Outdoor Learning

Outdoor education is woven into academic courses and after-school activities, taking advantage of our wonderful location. Courses such as Advanced Earth Science, Environmental Science, and Biology use the local and regional environments as a living laboratory. Lessons come to life as students learn directly from their five senses, rather than abstractly from a textbook. As they move through the land, they learn to observe and question everything. A few examples:

• Hidden in the mesquites, they discover thousand-year-old petroglyphs (Native American rock art) and metates (grind stones).
• On a remote mesa, they come across hundreds of Jurassic dinosaur tracks, and observe both four-footed vegetarian species and the two-footed three-clawed carnivorous species that seem to have followed them.
• Blindfolded, they identify plants by smell alone.
• From the size and species of trees and the growth rings in the cut stumps, they reconstruct the ecological succession of a forest.
• They measure the flow of a spring and calculate how much water it produces in a year.
• In a cliff face, they see hardened ash (tuff), evidence of a volcanic eruption 5 million years ago.
• They reconstruct a stream's history from the terraces cut into its banks.
• In canyon walls, they see the intricate pattern of cross-bedding, the preserved evidence of 170-million-year-old sand dunes.
• They collect pond life and examine it under the microscope.
• Visiting the ruins of a failed 19th century homestead, they come to understand firsthand the problems of settlement in the arid West.