29 Jun Project Time!

It’s been a very fun week, and I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of this place. All the kids are great and I am glad to be working with this group. The kids are mostly locals from the Grand Canyon who live here year round and go to the local high school. Some of them are returning from last year and for others this is the first time they’ve participated in the YCC.

I also met Amala, my main supervisor, this week and am glad to have her as my supervisor. She has known some of these kids since they were in the fourth grade, and I think that is so cool that she has seen these kids grow up and do well. This week we were all together going through their training. Many of the topics that we talked about were very interesting, and even though the training was for the kids I also learned a lot. Some of it was slower but still very important and necessary to learn. We went to some ranger talks, and I was personally fascinated by one in particular about a woman called Georgie White who was the first female raft guide on the Colorado River. She also swam the Colorado River (which I don’t recommend) before the dam was built. She was a pretty cool lady, and if you don’t know about her I recommend you look her up. We played a lot of team building games and I could see the kids start coming out of their shells; heck, even I started to come out of my shell as well. We also had first aid training which took all day, but the kids seemed to have enjoyed it and learned a lot from the training. On Friday we all went on a hike. The kids and I enjoyed it and it wasn’t too bad, but it was so the kids could start preparing for the rim-to-rim hike which is going to be even more strenuous and will take place sometime in July. At the end we separated the kids into their new positions and were told where to go next week. I will be working mostly with the Interpretation kids. I will make sure that they have all the resources they need so that they can have a successful program. The topics will range from geology, human history, canyon tales, critter chats, and fossils. I was also given the chance to do a talk myself, if I please, and am most likely going to do canyon tales on either Georgie White or John Hance, another interesting character of the Grand Canyon.