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Tired of snow? These Texans will take it
By Monica Isley, Lake County News-Chronicle
Jan 26, 2006; copied with permission from Lake County News-Chronicle (Two Harbors, MN)
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Texas students, experiencing winter for the first time, peer through the sonar device that helps them get a closer look beneath a frozen lake at the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center.
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When it stays cold, when the snow won’t go away, when you need two sweaters under your robe in the evening--think of Parish Episcopal.
For the second year in a row, a group of sixth-graders from that Texas school traveled all the way to Finland to spend a week at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. They chose the cold and the snow. They played in it. They slept in it.
And, snowly but surely, their parents are being reassured that winter in Minnesota IS survivable.
“We live in Texas. Why would you want to take the kids to Minnesota in January?” the school was asked by fearful parents the first year.
“Because we live in Texas,” came the answer.
It wasn’t so bad this year, according to Vicki Eastland, special projects coordinator for the school. When the first group of students returned with glowing accounts of ice fishing and snowshoeing and romping in drifts, the parent complaints plummeted, and the number of students who signed up to make the trip this year rose.
Last year, 44 students pioneered the way for this year’s 76 enthusiastic sixth-graders. They also shared some of the clothes they had to buy special last year, because they certainly weren’t going to use it again where they live in Dallas.
“We looked at the packing list that Wolf Ridge sent, and didn’t even know what some of the terms were,” Eastland said. “What are glove liners?”
They developed a close relationship with REI, a recreational equipment company, that helped them choose and order what they’d need. And they wore all of it.
“Outside at Wolf Ridge, we couldn’t even recognize our kids without knowing what color jackets they wore, because even their faces were covered,” Eastland said. “And then the locals walked by in their flannel shirts.”
She laughed as she said it, because she and the students found nothing but delight in their winter experience--a first time for nearly all of them. They were most impressed by the depth of the snow, and by the depth of the quiet when talk is suspended and only the wind can be heard, moving through bare branches and evergreen trees.
“These kids live in the city, with nothing but concrete and artificial air,” she said, referring to the air-conditioning. “Here, they can experience the deep woods, and nature. To us, it’s like going to the moon.”
In fact, while watching a deer move in under the center’s bird feeders, one boy remarked in awe that it was the first time he’d ever been so close to one.
The school plans trips every year for each grade to places that will allow them to experience different environments. For instance, the seventh grade visits Catalina Island. In the past, the sixth graders went to Boston.
However, when Eastland’s friend, a Minnesota teacher from Holy Name of Jesus School, told her about their annual trip to Wolf Ridge, Eastland lobbied to make the switch.
“Some of the parents were really concerned,” she said. “They were fearful for their children’s safely in such a cold climate.”
They soon learned they needn’t have worried. In an update the Eastland posted on Wolf Ridge’s website, Eastland described one of their 24/24 days (24 degrees outside, 24 inches of snow on the ground):
“It is a snowy Thursday with big flakes falling outside the window. Our sixth-grade adventurers are snowshoeing, ice fishing and studying animal tracks while the fourth group is on the adventure ropes course doing zip lines through the snow.
“To walk through these snowy woods, listening to the chickadees, ravens and the laughter of the kids is magic. Everyone is having a ball, laughing, throwing snowballs and challenging themselves to do new things daily.
“We will come home stronger and ready for a hot bath! There is nothing more exciting and memorable than stepping out of our routines into places we would not normally be...”
Those “new places” included a night in a quinzhee, a dug-out snow shelter.
“Normally, the quinzhee is used to teach other things,” said Betsy Mead, a naturalist at Wolf Ridge. “But sleeping in it was something they asked to do.”
The Wolf Ridge added a special treat just for the Texas visitors. They poured their homemade maple syrup over freshly-fallen snow and created special snow cones those students aren’t likely to find in Dallas.
“It was so fun to watch all of them,” Mead said. “Especially their sheer joy at being in the snow. The teachers here all clamor to teach them.”
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