Editor's note: The video link in this article has been corrected.
Window into RMNP
To see student storytelling from Rocky Mountain National Park, visit https://vimeo.com/channels/835845
Sunscreen must smell tasty as ice cream to animals roaming past motion sensor cameras at Rocky Mountain National Park given all the slobber they leave on the lenses.
"Animals will often lick the cameras, and the only thing that I can think of is that we all must still have sunscreen on our hands when we handle those cameras," said Dave Kline, a math teacher at Longmont's Westview Middle School.
On Wednesday morning, he and Westview science teacher Dan Cribby led 19 students up to the park wearing — under heavy jackets — matching brown t-shirts that read "Plains to the Park" on the front with the school's wildcat logo and on the back "RMNP ... a place that makes me wonder."
Daydreaming, long verboten in the classroom, now happens by design.
When kids step off the bus, Cribby gives them a prompt question to think about — last week it was "How might this place change in 40 years?" Then, he asks them to find a "solo spot" on a log, on a rock, under a tree, or in the snow to spend 20 minutes of "solo time."
The breather helps students transition from traveling to work related to the school's two-pronged STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) research project launched at a summer 2014 STEM camp in partnership with RMNP and the Estes Institute in Estes Park, he said.
Cribby leads the research team of "citizen scientists" — student volunteers who collect and enter data — and Kline leads the video production team to document that effort.
"We thought, 'Hey, this is like peanut butter and chocolate. We hit on something,'" Kline said of the way these STEM projects at RMNP dovetail. "We wanted kids to be researching and developing scientific thinking and communicating what they learn because scientists struggle with that — partially because science can be very dry."
Fieldwork in focus
Snow devils swirled around the group's Horseshoe Park destination within RMNP when the group got off the bus and out of chaperone cars to clean camera lenses, replace D cell batteries, swap memory cards, and reposition cameras.
"But if we just go there when it's nice, we will never understand this place," Cribby said, before dismissing the group to spend the usual 20 minutes of solo time in the open meadow area at the junction of Horseshoe Park and the Fall River corridor. The group also researches at two more nearby microecologies — one closed canopy mixed conifer forest and another area considered mosaic due to its mix of open meadow, aspen grove and a mixed conifer forest.
Like several other high school students in the group, Ashley Degen, 16, took on the project as a Westview Middle School student and continues participating in it as a mentor to the team's younger students.
"Once, when we came back in the winter, we were waist-deep in snow. But the same animals were there. They didn't have anywhere else to go. And that visit helped us see how their diets and activities needed to change," the Silver Creek High School sophomore said.
Desperate for food over winter, elk nibbled the bark off aspen nearby as high up the trunk as they could reach. Bald spots of brown dirt on the snow revealed how the tremendous body heat of bull elk bedding down melted it to the ground overnight.
"I just got back from Beijing, and I will complain about the plumbing there," the windblown Degen continued. "I will complain about a lot of things, but not this. Never this."
The project gives her and other students a window to a world very often out of sight were it not for the 30-second short films taken whenever wildlife trip the motion detector built into the Cuddeback game cameras. Students mount them with nylon straps to tree trunks along the corridors animals travel.
"I saw two male elk fighting that way," Westview seventh-grader Emily Winkler, 13, said.
Students edit these glimpses and other footage of project activity shot on Canon cameras. They plan how to tell the story and write storyboards for the narrator to read — an activity that extends and enriches learning beyond a conventional classroom's four walls, Don Haddad, SVVSD superintendent, said.
"When you communicate your understanding of something, it really solidifies and deepens that understanding of the concepts and the learning that you just experienced," he explained.
"Citizen scientists" speak
For the second time, RMNP's Biennial Research Conference featured the group's story now collected over a nearly three-year period with 400-plus trips to the park, Cribby said.
The conference held March 1 and 2 at the Estes Park Town Hall included an agenda of hot topics in the park such as large scale willow restoration, the archeology and paleoecology of ice patches, and sensor technology to detect toxins in the alpine lakes.
Westview Middle School's group got slotted to speak under the "youth relevancy" category to a group of about 55 people. That afternoon, they shared lessons learned as the next generation of citizen scientists fresh from fieldwork Wednesday morning.
First, they map areas of study with GPS coordinates so as to verify how it may or may not change between visits in terms of its biodiversity, population counts and more.
"The kids collect data that can be used for park management decisions," Cribby said, during the 20-minute presentation.
Students share it with the Continental Divide Research Learning Center, a National Park Service-wide initiative to promote scientific research in national parks.
"We're not with RMNP's education and outreach program where they do large school field trips and canned presentations — the traditional 'sit and get' model," Kline said. "We're hanging with the big dogs, and that's kind of unusual for middle schoolers."
Because of Westview's success with the dual Plains to the Park STEM research projects, the school in June 2016 expanded its territory to Button Rock Preserve — a walk-in only recreation area about seven miles west of Lyons. The preserve flanks Longmont and Ralph Price reservoirs along the North Saint Vrain Creek and stores water for the city of Longmont.
"We see a lot of fishermen there who walk by and don't even know that they've set off the motion detectors on our cameras. But we also see so much wildlife, especially big game. Compared to what we've seen in the national park, it's like 19 elk for one of something else there," Kline said. "... And even though we are careful to wash sunscreen off our hands, the bears are like bloodhounds. They still smell something and move in on the camera to lick the lens."
Pam Mellskog can be reached at email@example.com or 303-746-0942.