One of my passions since attending Franklin University Switzerland has been learning about freshwater ecosystems, especially in subalpine and alpine environments. This passion is what prepared me to give a two-hour-long program about the glacier-fed rivers of Tuolumne Meadows, specifically the Tuolumne River, which is the life blood of the beautiful meadow landscape, connecting all the plants, animals, and people in it.

To creatively express facts about the Tuolumne River while appealing to all ages, knowledge levels, and perspectives, I used folklore about rivers as a common thread throughout my program. It helped to have stories, which connect people across space and time and help us make sense of the world around us, as my base to help me share the natural, cultural, scientific, and political history of river ecosystems, as rivers are what connect landscapes across space and time. I highlighted how just like the stories they inspire, rivers are central to our lives, as life sources, resources, and spaces of inspiration that deserve our care and attention.

The basis of storytelling in my program also made space for visitors to share their own stories about rivers and other waterscapes, while allowing me to encourage them to be slow with the place through their travels, noticing its intricacies and patterns, connecting with it, to create new stories that they could share back home.

This program served as inspiration for my Meadow Walk at Olympic later on. It's where I learned that one of my favorite ways to interpret a place for visitors is to more or less point out the obvious, in order to then get people thinking about the landscape and ecosystem they're in more deeply, or in a new way. I've found that with kids, that's often how they learn best, just by noticing, getting curious, and being hands-on.

During this program, we discussed how trees, prey animals, predators, and flowers and their pollinators communicate, as well as how we can use all our senses to notice those interactions. To engage the kids throughout the hour-long program, I added games and activities to each section of the walk that tied into what I was discussing (e.g., playing the game Telephone to think about 'silently' communicating like the trees do; playing Sharks and Minnows (though I renamed it Cougars and Deer for my program) in an exposed space to demonstrate how hard it must be to be a prey animal in a wide-open area like a meadow or granite dome, and get kids thinking about why it's unlikely to find a prey animal in those areas).