The Red Tailed Eyas and Black Tailed Deer join the GEC Dragonflies and Salish Seals

Today two BEC groups met two GEC groups at our Connelly Creek Service site for a day of mulching, digging, and cribbing! Of course, there was lots of laughing and story sharing as well. Doing manual labor occupies your hands and in a way seems to free up your mind leading to interesting and inspiring conversations between explores and mentors. The mentors are consistently impressed with how much your children think about and consider sustainability, which is a difficult topic to understand because it is where science meets policy.

Lots of mulching happened today

We were excited to build on the momentum that four groups made yesterday at our service site. They were able to put down lots of mulch and even begin the installation of cribbing on the stream bank.

Girls installing some cribbing

Today we continued the effort of removing the last few patches of blackberries and their roots. It was fun to see who could dig up the biggest blackberry root, and some of the boys dug up possibly the largest root in Connelly Creek Service Site history. Unfortunately, the picture of the root was lost but it was a cylinder about two feel long with a diameter of about six inches.

We added an additional four or five feet of cleared stream bank on the downstream side of our site. Once we had all of those blackberry roots removed, we installed cribbing to make sure the bank wouldn't erode into the stream and mulched over the whole area.

After installing our cribbing, we mulched all the way up the the edge of the creek.

Almost every service outing includes moving a whole pile of mulch. Today, we followed suit and utilized most of that mulch down on the stream bank where we installed cribbing. One of the girls groups stayed at the site late enough into the day to get to see Bellingham Parks deliver a new pile of mulch for the groups who would be doing service the next day.

A couple of explorers strike a balance of work and play

The truck drops off more mulch!

With so many hands today (four groups total!) we were able to make lots of progress at the site.  To see the rest of the pictures from our outing, click here!