Day 3: Snowballs and Poetry in Rocky Mountain National Park
Students from Louisiana's Oil City Elementary School spent a week at Cal-Wood Education Center in the Rocky Mountains. The students from Oil City, a Project Learning Tree (PLT) GreenSchool, raised money to fund their trip. Our guest blogger Elizabeth is a 7th grader at the school and her teacher, Cindy Kilpatrick, is a 2011 PLT National Outstanding Educator.
It's our third day at Cal-Wood. Wow! Only three days in Colorado! Seems like we’ve been here forever.
Today we went to the Rocky Mountain National Park. After we got there, we rode a shuttle bus to our destination. We were going to eat lunch out on the trail again!
When we finished our delicious lunch of sandwiches, we started on our hike around Bear Lake. Our guide Patrick was a lot of fun. He kept showing us really cool stuff, like the layers of snow.
I’ve lived in Louisiana all my life, and the most snow I’ve ever seen here was, at most, two inches. So I was really surprised when Patrick told us snow had layers.
After that, we hiked some more and Patrick had us do an activity on the edges of the lake. Our activity was to be inspired by nature. We could write a poem, draw a picture, anything! I chose to write two poems. Here they are:
The Mounts
Reaching, grasping the blue sky
Attempting to stroke the clouds
Weaving them closely
Water
Gentle is the lake
With its water fingers
Reaching for the land
After we finished our activity, we continued walking. Finally, we came to several feet of snow! We kicked it up at each other, playing some sort of a soccer snowball fight. Even Patrick played! After that we finished our hike and drove to Estes Park.
At Estes Park, we had a real snowball fight, Trystin hit Mr. Irvin, my dad, on the head with a snowball, and we wrestled in the snow until we were soaking and cold. Two people actually got stuck in the snow. It was so deep and soft, like a white blanket.
We were so tired when we finally climbed back into the vans to go back to Cal-Wood. I’ve learned and seen so many things so far!
Take a look at more photos from Elizabeth's week in the Rockies.
Photo on Bear Lake credit Ricky Kilpatrick
