Current News

All those involved with A River Runs Through Us: The Bear River Watershed Education Project are gearing up for the Spring, 2000 monitoring season. We are supporting every participating school so that they can visit the mainstem Bear River or one of its tributaries between the months of March and May. The timing of peak spring snowmelt will determine when teachers will be able to sample before school lets out for the summer. For safety reasons, we are encouraging teachers to be flexible in their schedules so that they may take full advantage of this window of opportunity. As water levels are typically lower in the fall, monitoring at this time of year is often easier. Teachers: Remember, as soon as you have collected and analyzed your data with your students, please submit it to the central database. Please contact Robes Parrish as soon as you know when you plan to visit the River this spring.

We are happy to announce that we have partnered with three new teachers in the Cokeville, Wyoming area! Lyle Forrest is a teacher at Cokeville High School and Rocky Moore and Lila Rigby teach science at Cokeville Elementary School. We are excited to have them aboard and look forward to their contributions to their students, community, and our entire Project!

A recent GreenCorps grant from the utility company PacifiCorp has enabled us to purchase five additional monitoring trunks. These will be distributed to those schools outside the Cache Valley, Utah area so that they may engage in monitoring activities whenever they are able to. This will aid teachers by allowing them to visit their monitoring reach whenever their schedules allow. These kits will also provide materials that can be used to supplement classroom acitivities regarding watershed education. We are currently in the process of purchasing materials for the trunks and will distribute them to schools before the spring monitoring season. Look for upcoming press-releases about this donation and thanks again to PacifiCorp!

We are looking forward to another late-summer/early-fall teacher training workshop. We will familiarize teachers with the new sampling protocol, discuss information sharing techniques, and begin work on evaluating the effectiveness of our program. Information about this workshop will be available soon.