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Tips to help you connect your family to nature!
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 Nature guides are a great way to identify critters. These girls are using a bird guide to help them identify local birds likely to be seen along the Gunnison River. Colorado is famous for its great outdoor activities. Many of these activities require money or experience to get involved. Snowboarding, rock climbing, climbing 14ers, or riding snowmobiles or ATVs require both. Getting started in outdoor activities can be easier than you think, though. It is widely known that being outdoors helps our physical and mental health. So, here are a few easy and cheap ways to get outside on your own, or with others. Hiking: One of the best outdoor activities to start with is hiking or trail walking. The only real required equipment to start is a good pair of shoes. This cannot be stressed enough. Poor fitting or flimsy shoes can result in some frustrating experiences like blisters and sore feet. It can also result in safety issues from poor footing in steep or slippery trail areas. This does not mean you have to purchase expensive hiking boots or shoes, but sturdy, well-soled shoes with a good fit will be comfortable and safer. Next, and very importantly is to know where you are going. The COTREX app is a great trail application that has many hiking, biking and other trails all over Colorado. It includes important trail information such as distance, elevation changes, surface etc. Second, start with trails closer to your community because these are typically well signed and shorter. These will help you get a sense of how you feel on a variety of distances in different topography. Bring water and extra clothing layers for changes in temperatures. Before you know it, you will have gained experience, stamina and a little more equipment. You will be ready for longer day hikes on our public lands. Some of the most memorable experiences are being outdoors and seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling nature around us. A short trail walk in the same location in winter, spring, summer and fall will result in amazing differences in what you experience. Tracks and Scat Hunting: It is surprising how many species of wildlife are close to, and even inside, towns in Colorado. Recently, I was on one of the concrete trails early in the day in Montrose after a slight snow fall. I was excited to see fox tracks, and a beaver track including drag marks where the beaver had pulled a tree across the trail. In addition to small mammals and rodents, there are great bird and waterfowl tracks all around communities. Even more fun than tracks by itself, is to add scat identification. Identifying scat (or poo), and the creature associated with it, is a surprising amount of fun. Different families of animals will have different scat based on what they eat and how it is processed. Herbivore scat looks very different from carnivore or omnivore scat. In addition to tracks and scat, there are other ‘signs’ you can find like trees felled by beaver, or deer antler rubbings on trees, or the mud slide of a river otter. It is a little like a nature investigation. Best of all, there is no real cost to get started because track and scat guides can be pulled up online, obtained at many wildlife or public land offices, or you can also check out scat and track guides at your local library. As with all activities involving wildlife, the goal is to not disrupt the actual animal, so observe from a distance or just look for the sign and know they are around. Star Gazing: Similar to tracks and scat, astronomy guides are available as apps or online. You can also find printed materials at your local library. Make sure you have an app, or guide, that covers your location and the current time of year. The key to star viewing is clear night skies with as little ambient light as possible to not wash out the constellations (so get away from streetlights, vehicles, etc). One of the easiest constellations to identify is the Big Dipper. National and state parks have astronomy programs you can also attend where the local astronomy clubs bring out amazing telescopes that bring the planets, comets, or other astronomical features more into focus. These and other programs also add information to make your future star gazing even better. Outdoor Discovery Apps If you have a ‘smart’ phone, you can also use several outdoor applications in outdoor discovery. Applications like Agents of Discovery, INaturalist, Merlin, geocaching and others are very user friendly, and allow you to choose what you want to focus on. Some have missions or challenges, others are to help id any type of natural item out there (plants, animals, rocks, birds, you name it!). Even though we all need less screen time, this is a way to be outdoors and focus on what is around us with the assistance of technology. In addition to the above recommendations, other cheap and easy outdoor activities can be as simple as flying a kite, or making our own ‘Outdoor Bingo/Scavenger Hunt’ where you can look for things like a rock the size of a toaster, any bug under a rock, or any bird with white and black feathers. Another recommendation is to find a mentor who is already doing things you are interested in, and ask them to show you how to get started. When I first moved to Montrose, a co-worker showed me all his favorite trails, and areas to hike or bike. Many of those trails mean a lot to me. I have since taken my kids and hopefully soon my grandkids out to the same areas. You don’t need to be an expert or wealthy to spend time outdoors, there are many ways to get started and the benefits are endless!
