Prairie: home companion.

Having recently left the mountains for the first time in a long time to live in eastern Colorado Springs (love makes a girl do crazy things), I realize I had forgotten what richness is the plains. My family lived on the mixed-grass prairie when I was younger, and as a teenager I loved how the sun turned everything to pure gold in the late afternoon, just before it sank behind the peak.

However, things have changed. Places I used to think were uncross-ably vast and desolate are now hidden under street after street of new homes and shopping centers. The name of the dry arroyo where my horse threw me once is lost, renamed something more generically elegant with a better resale value. Not a neighborhood, but a community.

Even ancient Sand Creek, historically temperamental, always unreliable, and frustratingly needed seems to be bogged down with new drainages, culverts, runoff and other "enterprises".

Still, between the new driveways, Wheatgrass, needle-and-thread and bluestem refuse to let go of the sandy soil. In a few square waterlogged feet between the alley and a sidewalk just down from my house, cattails and rushes thrive. A man-made flood control zone across the street has become a veritable marshland refuge for red-winged blackbirds. A fox hides in the cottonwoods, eyeing the neighbor's cat. Coyotes take advantage of the concrete trail system, gibbering like maniacs well into the morning. Grama grass pushes up through the unkempt sod of my lawn.

Rediscovering these grasslands now, I am impressed with their resiliency.

Driving home at sunset, even the streetlights and the new hospital on the hill can't change the scope of the plains, their undeniable bigness. The prairie must be described in terms of fabric... swathes of golden green grass, rolling and folding in on themselves in the ever-present wind. The sky like a brilliant blue curtain, cascading down to meet the still earth; cotton clouds arcing across the horizon and becoming towers of silver thunderheads in the afternoon heat. It seems like the best-laid plans to make a mark on this place will be laughable in such a landscape.

A Pronghorn won't jump a fence, but she will squeeze through it. I thought that all might have been lost for this place that I used to call home and now will make my home once again, but I was wrong. The fence is just big enough, and I have hope.

Home is Where the Heart Is

I think the hardest question to answer when teaching Leave No Trace is simply, "why?". Why does anyone need to be reminded of simple, common sense steps in the backcountry? Why should I be concerned with the small impact of one person when the Earth is such a dynamic series of systems? Surely it can absorb my footprints, as it has the millions of footprints that have come before me? Why does the responsibility of lessening a global impact fall on my shoulders?

These are all completely legit, and while perhaps not verbatim, commonly expressed questions. And often, they leave me tongue-tied.

In a nutshell, the answer is easy -- because not everyone cares about the natural world and it's processes, so somebody has to pick up the slack, or the people who do care won't have anything left to care about. Sounds an awful lot like getting shafted, I know.

As a teacher, I often struggle to find more eloquent ways to ornament this bleak answer. I use images of alpine valleys and fragile deserts to evoke protective emotions; I tell stories of lone bears making a last stand and elusive fish forever swimming icy streams to drum up feelings of respect and fear. I demonstrate alternative methods and equipment to pique curiosity and I lead people out into our natural lands in hopes that their surroundings will give them the motivation and energy to go the extra mile.

But still, all this talking never really gets at the real, complex, constantly-evolving answer to "why": because the natural world is our home, and that is truly where my heart is. None of us -- no matter our immediate environment, decor, location, or mindset -- are outside of nature. We all rely on the planet's cyclical generosity for our lives, literally the very air we breathe, and this is all happening right now, right this very second.

My goal with this blog is to explore the often overwhelming emotions I have for this natural world, and eventually translate them into a better tool for teaching the principles of Leave No Trace in the Pikes Peak Region.

I also invite other LNT Master Educators, Trainers, or students to submit your own thoughts, photos, poems, teaching concepts, recipes, gear reviews, meteorological predictions, soap-box rants, baby pictures, what-have-you, to kristen@pikespeakleavenotrace.org . I hope that we can create a compendium of LNT-ish thoughts and ideas that we can all use to further the conversation.

Looking forward to it...

Kristen