Hawk Mountain 2008

Another pictobrowser slideshow:


Test panorama from magtoo.com:

We should actually write about our trips too. Like literate college students and all that :-)

Test Post

The sun is setting on a nearly deserted parking lot. A van pulls in, then drives up to a small cluster of cars with parents waiting expectantly inside. The van’s doors open and a dozen weary-looking high school students step out onto the pavement. Their faces have been tanned by hours spent in the sun, hiking through the rugged wilderness of the Kenai Peninsula. Their arms are covered in scratches from run-ins with alder thickets. It’s a lot to go through for a quarter of PE credit.

These students are part of the trail building intensive offered this spring at Polaris K-12. The intensive focused mainly on wilderness surveying skills and provided students with their choice of a semester of PE credit, a semester of community service credit, or one quarter of each. In addition to learning these skills, students used them in the field to help a local project.

The Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Huts Association, founded in 1998, has great ambitions. Members aspire to create a hut-to-hut system in Alaska similar to those found all over the world from New Zealand to Colorado. The concept is simple: a trail is created with huts placed at intervals along the way. Hikers can travel along this trail by day, then stop at the huts for food and cozy sleeping arrangements at night.

Marion Vicary, who taught the Polaris intensive, has known AMWHA executive director John Wolfe for a number of years. When she learned of the organization, she was intrigued. Vicary accompanied Wolfe and others on multiple backcountry excursions into the Kenai Peninsula in search of possible trail routes. An area surrounding Mills Creek was selected. It was time to get some field data.

Seeking to bring two interests together, Vicary suggested to Wolfe that she create an intensive—a prolonged class period lasting about three weeks—to help AMWHA gather the necessary information. He agreed, and the Polaris K-12 Trail Building Intensive was born...

Promised Land State Park Trip