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Shooting for the moon is a phrase that implies something is an unattainable target—but is that true? NASA is shooting for the moon right now with their Artemis 1, the first of the Orion Spacecraft. This unmanned moon launch is the first of many scheduled flights that will orbit the Moon and send several satellites out to collect data for future manned missions taking astronauts to the Moon’s surface. The subsequent Artemis missions will be the first manned flights to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, 50 years ago. These series of flights are intended to set up a lunar station for sustainable exploration beyond the Earth’s orbit—the possibilities are endless! Reaching the moon by spaceship is only our most recent relationship with our orbiting orb. The Moon has played an important part in our lives as humans for millennia. For most of our history, the Moon was the only source of illumination at night. It helped travelers navigate, and enabled people to work at night. It has signified wisdom, intuition, birth, death, reincarnation, and fertility, and has long been integrally tied to farming. The first astronomers created calendars from changes they saw in the Moon and linked those changes to the four seasons, crop planting, and harvesting. Many turns of phrase refer to the Moon, such as “once in a blue moon”, “many moons ago”, “promise the moon”, “over the moon”, “baying at the moon”, and let us not forget about honeymoons! We eat Moon Pies and look for the Man in the Moon, listen to songs like “Moon River” and read books to our children such as “Goodnight Moon”. Its magnificent presence in the sky has permeated our lives on every level. So, what do we see when we look up into the sky and see the Moon in its various stages? First, we need to know that the Moon revolves, or travels, around the Earth every 28 days, just like the Earth revolves around the Sun every 365 days. As the Moon revolves around the Earth it also rotates on its axis just one time during that 28 days, which means we always see the same side of the Moon. The Earth, on the other hand, rotates on its axis once a day—or 365 times in one year—as it travels around the sun. Why then do we see the Moon in its different phases or shapes? Sometimes we see a full moon, sometimes only a sliver or crescent moon based on the Sun’s reflection off the lunar surface. The Moon’s phases are created by the position of the Moon relative to the Earth and the Sun. A new Moon occurs when the Moon, Earth, and Sun all lie approximately in the same line with the Moon between the Earth and Sun from the Earth’s perspective. The side of the moon facing the Earth is completely dark because it has no sun reflecting off it. On the other hand, a full Moon occurs when the Moon’s revolution around the Earth puts it on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. The Sun’s rays then reflect off the full lunar surface that faces the Earth. The eight basic phases of the Moon can be seen in this graphic:  There are four primary phases: new Moon, first quarter, full Moon, and third quarter. The secondary phases are waxing crescent, waxing gibbous, waning gibbous, and waning crescent. Waxing means an apparent growth of the Moon’s image each night, always getting larger from right to left. Waning means the image is shrinking, which also occurs from right to left as you see the Moon’s image in the sky. This graphic shows the position of the Moon and the Sun during each of the Moon’s phases and the Moon as it appears from Earth during each phase. Not to scale. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech  One of the most interesting concepts behind the Moon’s phases is that the Moon, along with every other object in the sky, is in constant motion. The light we see from the Moon is a reflection of our Sun’s rays based on its position in the sky relative to Earth, not from Earth’s shadow as some believe. Also, its rotation around the Earth affects more than just our language and farming rhythms. The Moon’s diameter is about one fourth the of the size of the Earth’s width, making it Earth’s largest and only natural satellite. Its huge mass results in gravity that tugs at the Earth’s oceans to move in a pattern we call the tides. As the Earth rotates the water bulges out on the side closest to the Moon and the side farthest from the Moon, creating a high tide. As the Earth continues to rotate through its 24 hour cycle most shorelines experience two high and two low tides per day, spaced 12 hours apart.
Being Earth’s closest neighbor in space, it is no wonder the Moon plays such an important part in our everyday lives. Learning the science behind the Moon, its phases, and its effect on our planet is just the first step to learning about what lies beyond its orbit. From Apollo 8 to Artemis 1—to the Moon we go! |
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