s outdoor program has been around for about 10 years but fell off around COVID-19, said Chris Muller, Campus Recreation associate director and Hickle’s direct supervisor.
In the fall, Muller submitted a proposal to bring the program back and give students new recreation opportunities.
“There is an abundance of outdoor opportunities here in the Metroplex that kind of go unnoticed, and people are really attuned to, and so we wanted to expose people to the outdoors, as well as make them aware of the many offerings that the area has,” he said.
Hickle said she felt she would be a good fit for the position and wanted to be a part of the program, so she applied.
“I was like, ‘This seems perfect.’ I was looking at the job description, and it was almost exactly the job description for my trips and clinics manager position, so I was like, ‘I feel like I’m pretty fit for it,’” she said.
Hickle was hired part-time in February, after two other candidates were interviewed.
“Just her experience and expertise in the fact that she’s worked directly with a population that we’re interested in serving,” Muller said. “We had other candidates that had experience with outdoor recreation, but they didn’t have the same experience with the college students that we felt like set her apart.”
In total, the program has five outdoor activities spanning across the semester, including horseback riding, ziplining, swimming, paddling and hiking — all of which Hickle designed on her own.
“I remember Chris literally telling me, he showed me a blank wall, and he was like, ‘This is what you have. You can do whatever you want,’” Hickle said. “A lot of the trips that we’re doing here are trips that I either have planned before and altered a little bit for UTA or trips that I’ve done before in my own time.”
While Muller proposed bringing the program back and secured the funding for it, he credits Hickle for the success of the program.
“All the credit goes to Laine. I did the proposal in the fall, secured the funding for it, but as far as the execution of the program, it’s been all her, and I can’t thank her enough for the work that she’s put into the program,” Muller said.
Campus Recreation plans to continue to offer the trips in the coming semester, but what that will look like is unknown, Muller said. In the meantime, Hickle said she will look for seasonal work but has a dream of taking a break before going back into the workforce.
“We call it dirt bagging, where you’re just living in your car for the summer. You wake up, you run the river, you do your guides, you have a campfire at night, you go to bed, and that’s your summer,” Hickle said.
“I would just love to go back to that rudimentary style of living, just for a second,” she said.
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