Their tree houses, chutes and tunnels are surrounded by streams, swift-moving brooks and the giant peaks of the Rocky Mountains. In the shade of their teeter-totters and ladders, forest gray-haired mountain lions, grizzly bears and alpacas lounge by the logs where they perch, raise their ears to hear the movements of others, and occasionally, lean down and take a rest.
The videos, talks and drawings are a departure from the usual geometry class where teens are more focused on completing the puzzle of lines, lines and more lines. The setting is the Elk Creek Wilderness in Eagle County.
This is an outdoor program — more like a day trip for the youth population of the Boulder Valley School District — that takes high school students on a cycling ride, exploring the landscape, learning about wildlife and wilderness culture, and how to become better hikers, climbers and hikers again.
Eagle County’s natural and environmental education program, for-profit Expedition, works with the Boulder Valley School District to reach and engage a diverse population of youth in a natural education program based on the ideals of conservation and the environment.
“It is such a transformational experience,” said Laura Jo Hamilton, the director of the program, who grew up and began working on the Eagle County wilderness program as a seventh-grader in 2006. “Some kids come out with so much respect for the natural world that they learn to care for it the next day.”
Students learn the skills they’ll need to make good choices in the world. They finish the semester with a sense of success — “We get what we set out to get,” Hamilton said — and learn much from the outdoors.
“You really learn what a place is,” said Julia Summers, a senior at Boulder High School.
Summers was 14 in the early 1990s when she and some friends were told they could not bicycle along rugged Douglas Trail. They struggled. Summers and others picked up first-aid skills at an Eagle County fire station, learned skills to fight an automobile accident, and learned from experience how to find water — and sort through it — when there are no natural springs.
Summers describes the experience she remembers best: “There was this fall. It got a lot worse and we were sitting out there in the mud. The girls next to us gave us their clothes and we just washed our clothes out — scarves, hats — because we were too scared to take our own clothes. And when you look at it now, it makes me think, ‘There’s something pretty wrong,’ ” Summers said.
“The thing that really got me was that you know, it was this really pretty place. We could see this mountain — and not see it, not touch it, not see it. Not think about it. And we would look and it was like a bit of an alien.”
Watch a YouTube video by Jean Lee:
