Chattermarks

It’s been an exciting two weeks with the Parks Climate Challenge crew. After gathering everybody in Seattle, we took off for the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center to pack for our first camping trip.

This was just one of the many firsts we’ve celebrated on the trip so far: first camping trip, first s’mores,

Refining our s’more technique

» Continue reading The PCC Team is on the loose!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your 2009 Parks Climate Challenge instructional team, Megan, Nick, Ian and Aneka!

What is the Parks Climate Challenge you ask? From our point of view it’s: one month, four instructors, twenty students, 620 student-days, and 1.8 million calories (Yes, we did the math.) After days of packing food, calling students, counting gear, discussing strategy, rehearsing logistics, preparing lessons and caching equipment, we are finally starting to feel almost ready to receive 20 kids from Washington D.C., Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago. The whole lot of us will spend the month of July traveling all over the North Cascades National Park learning about the National Park Service, climate change and the power of youth leadership.

Gear for twenty-four, or most of it.

The students will be arriving on Monday, so the four of us will spend the next two days buying last-minute items and putting the finishing touches on our lessons before taking one last day of well-deserved rest. Stay tuned for further dispatches!

May 30 was a great day for a paddle in Seattle, with full sun and a light breeze to take the edge off. With a myriad of wild lakes, rivers and open sound waters to choose from, the Duwamish Waterway hardly seems like a choice location for an excursion. An EPA Superfund site, the Duwamish River flows through the backsides of various industries – shipyards, cement factories, and scrap plants to name a few. It is a heavily traveled waterway, where industry supercedes habitat. But don’t tell that to the osprey, purple martins, killdeer, bald eagles, great blue herons and other birds we saw out on the water that day.

Cruising past a cement plant

» Continue reading Surfing a Superfund site

Winter may be time for hibernation, but spring is fast approaching, ready or not! Our field excursions have been hitting the trails the past few weekends and watching the signs and cycles of of change. Last weekend the Nooksack Snowshoe excursion went to the riverbed again. No hoar crystals anymore, but there was plenty to see. We checked out elk tracks, followed a female coyote preparing for pups and traced a set a of striped skunk tracks directly to the source! (“Whoa, everybody take a step back, there she is!”)

» Continue reading Gettin’ out on the flats…

The recent temperature inversion set has had a noticeable effect in the cities, with cold freezing fog, but up in the mountains that same phenomena has been creating sunny skies and melt-freeze sun crusts on the snow. On Saturday morning we headed up the North Fork of the Nooksack River to check out what kinds of goings-on happen in the winter. It was pretty cold, and the snow was very crusty.

An elk track in the crust on the riverbed

» Continue reading Tracking through crystals

It takes a hale and hearty individual to get up in the dark and head out into the teeth of an arctic blast, but Sunday, December 13, two vanloads of us joined Libby Mills as we headed up river in search of eagles. After a round of introductions, we drove to the banks of the mighty Skagit. Early on we were rewarded with views of juvenile and adult eagles perching, feeding and calling.

» Continue reading Eagles and salmon… and dippers