South Dakota National Parks: Junior Rangers

If you ever make it to any of our nation's National Parks, and are a homeschooling family, make sure you check out the Junior Ranger Program. It's an absolute must.

Admittedly, it takes a whole lot of extra time, but the level of learning just cannot be found in any other way. They are there. They can see, smell, touch their surroundings, and the Junior Ranger program encourages them to look at all the tiny details they would otherwise glance right over.

If you visit a park ranger, they will give your kids a workbook, based on their age. The program usually includes kids ages five to twelve, and there are different requirements for finishing based on how old they are. The workbook is filled with activities that require them to walk through visitor centers and read the displays, search for details, and answer questions. They cover all kinds of history and science and social studies, and some of them really make kids think. Many of the programs require a hike or walk through the area, where they will complete a 'scavenger hunt' while looking for little bits of nature around them.

Usually, in order to complete the program and receive a badge, you are also required to attend a ranger talk, walk, or other program. We learned years ago how educational these can be - rangers are full of information specific to their park, and they love to share it - especially with kids. On our trip, we spent an hour being led through a cave, we listened to a talk about fossils (complete with real fossils to look at and touch) and we attended a walk around Mt. Rushmore where we were taught about the history and geology of the project.

When the book is all finished, and you've attended your ranger program, your kids take their books back to the visitor center where they are presented with a certificate and a Junior Ranger badge. They are also required to take an oath that they will do their best to preserve America's lands and share their newfound information with family and friends.


My girls earned three badges on this trip. First, we visited Jewel Cave National Monument:

Since the ranger leading the walk knew they were working on their Junior Ranger badges, she gave them the honor of occasionally leading our tour group to different locations. They loved this.


And of course, The Daddy and I are were just as fascinated (if not a little more) than the girls were with all the cave formations we saw. Really neat stuff down there - definitely worth the time if you are in the area, and aren't claustrophobic.

After that, we drove through Badlands National Park. It has it's own kind of beauty, though it's not far off from what we have here in Western Colorado. The colors were more impressive though. I did buy some yarn as my trip souvenir in the colors of the Badlands. :-) 


Next, we visited Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. It's awe-inspiring, the way the mountain was carved. You don't really have any idea just how huge it is until you are there and actually seeing it.

And after all those, we took a quick scenic drive through Custer State Park. While not a National Park, Custer does have a Junior Naturalist program available for kids too. I was a little bummed we couldn't spend more time there, as I think this area might have been my favorite out of everything we saw. Wildlife abound...


And who can resist pushy donkeys that actually stick their heads in your car begging for treats?
 
We sure can't.
 
We drove all the way through, looking at the Needles, and driving along narrow, twisting roads and low, one-lane tunnels. I would have loved to have just stopped and spent a day or two hiking and looking and taking it all in. The plethora of different geological formations all through South Dakota is so impressive.

We're blessed here in the west to have so many different National Parks within driving distance, but I know they are scattered all over our country. So if you're looking for a really neat, hands on way to teach your kids some stuff about the world they live in, definitely go check them out. Each one has something different to offer!

Homeschool Bits: Quill and Ink

While we were in Missouri, we discovered the novelty of black walnuts. Being as we're Westerners, and they don't grow wild here, we'd never seen them before. Chloe had a great time collecting them at the park at Alley Spring.



We put them in a bag, brought them home with good intentions, and ended up leaving them in that bag on the front porch for six weeks. They were rotten and slimy and gross. I was ready to toss them. But when I was reading about how to make black walnut ink and dye, the first step is to... leave your black walnuts in a bag to rot. Heh! Awesome. On to Step 2, then!

We put the rotten walnuts (maggots and all. No joke*.) in my five quart soup pot.

(I thoroughly wanted to ruin the pot, so I'd have an excuse to get a new stainless steel one. It didn't work, the pot's just fine.) Clad in rubber gloves and craft aprons, in our very oldest of clothes, we stabbed the walnuts with steak knives repeatedly until they were fairly broken up.

