On April 26, 2019, sixty-one students from Mount Elden Middle School 8th grade traveled to the Arizona Trail north of the San Francisco Peaks to learn more about the way water travels downhill, how to design trail to make minimal impact on the watershed and make some drainage improvements to the trail.

 

Students rotated between working with volunteers and Forest Service employees to build drainage on the Arizona Trail, and participating in watershed and drainage lessons. To learn the way water moves downhill students acted out being water droplets moving down the hillside under different circumstances like a hillside covered in vegetation vs. a hillside devoid of plants. They used what they learned to explain how they would design and improve trail drainage to avoid turning our trail into a water diversion!

 

Big thanks to our Forest Service and ATA volunteers who help make these youth work days possible!