The Quarterly Newsletter of the

by Michelle Tourville

Michelle Tourville is the Outdoor Education Director at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, CO.

Having been an outdoor educator for many years, I've admired the Big Thompson Watershed Forum; as the director of outdoor education programs at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, I am now excited about a potential partnership with the Forum. Our YMCA outdoor education classes served over 5000 students from Front Range Communities this year. Most of our students are in middle school, usually stay for three days, and will attend four to six outdoor education classes. The classes are designed to accommodate specific academic interests and needs articulated by teachers and to be an integrated complement to the classroom back at school. Our "classrooms" are outside on the YMCA campus and in the adjacent Rocky Mountain National Park, which are the perfect settings for hands-on classes on topics such as water ecology, forest ecology, beaver and elk ecology, geology, route orienteering, outdoor living skills, adventure and many others.

Had you joined one of our water ecology classes this fall, you, along with 20 fifth graders and one of our instructors, would have journeyed down to the confluence of Glacier Creek and the Big Thompson River. There you would have used your powers of observation, chemical tests, and macroinvertebrates to determine the water quality of the two streams. You would have measured the dissolved oxygen, pH, and temperature, collected and identified numerous aquatic macroorganisms and maybe conducted a "foot-test" of the water (brrrrrrr). You would have learned the water cycle and the characteristics of healthy streams, and sketched and recorded observations and findings in your field journal.

For most of our students this is the first opportunity they have had to study a stream; for many of them, these streams are an integral part of their water supply, adding particular relevance to their stream investigations. In partnering with the Big Thompson Watershed Forum and becoming a volunteer monitoring site, we could integrate the monitoring into our water ecology class, thus providing our students with hands-on sampling and research experience and increasing the relevance to our students. This partnership could also provide additional training for our instructors, equipment for our classes, provide a valuable service to our community, foster a sense of stewardship in our youth, and deepen our understanding of our rivers. Living in a place, it becomes a part of us and we become a part of that place; the more we know about the natural environment that surrounds us, the deeper and richer the relationship. So possibly the most important benefit of a partnership with the Forum would be the opportunity to nurture a deeper, richer relationship with the rivers that give us life.