Then we brought them inside, filled the pot with water, and boiled it for a few hours.

Now, they say to boil it for 8-24 hours. I was working with two impatient little girls, and a time span of one afternoon to finish this project. We boiled it for two and a half hours, and that was plenty.

I mashed the husks up a bit more as it boiled, and when we were satisfied with how dark it was, I strained out all the nasty sludge.

Then we made our quill, using a feather from the geese The Daddy shot this spring. I'm not going to go into detail here, because if you Google "how to make a quill" you'll find about forty five thousand how-to articles on the subject. Suffice it to say, it's not hard. We had the best luck with an Exacto knife.

We all took a try at writing with the quill.

It was surprisingly easy. Chloe wrote a letter to her great-grandma that we visited in Missouri. The downside was not being able to erase!


History, science, art, penmanship and grammar all rolled into one activity? Awesome. And the actual hands-on time was only about half an hour.

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*Yes, maggots. Seriously nasty. If it wasn't mentioned specifically in the blog I used as my general instructions that there would be bugs and larvae of all sorts, I don't think I could have continued. But by the time they'd boiled for two and a half hours, we couldn't tell they were in there any more. Not sure if that's a good thing, or if it's even more disgusting...

A Love Story: A Girl and her Yarn.

I feel compelled to tell you my happy knitting project story. It's been a long time since I finished a project I was so darn smitten with. This story is far too long, considering it's about yarn. But hey, at least there are pictures.
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When I take a trip now, instead of buying souvenirs that are going to sit on a shelf and collect dust (because I have too many of those already!) I try to buy a ball of yarn. It turns into something useful, and each time I use it, I have a chance to look back on the trip fondly.

So when we were in Birch Tree, Missouri (population 600-something) I found a local yarn store called The Twisted Thread.



The fact that there was a local yarn store at all in a teeny little Ozark town thrilled me. Mostly, she carried Cascade products, which I can easily buy at home, and aren't all that exciting to me. But! There was this shelf! A shelf of gorgeous, hand dyed (and even some hand spun) yarns! Colors galore, I tell you. But I knew just what I was after. I wanted a ball of hand dyed yarn that was going to remind me of the amazing fall colors of the Ozarks.



And lo and behold, there it was, the "Fall" colorway. Sumac red, Sassafras orange, the gold of hickory and dogwood. It had all the colors of the fall I was so enthralled with there in Missouri. And it was hand dyed by someone local to the Ozark region. And it was cashmere.

So anyway. Enough about the yarn, with it's gorgeous drape and ultra-soft feel and.... Right. So anyway.

I bought my ball of yarn, finished enjoying the fall in Missouri with my sweet grandmother, and came home to start looking for the right pattern. I knew I wanted a shawlette/kerchief. You can't do too much fancy lace work with hand painted yarn, so I was looking for something simple to show off the pretty colors. I looked for over two hours at Ravelry's options, was about to shut off the computer and give up completely, when I saw Simple Things.

The name hooked me first - Simple Things are what I live for. I looked at the pattern some more. It was named after a quote from Laura Ingalls Wilder! Our trip included our stop at Laura's home! It was clear to me then, this project was meant to be.

And so I knitted it. And lemme tell ya, knitting with cashmere (even just 10% cashmere) is a pleasure every knitter should experience at least once. This yarn is like butter, I tell you. It took a couple of weeks, but now I have this piece I am just utterly tickled with.


Oh my. Just look how those colors melt together, and yet still stand out from one another. I am completely sold on hand-dyed.

The shawl is hanging in my hallway, when I'm not wearing it. I get a lot more satisfaction out of it when I walk by it forty times a day than I would if it were hanging in my closet. It won't stay there forever, but at least for awhile. I'm calling it part of my "fall decor".



