'Grateful to be Part of this Day'

By Leslie Vreed, Telluride Daily Planet

Perhaps Mollie Theis, the education and outreach coordinator of EcoAction Partners, summed it up best.

“I’m grateful to be part of this annual day dedicated to connecting young people with their space-and-place through joyful, hands-on activities,” Theis said of her participation Monday. The event was the Pinhead Institute’s annual education event on the Valley Floor.

Emily Ballou, who attended as a volunteer with her daughter, Ellison’s, first-grade class, caught the spirit too.

“It’s one of my favorite days to be a part of the Elementary School,” Ballou said, “and one of many sweet reminders of how fortunate we are to live here. Pinhead does a fantastic job, and it’s such a fun experience for the kids.”

Founded in 2019 by the Pinhead Institute, a Smithsonian affiliate whose mission is hands-on science education for regional youth from kindergarten to age 18, the annual spring get-together was originally a collaboration between Pinhead and the Sheep Mountain Alliance.

“We shared an employee — Joe Cullen — who came up with the idea,” Sarah Holbrooke, Pinhead’s executive director, said.

“We’ve since opened it up to other nonprofits.” This year, collaborators included Sheep Mountain Alliance, EcoAction Partners, San Miguel Watershed Coalition, the Telluride Historical Museum, “many, many Pinhead volunteers,” and “all the elementary school kids from Kindergarten through the second grade.”

That last group was the most important of all. Despite the fact that it is situated just a short walk from Telluride Elementary School, “Many kids say this is the only time they’ve been on the Valley Floor,” Holbrooke said.

On Monday, with adults fueled by free donuts and coffee supplied by Baked In Telluride “for our many volunteers, collaborators and teachers,” young students moved in waves through five separate stations to learn about macroinvertebrates at the pond; waterflow and geology along the river; to take a stroll through a spruce forest, “which has animal poop, bones and a skull”; to receive a brief lesson on botany (along with a sustaining snack); and not only hear about human history but get a chance to help build a wikiup, “a kind of temporary shelter the Utes once built here,” Holbrooke said.

In short, the kids received interactive encounters with all kinds of history — ecological, human, aquatic, anthropologic, geological — across a wide variety of landscapes — Telluride’s Valley Floor makes that possible — staffed by educated, passionate volunteers.

The adults were there, as Theis put it, “with the hope of inspiring the next generation of stewards for these special landscapes.”

“We get to reflect on a moment our community came together to protect this special place, talk about it with future generations, and inspire kids to learn and love the landscape in their backyard,” Ruthie Boyd, the program director for Sheep Mountain Alliance, said.

The kids were sponges for all that passion, soaking it all in. There have been other soakings in past years: “We’ve been rained out,” Holbrooke observed, “but in all the years we’ve been hosting, there has never been a more beautiful day than this.”

Nor, perhaps, one more joyous, or impactful.

“I loved building a fort with my friends and the scavenger hunt,” Ellison Ballou told her mum.

“Hey kids! Did you have fun today?” Holbrooke called out to one gaggle of youngsters.

“YES!” they cried.

“Are you going to come back and teach your family?”

“YES!”

“What did you learn?”

“I learned that different kinds of animals go in holes.”

“Hey, you with the water bottle! What did you learn?”

“I learned that lots of animals live here.”

“You with the pink sunglasses!”

“I learned that the river’s name is the San Miguel River.”

“And you in the pink dress! And then we have to go.”

“There’s water under the sand, and that makes it (the river) go slower.”

“There’s water under the sand. Interesting! Thank you! Now let’s go back to lunch.”

Read the article here.