WREN (Wallowa Resources Explorations of Nature) started on Friday. WREN, in short, is where a ton of kids from 5th to 8th grade get together and go hiking with a leader to teach them about wildlife, geology and so on. In short. What it really is is a great learning experience, and a lot of fun. We meet at 8:30 on Fridays and Penny (the leader) with some field staff drives us to the hike or place.
This particular Friday (the first fall WREN) we went up the Wallowa Lake Tram and took a hike. At the bottom of the Tram we divided into two groups because those were the groups we were going to be in for hiking, then we divided into groups of 3 or 4 to go up the Tram. At the top, we went back into our two groups and started hiking. My group went to the valley overlook first and ate lunch. The valley overlook is a cliff where you can look down on the valley. It looked like a giant checkerboard of green and yellow; the yellow was hay or wheat and the green was grass, We also saw the lake - it was dark blue and surrounded by the yellow moraines. Then was the real hiking, it felt like a mile and a half straight uphill, and then a mile and a half straight downhill. It was hard. On the way up we stopped frequently to learn about wildlife, and on the way down we stopped frequently to learn about geology and soil.
We saw a lot of trees - the most common was the subalpine fir. Subalpine fir trees have purple pine cones and they grow between 6,000 to 7,500 feet
.We didn't see very many animals. We saw a Pika, which is a member of the rabbit family. Pikas live in the mountains in cold climates. We saw a Yellow-Pine chipmunk, which likes seeds of knotweed, yarrow, larch, thistle, huckleberry and yellow-pine trees.
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We also saw a Clark's Nutcracker (right) and 2 gray jays (left). Clark's Nutcracker nests early in the year and likes to eat pinon seeds. Grey Jays are also called "camp robbers" because one of their favorite things to do is steal scraps of food from camps. They will eat almost everything.
After our hike we rode down the tram and left. I had a lot of fun.I got my information (and photos) about the plants and animals from Birds of Oregon Field Guide and Wikipedia.
4 comments:
Nice work on your first post M! I'm glad you added the extra information about the animals and plants you saw. We should look for a photo of a view of the lake.
sem
Hi Maddie,
Love your first post! We went to a bird park last weekend but all the birds were in cages so nothing like seeing them in their natural habitat. There are some wetlands here so we hope to see some migrating birds when we go.
Love,
Aunt Kim
Congratulations! It sounds like you had a lot of fun. Keep us posted about your upcoming wildlife forays.
John & Lauren
Kim, you should come on one of our family hikes. They're really long and they actually tire us out!
Mads
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