24 Apr Teaching Our Future Foresters

The San Juan National Forest has started to thaw with spring around the corner. The elk in town are moving back towards the National Forest and the tulips are starting to sprout. Gates will begin to slowly open, and lower elevation trail conditions are becoming passable, but still snowy and muddy in spots.

In this part of Southern Colorado, it stays quiet in town until summer break begins and then Pagosa Springs becomes a hub for outdoor adventure. By the end of March, outfitters and guides have completed a lot of their administration work and are usually just waiting for the snow to thaw. It’s been a light winter though and people are anxious to get the summer activities rolling.

Though most of my month looked like excel spreadsheets, paperwork, and maps, I was able to get out and mold the minds of some potential future foresters. Each year, the elementary school in town does a snow science field day in March. This year with the lack of snow it looked a little different. The Audubon Society taught the kids avion identification along the river walk and volunteers in the community taught classes on geology and the geothermal hot springs. The Pagosa Ranger District taught two classes, fire ecology with a Smokey Bear appearance and forestry.

For our forestry lesson, another forester and I taught the kids about leave no trace and how to measure trees. I cored a tree at the beginning of the day and with each class we counted all the tree rings and talked about why there might be differences in the sizes of each ring. By the end of the day one hundred little brains walked away with a handful of trash each, inspired by the leave no trace discussion, and a little bit more knowledge on the forest service and various ecological lessons.