A SPECIAL PLACE . . .

This is a picture taken in the High Uintas Wilderness Area in Utah.  I worked here as a wilderness ranger during the summer before my senior year in college.  Since that was almost 20 years ago, I don't have any digital photos, so I found this one on Panoramio.com.  The reason this place is special to me is that it was the first time I realized that I was drawn to mountains and that I needed to make my home near them.

I grew up in Wisconsin, which is quite a flat place.  As a kid, I always enjoyed being outside but did not have a chance to venture into very many wild places.  Then I went to college in upstate New York and was introduced to backpacking by some friends.  It opened my eyes to how I could get out and explore with everything I needed strapped on my back.  When I learned I could work for the Forest Service during the summer going backpacking and getting paid for it, I jumped at the chance.  The money wasn't much, but the work environment was phenomenal compared to the previous summer's job of waitressing.  When I returned to college after that summer in the mountains, I changed my major from meteorology to biology, got a job in an outdoor school in California after graduation, and have lived somewhere near mountains ever since.  That summer in the Uintas immersed me in the mountains and gave me an appreciation of an incredible alpine ecosystem.



LANDSCAPE OF MY BIRTHPLACE . . .

I was born in a landscape that was both leveled off and punctuated by glaciers, as you can see in the Google Earth image above.  Northeastern Wisconsin is fairly flat terrain interspersed with water sources of various sizes.  The only water in my immediate area (my backyard) was a small unnamed creek, which is pronounced "crick" where I'm from.  But I could travel less than an hour in any direction and come to either Lake Winnebago, the bay of Green Bay, the Fox River, or Lake Michigan. At the time I didn't appreciate it, but after having lived in the dry Central Valley of California I know how precious water can be.

I have never used Google Earth with my students.  I imagine it would be very useful for a variety of earth science topics.  Perhaps we could use it to examine volcanic landscapes, or to see aerial views of fault lines.  I hope that as I explore it more I will come up with some ideas and also learn from reading the blogs of other students in this course.