Bound Outdoors—San Antonio offers some extraordinary opportunities to explore science outside of the SOT 2013 Annual Meeting. With Bound Outdoors, you can explore the newest area of the San Antonio Riverwalk through a team building program that is part adventure and part discovery. Your program begins aboard the San Antonio River Taxi, where the Bound Outdoors guides will greet everyone as the boat glides upstream towards the starting point. From there, a handheld GPS takes each team to build bridges, solve a water shortage, unlock riddles inside the San Antonio Museum of Art, and much more. Along the way, guides from Bound Outdoors will work with each team as they explore nature, history, and technology together.
Bracken Bat Cave—Bracken Bat Cave is the summer home of the world’s largest bat colony. With millions of Mexican free-tailed bats living in the cave from March thru October, Bracken holds one of the largest concentration of mammals on earth. The cave and 697 acres of the surrounding Texas Hill Country are owned and protected by Bat Conservation International.
Natural Bridge Caverns in the Heart of San Antonio—Experience a thrilling and physically demanding 3- to 4-hour excursion into one of the world’s premier caverns. Climb, crawl, rappel, explore—with only the light of your helmet to guide you. Once outfitted with caving gear, you'll be lowered by rope through a 160-foot well shaft.Travel approximately one mile, going down to 230 feet below surface level to the Fault Room that features one of the longest soda straw formations in North America—14 feet in length.
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)—Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, SwRI is one of the oldest and largest independent, nonprofit, applied research and development (R&D) organizations in the United States. Founded in 1947 by Thomas Baker Slick Jr., an oilman and philanthropist, SwRI provides contract research and development services to industrial and government clients in the United States and abroad. Mr. Slick's goal was to establish an internationally known scientific research center in San Antonio and he challenged a group of pioneer scientists and engineers from around the nation to move to the new center to seek revolutionary advancements in many areas by developing and applying technology. He also founded the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, which conducts biomedical research and is home to the world’s largest nonhuman primate colonies used to study human diseases.