And so goes the story of a girl and the yarn she fell in love with. I love stories with happy endings. :-)

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**Note: The picture above the pegs is the painting of Laura's house that my grandmother gifted me. Isn't it so pretty?

**Another note: check out Morandia's MIB Fibers if you want your own ultra-soft skein of cashmere/merino yarn. I'm sure she can help you out.

Missouri Trip: Rocky Ridge Farm

The reason for our trip was to visit my grandparents in Kansas and my grandmother in Missouri. But we're homeschoolers - if there's a cool place to stop along the way, we're going to stop, and we're going to learn all we can.

Well, it just so happened that we'd have to drive right through Mansfield, Missouri on our way to Grandma Elda's house. Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura and Almanzo Wilder moved about seven years after they were married. Rocky Ridge Farm.



When I looked at the map and realized this, I did a little dance. I think I even squealed a little. Anyone who knows us knows our love for Laura Ingalls Wilder. I've read each of the books out loud to the girls, and they just thrive on the play that stems from pretending to be pioneers. (Cora is always stuck playing Mary, because of her blonde hair, but she can never be nearly as well-behaved as Mary was, and Chloe is always getting frustrated with her because of that!) My reading has gone further than just the books she wrote to biographies, etc. that describe more of who she was as a person, and I've become even more enthralled with the woman that she was as I learn more about her. Wisdom like that is hard to come by.



We arrived at Rocky Ridge Farm after rain had poured down on the area for five hours. It was soggy and damp and chilly outside, but we still enjoyed walking around the grounds, imagining Laura raising Rose out there among the huge native trees, and the trees that Almanzo planted.

The biggest disappointment of the whole place was that no photos were allowed of anything indoors, meaning I have very little to share with you in the way of pictures.

We started with a guided tour through the house, left very much the same way Laura left it when she passed away. Almanzo built the house, and he was clearly an ingenious carpenter. Everything he did just made so much sense, and he did it all with Laura's comfort and convenience as his priority. I'm terribly envious of the baking station in her kitchen - windows on both sides, a counter low enough to knead the bread comfortably, bins below for sacks of flour and sugar and cupboards in easy reach for other ingredients. Throughout the whole house were all the little things she treasured - framed calendar prints on the walls, handmade pillows and embroidery (even some that Almanzo did!) and it was just so perfectly homey and cozy. She had a library nook that looked lovely, another thing I'd love to have some day. Unfortunately, our time in the house was short. Chloe and I could have spent hours looking at every detail, but the tour guide pushed us through in order to make space for the next group coming after us. I would have been content to stay there all day but they wouldn't let us.

After the tour was the museum they've set up to house many of the more precious artifacts from her life - including Pa's fiddle. The real fiddle, the thing that got them through all the hard times of pioneer life, that celebrated the great times. That fiddle held that little family together. It was central in each of the books, as Laura's earliest memory on into her teen years when it was still such a great comfort to her. To see it was really, really special. We also bought a CD in the gift shop of the fiddle being played by a local - neat stuff! We were able to spend as much time as we wanted in the museum, moving at our own pace and taking it all in. There was a lot of "Mom, look! Remember when she talked about....." and "Oh, Chloe, it's the ......." We were both so excited to see firsthand so many of the little things mentioned in the books: Laura's first embroidery sampler (at age four), the lace given to her on her wedding day, the tiny box with porcelain flowers. Cora mostly just followed along patiently, listening and asking questions, though she enjoyed looking at the pictures of Laura and her family, seeing what they really looked like.

We visited "The Rock House" that Rose had built for them after she'd become a successful writer. We could sit on the back porch and imagine Laura there.



And I did manage to snap a quick shot of Laura's beloved blue willow table setting from outside the kitchen window.



Truly, the whole visit was a treat. We were able to, for a short time, immerse ourselves in all of Laura's things, imagine so much more clearly her life after what we know from the books. To be able to add sight to the stories made them that much more real.

