Weekly Photo Roundup: January 15 2018
Every weekend I will post photos collected from various North Cascades Institute graduate students and staff. Please enjoy this glimpse into our everyday lives here in the North Cascades.
This week graduate students in the M.Ed Residency Program returned from their holiday break. After three weeks of being gone, we all returned to see cold, white stuff everywhere at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Below is a video from Ashley Hill of students having a snowball fight while on a break from nonprofit class. Some of us couldn’t help but enjoy the newly fallen snow and the temptation to throw it at each other!
Graduate Student Charlee Corra caught a glimpse of deer enjoying the snow, too.
Photo of deer snacking by Marissa Bluestein
And of course, she just had to melt some snow in her mouth like pop rocks crackling.
Words well said by graduate student Marissa Bluestein:
Why is snow falling such a magical event? Maybe because you can go to sleep in one world and wake up in another so different. Or perhaps it invokes the excitement you felt as a kid, to hurriedly throw your layers on and run outside to play in the falling flakes. Maybe it’s the silence that comes with the white blanketing of the landscape. Whatever it is there’s no denying the magic.
When students weren’t outside living the dream, they were inside – warm and cozy – learning about conflict resolution and fundraising in their Nonprofit Leadership & Administration course. Above is a photo of Iris Maute-Gibson, Grants Coordinator, and Jodi Broughton, Development and Marketing Director, teaching a class on grant writing.
For Curriculum Design, Professor Nick Stanger visited and led a class on the complexity theory of panarchy and how it can be applied to education. In the photo above, we made a tangible representation of the panarchy adaptive cycle.
Photo by Liz Grewal
On the weekend, graduate student Liz Grewal enjoyed a spectacular sunset while visiting Rockport State Park. It was a vibrant sight enjoyed by many folks upriver.
This weekend also brought sunshine! Above is a photo of clouds waving hello – taken from Diablo Dam. There were many low-hanging clouds, but lots of welcomed rays and blue sky.
Darcy Page taking pictures of vine maple. Notice the pink tag? Photo by Montana Napier.
Darcy Page and myself setout to collect data for the North Cascade Institute’s ongoing phenology project. It is an opportunity to participate in citizen science and report our results to Nature’s Notebook, a project with USA National Phenology Network. The data and patterns observed are then used to tell a more accurate story of our landscape at the Learning Center.
Phenology is the study of animal and plant life cycle events, and how such events are influenced by seasonal changes in their environment and climate. This week it was our job to record weather, plant and animal observations, and take photos of designated study subjects. Of course, it was fun having the added challenge of snow, and an excuse to play outside some more!
It’s important to include weather observations and sky coverage in the data. Photo by Montana Napier.
Photo by Liz Grewal
This weekend students also spent time meandering past the North Cascades Highway road closure near Ross Lake. We grabbed snowshoes and waddled as far as we could down the road to take in several snowy views. It was fun exploring the road on foot, and getting close to cascading waterfalls.
If you haven’t played in the snow yet, what are you waiting for?!
Graduate students Darcy Page, Montana Napier, and Liz Grewal pose with Jack Mountain.
Click here to see previous Photo Roundups!