Snow School
Friends of the Inyo and the Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association believe that every child in the Eastern Sierra should get a hands-on outdoor educational experience in their backyards. Fortunately, Winter Wildlands Alliance—a national organization devoted to protecting the human-powered winter recreation experience—has created a SnowSchool curriculum that is easy for organizations like ours to pick-up and implement on a local level.
Since the beginning of the program in 2017, we’ve gotten 450 Mammoth and Bishop fifth-graders out to don snowshoes, dig snowpits, calculate snow/water equivalence, learn about how the critters and trees adapt to life in a harsh winterscape, and of course, play!
Updates
By Lindsay Butcher, Stewardship Director SnowSchool is the nation’s largest on-snow winter ecology education program, with more than 30,000 annual participants at 60 sites across the United States. Developed by Winter Wildlands Alliance (WWA) to introduce underserved K-12 students to snow science and the wonder of winter landscapes, SnowSchool combines hands-on science education with snowshoe-powered outdoor exploration. The kiddos learn what the water cycle is and the part humans play in it, what our local watershed looks like and where we get our water from, where it goes, winter adaptations of animals/humans/plants, water-snow equivalency, and how to dig a snow…
On February 13th & 14th, Friends of the Inyo partnered with the Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, Winter Wildlands Alliance, the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, and the Mammoth Mountain Community Foundation to bring the SnowSchool curriculum to Mammoth Elementary School fifth graders for the second year. We were fortunate to get a quick dusting the night before our first day of SnowSchool. Perfect timing! The 2-3 new inches of snow provided a nice fluffy layer for the students to get used to their snowshoes. Though many had tried them out on the grass around campus during PE, this…
Partner Profile: David Page of Winter Wildlands Alliance Friends of the Inyo’s Ben Wickham sat down at Mountain Rambler Brewery in Bishop with David Page, Mammoth local and Advocacy Manager for Winter Wildlands Alliance, to talk about SnowSchool, a national education program designed by Winter Wildlands Alliance with 60 sites across the U.S. that educate 30,000 youth each year. For more about SnowSchool, visit SnowSchool’s website. What is SnowSchool? David Page: Snowschool is a program that is developed by Winter Wildlands Alliance and has expanded to about 60 sites, and reaches about 32,000 kids a year. The goal is to…