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Theme Trips |
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Theme Trips for 2012
A. Project Wild - River Ecology & Conservation
B. Wisdom of Wolves
C. Nez Perce Culture & Salmon River Archeology
D. River Magic for Kids
E. Counting Coup on Nature
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A. Project Wild - River Ecology & Conservation
2 days - $269 mid July 17 -18, 2012
Salmon River near Riggins
Designed for teachers & educators
Engaging the mysteries of nature toe to toe .
Project WILD is a program promoted by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They will provide the professional instructor for the college credit curriculum on this trip. The IDF&G fee is $25. For college credit, an additional $60 fee is required. Note: these two fees are in addition to the float trip price. The $60 college credit is optional.
The beauty of floating a wild river and camping-out to facilitate the Project Wild curricula is that it provides an exciting venue to enhance the learning experience. Rivers are the life blood of mother earth and source of nourishment to all organisms. The rivers flow is the heartbeat to all natural cycles and rhythms. You will be a part of this great circle, with hands-on learning, while having great fun as you feel raw nature and discover new ideas. You will be refreshed and re-charged with a ripple effect that will help you better teach students when you return to your respective institutions.
Our float trip will take place on a special segment of the Salmon River, famed "River of no Return", near Riggins, Idaho. It flows through the second deepest gorge in North America and is the longest free flowing river in the lower continent of the United States. The natural flow of the Salmon River, and all the ecological ramifications it represents in its natural state, (undammed) is itself, an integral part of environmental education. Potential opportunities to encounter various species of flora and fauna, side stops for interesting topic-specific curricula, and chances to ponder how early cultures lived in the canyon, all add up to a more holistic approach promoted on this trip.
Another important highlight of this class is that the professionals facilitating the river trip are year-round, local Rigginites, and Idaho guides who are intimately familiar to the area. As veteran river professionals, they are also heavily backgrounded in natural history, geology, archeology, astronomy, and other "ologies". It is a vernacular knowledge (of place) that is often missing in our world today. They also live simple lifestyles, in tune to the river and more in harmony to the fundamentals of an "Aldo Leopold" healthy land ethic as championed by PROJECT WILD.
Why is this floating outdoor classroom so valuable? Because it offers the type of educational experience that is face to face with the outdoors, and is filled with practical solutions to help educators arouse interest in their students for the natural sciences. It does so by offering various ways to help implement their lessons with unique methods to help inspire kids.
You will be immersed into the very essence of a heart-felt ecological consiousness that is now being taught. Our high-tech society has the tendency to reduce humans into something like a "brain in a bottle". What we need is to morph our self-centeredness into more critical thinking, willing to free our thoughts and re-focus attention to wonders of the natural world again.
Course content includes environmental education, fisheries and wildlife science, and conservation ethics.
To find out more about Project WILD: fishandgame.idaho.gov/cms/education/project_wild/
Come share and learn with us, on a journey both inner and outer. Drink in the beauty of primal places wild and free.
B. Wisdom of Wolves - on Salmon River
5day trip: $1299 Aug 13 - 17
This journey is an informative and educationally fun type trip, designed to teach you more about wolf ecology. On day one, we will visit the Wolf Education and Research Center in Winchester, Idaho. There you will observe wild wolves in their natural habitat and be given a tour of the facility by a Wolf Biologist who will also share with you a brief history of the gray wolf. The Wolf centers mission is dedicated to providing public education and scientific research concerning the gray wolf and it's habitat in the Northern Rocky Mountains. The center provides the public with the rare opportunity to observe and learn more about this beautiful animal in it's natural habitat. They also seek to enhance the awarness of threatened species in the region and ways to co-exist with these species. From there we will travel to our put in on the Salmon River "the famous river of no return" for 5 days of fun rapids, relaxation and informal discussion about wolves, while floating through one of the deepest canyons in North America. Your guide is Gary Lane owner of Wapiti River Guides and a trained Wildlife Biologist turned river guide, who has 40 years experience, running rivers in Idaho, Oregon and Alaska.
for more information on the Wolf Education & Research Center:
Note: Custom launch dates are available, and can be booked on an individual basis, thus allowing guests to arrange their schedule to fit their needs. There is a maximum of 10 people for this trip and a 2 person minimum. Please contact us at 800-488-9872 for more detailed information or to book this trip.
C. Nez Perce Culture & Salmon River Archeology
2 day trips: $299 (TBA) July - Aug
The Lower Salmon River flows through a landscape rich in Nez Perce history. Their people have been living in this region (including drainages of the Snake, Grande Ronde, Imnaha, and Clearwater watersheds) for over 12000 years. Stories of the Nez Perce today, reflect their ties to the ancient past, as is also being exposed by the current Lower Salmon River archeological digs.
Interpreting the evidence of this forensic science and relating it to the question of how ancient people lived in the canyons before we came along, is quite ponderous.