I did buy some postcards of the most special things inside the house and museum - Pa's fiddle, her writing desk, the kitchen. And I bought a china shepherdess in hopes of someday having a mantle of my own on which to put her. When we arrived at my grandmother's house later that day, she gave us a painting of the white house, done by someone native to the area. On the back, the artist wrote "I knew Laura as a nice person and as a friend." A painting of Laura's house, done by someone who considered her a friend. Awesome. It will hang in our hallway now, treasured.

Missouri Trip: Bakersville

Blogging trips is so hard to do - we do so many things I want to write about, and take hundreds of pictures, and sorting through it all and finding the words to describe it all can be a daunting task. But I'm at least going to try, for posterity's sake, you know.

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In the beginning of October, the girls and I set off on an adventure. And adventure without The Daddy (gasp!) that included driving 20 hours east. There were many stops along the way, all of which I'll eventually blog about, and ending in a little town called Mountain View, Missouri, deep in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks.

One of the stops we made was Mansfield, Missouri. Our main reason for stopping was to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum there, but discovered another little gem close by: the little town of Bakersville, familiar to anyone who orders heirloom seeds from Baker Creek. We've ordered our seeds from them for years, and I'd always wanted to visit their little town. I had no idea driving through that we'd be right there, but plenty of signs led us right to them. And it was such a treat to visit this place (especially for this avid heirloom gardener.)



The gardens were utterly fantastic, and this was in early October, when they were long past their peak. But still there were bright colors in every shade of red and purple and orange and pink tucked away here and there, and flower gardens still bursting with color. I'm not a flower gardener, but this may have inspired me to become one!



We visited on a Wednesday afternoon. It was super quiet, hardly a soul to be seen, but I think that added a bit to the overall effect of the town. The shops were all void of people, meaning we could walk and look and talk to our heart's content without feeling rushed at all. The folks that worked there were sweet as could be.



There were shelves of jams and jellies for sale, handmade crafty bits of all kinds, an apothecary with jars and jars of dried herbs, books on every subject interesting to folks like me, and of course, seeds. Row upon row of heirloom, antique-variety seeds for purchase. It was a gardener's dream come true.

Not only do they grow heirloom seeds at Bakersville, but they grow heirloom chickens. All shapes and sizes and manner of fowl, really. You'd think, seeing as we have chickens in our own back yard, that coop after coop of chickens would get boring fast to Two Little Girls, but no!



I had to drag Chloe away from them. The kind folks at Bakersville were trying to close up for the day, and my daughter was still cooing softly to a cage of banties, telling them how pretty they were. She left that day utterly smitten, determined to own at least one pair of banties next spring.

Upstairs in one of the shops is a Seed Museum.


Seed catalogs, packets, advertisements and other memorabilia from years gone by. Truly, the folks at Bakersville possess an extreme love not just for gardening, but for the history of it. The girls dragged me through faster than I'd have liked, but it was fun to see all this history collected into one place - and there couldn't be a more fitting place for it.

I am so glad we had the time to stop at Bakersville. It was a lovely surprise to find it so close to our planned route. Some day we'll have to make it back and visit during one of their festivals, and see everything in action, but spending a quiet afternoon just exploring was a great experience in itself!



If you garden - or need inspiration to start - check our their website and ask for a catalog. It's the prettiest garden catalog you've ever seen, and you won't be able to stop yourself from ordering at least a few packets of something interesting to try.


More to come on the rest of our trip as soon as I make it through more pictures. :-)

Homeschool Field Trip: Leadville

We did a "quick" day trip to Leadville, CO yesterday, opting to stay home and act like responsible homeowners this weekend instead of going camping again.

Leadville might be the most historic mining town in Colorado, with fascinating stories of the many famous people that lived and visited there. It was a great lesson in some of the more "colorful" mining history (we had lunch in a building that used to be a brothel), though of course we kept that toned down when explaining it to the young ones.

