WOLCOTT, Vt. – Bear Swamp resembles many places in northern Canada or Alaska.

Through the woods at the bottom of a hill, the forest opens up to a wide expanse of what used to be a glacier lake. Stunted black spruce trees grow on a ridge. Sphagnum moss and heaths cover the rubbery floor. And temperatures dip far below normal for the latitude.

“It actually has virtually every species of tree which is found in central Alaska,” says naturalist Steve Young. “All the things you’d normally associate with the colder boreal regions across most of Canada and Siberia. It’s very similar down here.”

The wooden cabin above the swamp also could be anywhere in the north. A wood stove churns out heat, boots and fleece slippers sit near the front door and posters of Finland and arctic vegetation cover the walls.

But it’s far from Alaska or northern Canada. It’s the Center for Northern Studies at Sterling College in Wolcott.

It’s a place where college students study the environment and people of the north. They take classes in arctic and subarctic fauna, indigenous cultures of the circumpolar north, literature and wildlife biology. They travel to Lapland, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador. And they do research in Bear Swamp.

“So you literally can just step out the door and five minutes later you’re in an environment that has most of the components” of a colder boreal region, says Young, who founded the center more than 30 years ago, on his family’s land.

It started as a research project in 1971, and later evolved into a study away program for college students from Middlebury and other schools for the study of winter ecology.

Last year Sterling College took over the program and made it accredited. Sterling now offers four-year bachelor degrees in northern studies and is believed to be the only such program in the lower 48 states, says Erik Hansen, the center’s education program director.

“We decided it fit really well with our other majors – wildlands ecology and sustainable agriculture and outdoor education leadership, which has a big emphasis on ecotourism, that kind of thing,” says Hansen. “That’s one of the factors that’s really at work in the far north, that many of these areas are looking for ways to do sustainable development and not be preyed upon by big companies coming in to do mining, oil drilling, those sorts of things.”

Similar programs exist throughout Canada, at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and other places in the north.

The sweeping region defined as the north consists of Alaska and Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia, and vast stretches of northern Russia. The roughly 15 million square miles make up a quarter of the land surface on earth, but just 1 percent of the population, says Hansen.

Another way to think of the north is as the places inhabited by caribou or reindeer, Young says.

“There are no longer caribou here, unfortunately,” Young says of Vermont. “There were 50 odd years ago. We’re right on the edge of caribou country here.”

Young and the students just returned from Lapland where they worked with the reindeer herding Sami people. They studied the bioregion, species and the fisheries industry in what one student described as a barren landscape.

“The transition was surprisingly dramatic for me,” Luke Hardt of Middlebury says. “I didn’t think it would be so sudden from boreal to arctic. The flora and fauna, the more northern you get obviously the less diversification you’re going to get.”

On a recent morning back in Wolcott, Young in a worn Norwegian sweater, and several students head down the path into Bear Swamp with a long stainless steel tube cut in half lengthwise.

They plan to collect core samples of the earth to determine what took place over the last 10,000 years as the lake filled up.

It’s part of a class in quaternary studies, which Young, the professor, describes as the history, environment and people of the last million years.

“It has to do with ice ages, and how the climate has changed over long periods of time, and how we know about that, and how humans responded to that,” he says.

The students take turns pushing the pointed tube about a meter into the ground. They turn it slightly, and a hinged door encloses the dirt in the half cylinder.

The earth slurps as they pull the tube up and examine what’s inside.

They spot woody material in the lower, older part, of the slab.

They will eventually analyze core samples taken in the swamp for pollen. Any pollen will help determine what type of trees lived at what time, and based on the trees, what type of climate was occurring.

For Christa Wurm, 30, of Craftsbury, seeing the history of things, remnants of glaciation, has changed the way she views the world.

“It’s just a totally new zoom out vision of the word,” she says.

The program tends to attract independent, imaginative and curious people, says Rick Morrill, a teaching assistant.

“The sort of people we get are not your average folks,” he says. “Usually it’s higher level academic students. People who are interested in doing things differently than standard programs.”

Hardt opted to switch to northern studies from botany. “When you’re just an ecologist, or just a biologist, or just an anthropologist, you have blinders. You don’t see the whole scope,” he says.

And, like Young, the few who are now majoring in northern studies share a love of cold barren places.

“I like unpopulated areas and like the winter,” says Ian McEwen, 31, of Brunswick, Maine.

On the Net:

Center for Northern Studies: www.sterlingcollege.edu/CNS/