What are middens and what do they say about what people ate? Were the same plants, animals and fish present 12000 years ago, as those that are here now? The absence of salmon bone evidence, is not the same as evidence for absence of salmon. What does the geologic evidence (Oasis Effect) tell us about the potential for the presence of anadromous species. Interpreting Rock Art, (potential age, and/or meaning), and other significant primal sites. Note: recent discoveries of mammoth bones are evidence of what four legged creatures use to roam nearby areas. What part did they play in the life-ways of those humans who ran along beside them? Did there really used to be people over 7 foot tall living in this same area? Was everything of mega size back then? Fact or fiction? Let the forensic evidence reveal a deeper part of the story of historic life in the canyon.
Presented by:
Loren Davis
Assist Professor at OSU - Dept of Anthropology
Probably no other person knows more about the early peoples that lived in the Lower Salmon River Canyou, than Loren. He has spent a life time studying this region.
His dissertation: “The Coevolution of Early Hunter-Gatherer Culture and Riparian Ecosystems in the Southern Columbia River Plateau” (2001) is still of huge impact for cultural resource management. Active “digs” still being conducted in the canyon, will also be just a part of some places of interest that we will visit during our float trip.
D. River Magic for Kids
2-days: Mar - Aug (customized)
Salmon River: $249
note: 5 & 6 day trips also available:
(kids only price): 5-day ($909) 6-day: ($999)
Alternative rivers for 5 or 6 days:
Owyhee River: March - June
Grande Ronde River: March - July
Lower Salmon River: July - Aug
What is magic? To paraphrase a famous biologist, he said that what most people mean by real magic, is thoe things that look like miracles or supernatural acts. But real magic in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not magic.
This is why science is so exciting, it reveals how the tricks of magic are done. And what better magician is there than nature?
The biggest value of this trip is that, in a fun way, it will expose kids to some of natures greatest tricks. It will stimulate their curiosity in the wonder of science and arouse their interest in wanting to figure out how those tricks afd performed. That is, the basic whys, of science. They will also be absorbing an ecological consiousness and conservation land ethic. (sophisticated terms for helping inspire compassion in our future stewards of the planet).
This trip is designed for all age levels, and in conjunction with the magic of science, also as an introduction to learning how to camp outdoors; cook over fire; pitch tents;identify edible and poisonous plants; truths about wild animals, dangerous or not; read water while running the river; and experiencing raw nature by tooth and claw - that is, in your face reality from rain storm to extreme heat, and how to deal with any of it.
Most importantly, kids will learn their place (and responsibilities) in the circle of life, and how they are connected to everything else.
Bascially, this trip has grown out of our Project Wild trip for teachers. While, the message of educational outdoor adventures, can reach more kids via teachers, there is still nothing better than direct experience. The main idea of Project Wild is to give a boost to teachers for getting more kids outside and offering them a richer natural resource perspective.
But, unlike most teachers, we can take kids down the river into harder to reach places, where they can have new opportunities with the richness of adventure to help inspire their interests to learn more about nature.
Most kids these days suffer from "Nature Deficit Disorder" from their continous inter-locking engagment with high technologies. To have compassion for other living things requires meeting them on their own terms, wild and free, where they can be felt, up close, and personal. The next generation is the next in line for stewardship and we want to do our part to keep that relationship between kids and their outdoor (the real one) environment.
Yes, technology has a lot of great qualities, including this website and the internet. But, we can't forget all of these things come from somewhere. Computers have metal components, which do not just exist in thin air.
An old zen saying: "The frog does not drink up all the water in the pond of which it lives."
Note: trips can be customized to drop either the educational science part, or the outdoor skills dimension, as interests dictate.
E. Counting Coup on Nature
5 days: $1299
Lower Owyhee river - May 3-7, 2012
Grande Ronde River - June 10-14, 2012
Lower Salmon River - July 2 -6, 2012
Want to reach out and poke nature on the nose? Like the days of old when it was more respected to touch your enemy than to kill them, will we so confront nature in such proximate terms. To engage nature up close and intimately personal, there is no better way than to learn how to be a better observer and tracker.
Anyone can go out into nature, but not every one does so with a trained eye. Not to worry. Like most everything worthwhile, this can be learned. All you need is someone willing to help you learned the skills. Here at Wapitiville, I am that person willing to be your mentor for doing just such.
This trip is specifically designed to learn such things as tricks to get closer to animals, how to identify their tracks, and how to interpret what they mean. It also includes techniques to help find other special "behaviorial events" that occur naturally in the outdoors.
Optionally, for those so inclined, it will include aids to help learn better ways to improve your nature photography.
While this is my first offering of such style trips, I am really looking forward to this type of journey, as it is one of my all time favorite outdoor endeavors when I go out on my own.
Having approached within two feet of a sleeping bull elk, without waking it up, and backtracking away to leave it undisturbed, is one of my most cherished accomplishments. For me, counting coup on nature is about as exciting an event to ever experience in life.
How about you? Want to give it a try? Come count coup with me and I will disclose some of my secrets.
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