Our main reason for going was to ride the train. The Leadville C&S railroad goes along a stretch of track through some of the old mining community, though it was hard to see much of it. The girls enjoyed the train ride though - it was a neat experience for them, especially the three year old, who is very much in the "Transportation Stage", fascinated with all things that move.

We also took some time to drive around town and see a few historic sites. There are tours for many of the historic buildings in Leadville and we would have loved to go on them, but time was limited (it's a three and a half hour drive to get there in the first place.) So we appreciated them from the outside.


We did stop at the cemetery for a quick geocache, and enjoyed the story behind this grave:

Note the name below Texas Jack's - Wm. F. Cody Buffalo Bill. He erected this grave stone for his friend. Neat to see.

When I was in the fourth grade, I remember having to do a whole report on California history. It was a huge project, learning the state flower and bird, the history of California, some of the geography. My hope is that my own girls will never have need of such a report - that they'll have seen and touched and felt it enough in real life that they'll never question the heritage of the State of Colorado.

Summer Adventures 2011 - 4x4 driving

Once upon a time, I used to be adventurous. Or maybe I was just stupid.

I used to love riding along on the four-wheel-drive roads my husband loves so much to explore. Steep drop-offs inspired awe, not terror. Jostling and bouncing over the bumpy, rocky roads induced laughter, not nausea. Sadly, all of that seems to have changed.

Ouray is known for the Million Dollar Highway, twenty three miles of narrow, winding road with sheer cliffs just inches from the edge of the roadway, and no guard rails. I've ridden and driven over it enough times that I ought to be comfortable with it. I've always been fine with it before. Maybe it's just my increasing age giving me the sudden ability to imagine every single thing that could possibly go wrong. For whatever reason driving the pass this time really creeped me out.

And Red Mountain Pass wasn't even the half of it this time. Check out this road:



You have the pleasure of driving under the rock overhang, still dripping with water from an earlier rainstorm. The road is narrow and one lane. Mostly, you just have to hope no one is coming down, or someone's going to have to back up. And backing up on these roads isn't fun. I know this from experience, as we had to back all the way down one of them when we discovered a snow slide was blocking the road, and there was no spot to turn around without falling off the side of the mountain.

Anyway, back to the road with the crazy rock overhang (it's the Yankee Boy Basin road, for those here locally.) It's a popular road, busy even, on the Fourth of July weekend in Ouray. It was somewhat comforting to realize that thousands of people drive the same road and have survived it. And then we got to the top, and we found this:



The kind of scenery that can only be found at the end of steep, sometimes scary mountain roads.



More wildflower species than I could have counted, with thousands more buds because we were just a couple of weeks too early for the height of the wildflower season. Two waterfalls rushing together into a creek cascading down into the deep valley below. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, a perfect mix of lush green and jagged rock cliffs. Nature at it's finest.

Was it worth the trip up that awful road? Probably. I felt increasingly better seeing tour trucks going up and down the mountain all afternoon.

I wish I could stop my brain from playing out all the awful scenarios that could come from the 4x4 excursions (mostly the scenario that involves the truck falling over the edge. It's an awful scenario to think about.) I trust my husband, and I trust his driving... but I don't trust other people much. I'd much rather be hiking, on my own two reliable feet, but there are some places we just couldn't hike to in a day, places like this. I'm glad we've got the truck for stuff like this. I think.

Summer Adventures 2011 - Geocaching

I keep trying to explain geocaching to friends, and I keep getting the same response - mostly a bunch of smiles and nods and "uh-huhs." You know, the raised eyebrows that resonate with "Yeah, that sounds like fun. Not."

So let me try it again, this time with pictures of my personal favorite caches from the past couple of weeks.

Geocaching is a sort of "treasure hunt". There are caches placed all over the world. A cache can be anything from a film canister with a log in it to a big rubbermaid container. The larger ones are generally filled with "treasure", items not usually of much value, toys, keychains, other trinkets. You're welcome to take any item you find in a cache, so long as you replace it with something of your own that is of similar value. If you look at geocaching.com and map your area, you'll see what I mean. They're everywhere.

