This week the CAP was in full swing, with the mound of paperwork and course logistics behind us. On Tuesday, we spent the class learning about the Community Action Project we will take on during this class. Our class will work together to tackle an outdoor or environmental issue affecting our community and actually doing something about it. We learned about last quarter’s project and read the article they wrote about the aesthetic and environmental impact of dog poop on trails. We also learned about Earth Force projects around the country that other schools have taken on in order to help inspire our class.

Wednesday was jam-packed. In the morning, we had a Jeopardy-style quiz on a book called Snow Sense, which serves as our text in this course and we learned about the different types of avalanches and avalanche statistics. Jesse, Corbin, and Tom won the “get out of journal free” cards because they answered the most questions correctly. We also participated in a sense of place writing activity where we picked a place in the outdoors from our past and wrote about everything we could think of from describing the landscape, to recalling how that place made us feel when we were there. On Wednesday afternoon, we were fortunate to have Leave No Trace (LNT) Master, Ford Craven, enlighten us about how to leave no trace in the winter environment. Thanks for volunteering your time Ford!

On Friday, we conducted a Socratic Seminar about land access issues in the winter. Specifically, we discussed whether or not access to our public lands should be limited to outdoor recreationalists and whether or not snowmobiles should be allowed in backcountry areas. While we did not come up with any answers to this complex problem, the discussion was rich.