Tour to Pardee overlook a watershed moment for students

Twelve-year-old Lafie Hardin’s ever-so-brief life as a water molecule involved a lot of travel.

“I went from groundwater to lakes to plants, then to animals, then to soil,” said Hardin, a seventh-grader at Calaveras River Academy, explaining the make-believe exercise on the water cycle.
  

“You were very adventurous,” said his teacher for the day, Mary Anne Garamendi, an instructor at Mountain Oaks Charter School.

Hardin was one of a dozen Calaveras County students who stepped out of the classroom Tuesday to learn about water and watersheds at the Pardee Reservoir.

The field trip was part of Service Through Education, a program started about seven years ago to promote youth stewardship of watersheds in Amador and Calaveras counties.

Its first tenet is to uphold the maxim of child activist, journalist and author Richard Louv: “No Child Left Inside.”

“Learning doesn’t really take place unless the senses are activated,” said Garamendi. “We’ve got to get kids out of the classroom.”

Consequently, a dozen Calaveras High School and Calaveras River Academy students found themselves on the chilly, fogged-in observation peak at Pardee, being peppered with questions to build their knowledge.

“Which way is our water flowing?” Garamendi asked the students.

“South?” ventured Karla Everett, 18, a senior at Calaveras High School.

Garamendi let out a faintly despairing sigh.

“West?” murmured a few less confident students.

“Yes, it is flowing west,” said Garamendi. “What is causing it to go west?”

“The Sierra Nevada?” Everett tried again.

“Yeah!”

“Yay! I got an answer right.”

Then it was Kent Lambert’s turn. Lambert is the manager of watersheds and recreation for the East Bay Municipal Utility District Mokelumne River Watershed Division. East Bay MUD operates Pardee and Camanche reservoirs to supply water to East Bay Area communities.

“Raise your hand if you live in a watershed,” he told the students.

“Don’t we all live in a watershed?” ventured Brett Burton, 17, a senior at CHS, as about a third of the hands tentatively went up.

“Very good,” Lambert said.

Originally thought up by Garamendi and eight other educators, Service Through Education is supported by a veritable alphabet soup of regional water and utility districts.

The program’s main support, however, comes from the Upper Mokelumne River Watershed Authority, a joint powers authority that includes many of the region’s water districts.

In 2004, the nine-member STE team completed the program’s guiding text, Circles and Cycles, a 300-plus-page guide to teaching students in kindergarten through 12th grade about the area’s water issues.

The guide lays out more than 25 trips like Tuesday’s, to destinations near and far, ranging from the West Point Water Treatment Plant to the Chaw Se Indian Grinding Rocks State Park.

STE has programs targeted for all ages. For younger students, there is the highly simplified Salmon & Go to School. For fifth-graders, there is Stewards of the Watershed, which involves a classroom presentation and countywide poster competition.

Wednesday’s trip was part of RLEEP, Ranger-Led Environmental Education Program, which is sponsored by EBMUD.

Courtesy of the Calaveras County Office of Education, the organization also has an extensive library. Teachers can borrow everything from animal skulls to Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” to a video about earthworms called “Wormania.”

Mixing in a little tactile fun was also part of Tuesday’s trip.

One group’s task was to find the boundary line between the Pardee watershed in the north-east and the Camanche watershed in the southeast.

Their tools: three basketballs and five bundles of wooden stakes.

An hour of carefully observed ball bounces later, a series of short lines had been scrawled in red crayon across the damp asphalt. A boundary had been found.

“I use this type of info every month, every week, every day in my job,” Lambert told the students.

On the dirt just off the parking lot, another group was working on simulating the filtration role of soil in a watershed.

As Darren Spellman, a former history and geography instructor at CHS who was tagging along on the trip, had pointed out to the students during the bus ride, watersheds are essentially coffee filters.

Using napkins, a few open-ended containers, two trowels, a shovel, a roll of duct tap and bottles of Tang, apple cider vinegar and Thai fish sauce, not to mention soil, the kids were to brew their own house blend. It was not an experiment for the faint of nose.

“The Thai stuff smells like cat food,” complained Everett.

Back at the reservoir’s main lodge, Kent Lambert, with a relief map of California in his outstretched hand, explained the last project of the day: to make a similar such contoured map for the watershed in which they currently stood.
 

“They don’t make one for the Mokelumne River Watershed, so it won’t be as easy as ordering it from Amazon, as I did with this one,” he said.

Instead, using nails, clay, a tape measure and some quick mental arithmetic, the students got a start on putting in a few of the area’s peaks. The map will be completed in the coming weeks by the students, most of whom are members of the CHS Earth Club.

The students also got a start, with the program’s help, in understanding that bundling of hydrogen and oxygen on which life depends.

“Water is our most precious resource and it’s important for you to protect it,” Garamendi told the students. “That is why you’re here.”