Spring Break Eco Adventure Helps Restore Death Valley Habitat
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Death Valley in the spring after a wet winter is a great place to spend Spring Break. For eight Cougars, though, it wasn’t all play. The eight, led by trip leader Josh Gile, spent two days driving in a Center for Civic Engagement van in order to work with their community partners on a restoration project.
The restoration project involves removing large stands of tamarisk, an invasive species that chokes off native plant growth and which provides no useful habitat for wildlife. Tamarisk was brought to Death Valley early in the twentieth century in order to control erosion, provide shade and as an ornamental.
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Working with Friends of the Inyo and representatives from the Bureau of Land Management, the WSU crew cleared out a lot of tamarisk from canyons few people ever see.
This was the second year WSU partnered on the project, Gile said, which National Park officials launched in 1999.
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Gile facilitates community service Eco Adventures for the Center for Civic Engagement and the Outdoor Recreation Center. The civil engineering senior said he’s looking forward to an April 22 trip to Granite Point, where adventurers will work with a team from the Army Corps of Engineers to clean up the popular Snake River rock-climbing site and protect the area with erosion-preventing plantings of Ponderosa pines.
“A lot of the overuse of the Granite Point is due to college students,” Gile said, “so this is a way to give back.”
But like all Eco Adventures, community service is only part of the reward. “Granite Point is a great rock climbing site,” said Gile. The climbs range from an easy 5.0 clear up to an advanced 5.12.
“It’s classic!” said Gile.
For more information on Eco Adventures, visit http://orc.wsu.edu/.
WSU Students Spend Spring Break Helping Flooded Farmers
Mucking the mud out of a previously flooded dairy barn isn’t how one would expect most college students to want to spend their spring break.
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But 13 WSU students from the Pullman campus chose to devote part or all of their break helping clean up after the devastating floods that soaked southwestern Washington in December. The group drove a van across the state on Saturday to work in the southwest Lewis County communities of Pe Ell and Boistfort.
Student volunteer Morgan Leap said the experience has given her a more realistic perspective on the impacts of the disaster.
“You see stuff like this on the news and you see pictures of how people have lost their homes and you know in your head, but seeing it you feel it in your heart more,” she said. “You’re talking to families and hearing people’s stories. Actually seeing it makes it real.”
In addition to shoveling mud and debris out of barns, the students cleaned flood debris from fences, shoveled flood-deposited rocks and gravel out of fields so they can be plowed, and dug out irrigation pipes buried under two feet of mud.
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Generally, the student volunteers were overwhelmed by the extent of damage they found and the years of cleanup facing local residents. Still, they felt their few days of work were a valuable contribution.
“I am very satisfied thinking about how I’m giving help to other people, so it’s very meaningful to me,” said Yoo Tak Han, a foreign studies student from Korea. “I can give something, some small thing, that will make some people happy, so I think it’s a good thing.”
--Denny Fleenor
Video: WSU Students Help Flooded Farmers
Related Podcast
WSU Students Spend Spring Break Helping Flooded Farmers (4 meg MP3)