Our favorite caches are the ones that take us on incredible hikes and drives to places we never would have gone otherwise, places we didn't know existed. Like this:

A 130-year old narrow gauge railroad bed through the Red Mountain mining district in the San Juan mountains.

It's such an interesting way of exploring your world, and in cases like this, of exploring history. We could look at pictures, like this one of a train on this exact same railroad:
And we will look at those pictures, but what better way to really understand the magnitude of this accomplishment than to walk along it, see it for ourselves?

We hiked a little over a mile on the way to the cache, which was placed near this turntable:
The only one of it's kind in the Rocky Mountains, tucked away amidst the ghost towns of the Red Mountain mining district.

The "treasure" of this hike wasn't the cache. It was the experience of walking the path of miners over a century before us, imagining the life they lived, the work they did, admiring their determination to send a train through country that was hardly accessible by horseback, all for the desperate desire to strike it rich on gold or silver. It was seeing firsthand how much the earth can change in 130 years, how she can "bounce back" after being exploited, trees and undergrowth once again taking over their rightful ground.

I realize not everyone can come to Colorado and follow this particular trail, learn these particular lessons. But everywhere, there are little "secrets" like these, secrets that can be known to anyone who cares to find out. I encourage everyone to give it a shot. Not every cache is as interesting and as exciting as this, and you don't even always find them, but each is fun in it's own right.

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Here are some other photos from interesting places where we've found caches recently.

A faucet piped into a hot springs near Chattanooga, an abandoned mining town outside of Silverton, right off the Red Mountain Pass. Who would've thought you'd ever find bathtubs on the side of the Million Dollar Highway with naturally warm water pumped in? We figure it was put there in the 60's... and the faucet still turns on and off! Too cool. Unfortunately, the "hot" springs are only lukewarm now. But still neat to see.

This cache was near the top of Cottonwood Pass, outside of Taylor Canyon near Almont, CO. The view up here was amazing. I mean, we see some pretty incredible views doing the kinds of things we do, but this one was just awesome. There aren't words to describe it. 12,000 feet at the top of a mountain, and then further up for the cache, looking out over the Collegiate Peaks with Taylor reservoir in the distance, mountains and valleys on all sides. Breathtaking.
This picture was taken after we drove through a lake to find a cache.
I'm all about gorgeous, pristine lakes at 11,000 foot altitudes. Can't say I'm crazy about driving through them, but you know... there was a cache on the other side. Happily, it was shallow and all went well.
In this one we're hiking up over an avalanche, north out of Crested Butte. You read about avalaches, how dangerous they are. But you don't quite understand the reality of that until you walk along and look at the hills above you, trees snapped off at ground level or uprooted entirely, a solid bank of snow who-knows-how-many feet deep when it settles. The whole side of the mountain was basically cleared of vegetation. We never did find this cache - after traversing the avalanche we discovered we'd have to cross a raging, icy river. Not a good plan at the height of spring run-off, so we gave up.

These are just a few of the caches we've found in the past couple of weeks, along with all kinds of other adventures in the Colorado mountains. I think we found something like 40 caches altogether between both recent camping trips. Each one took us to somewhere worth seeing - a creek inlet, a beaver pond, lots of very old cemeteries, the tops of mountains and down along creek beds, ghost towns and thriving mountain towns.

You'll find your own treasure in it - some folks love to dig through the caches and see what others have left. Others love the hunt once they get to the point where they should be looking. Some crazy ones love the whole concept of 'micros', searching for minuscule capsules hidden in very public places, often impossible to find (I hate micros.) Our treasure is the discovery that happens while we're getting to the cache. All it takes is a GPS (or a downloadable app on your SmartPhone) and you'll be off and running. Do give it a shot. And let me know how it goes!