Traveling Trainers visit the Bay Area

On Tuesday, we started the day off by visiting the Odyssey School, a small middle school for gifted and talented students in San Mateo, California. We met with the 6th and 7th grade classes to introduce them to Leave No Trace information. We discovered that the students had a wide range of outdoor recreation experiences in beautiful locations around the globe. These experiences allowed us to identify a common ethic amongst the group while participating in a number of activities focusing on the principles of Leave No Trace!

In the afternoon we traveled to the East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, a small college preparatory charter high school created four years ago in East Palo Alto, California. We first spoke with nine students in the E-packers club, the new outdoor recreation club. The E-packers will be going on a five-day backpacking trip in Big Sur at the end of the month, and we were invited to share Leave No Trace information with the club as they prepare for this trip. Our second presentation was open to the community and many parents, siblings, and friends of the E-packers came to find out what Leave No Trace was all about. We had a very interesting and bi-lingual conversation about Leave No Trace. When we talked about the decomposition rates of common trash items, the participants were quite surprised that it can take a plastic six-pack holder about 450 years to biodegrade. The audience was also interested in learning more about the Hotspots program to possibly nominate a local site for restoration within the community.

All the best....

Agata and Jason