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
SnowSchool happened this year in Mammoth! Winter Wildlands Alliance sponsors SnowSchool, a travelling curriculum of winter science and ecology lessons applied to outdoor educational opportunities. This winter, Winter Wildlands Alliance worked with Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association to coordinate the event and bring together groups like Friends of the Inyo, Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, and Mammoth Mountain to get Mammoth Elementary 5th graders out into the winter landsacpe for a day. We scheduled it twice, and got cancelled due to epic storms, but we made it happen on Tuesday, March 21, even with another big storm. The kids were great- smiles…