Arlee students make 41st Yellowstone trip
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ARLEE — This year for the 41st consecutive year, the Arlee eighth-grade students embarked on the Yellowstone National Park adventure Monday, May 18.
Jay Sumner started the program of taking students to the park in the spring of 1975. Back then camping was just the basics. Students took sleeping bags and pillows only,, cots and air mattresses were unheard of. They ate food cooked over an open fire and slept in wall tents. Their days were spent hiking and seeing the sites of our first National Park.
Sumner did the trip for 24 years, taking kids and parents on six-day adventures to the park. Ken Hill replaced Jay in 1990 as the Junior High Science teacher and took over the duties as Yellowstone trip director. Things have changed over the years. We no longer cook over an open fire. We use a clean 24-foot horse trailer as the kitchen. It has all the amenities of a kitchen except running water. But if there is a student close by, they can run and get the water for you.
It is equipped with two propane kitchen four-burner stoves with ovens, and a five-burner gas range top, picked up at an auction. It has cupboards and countertops, shelves for storage, and battery operated lights. Almost all the food is cooked before the trip and frozen. We make all the cakes and cookies, spaghetti sauce, taco meat and anything we possibly can, then get it in the freezer. This eliminates all the time and energy, trying to get dinner ready. We still do breakfast from scratch, except for the sausage and bacon, which is bought already precooked. We just need to slide it onto a cookie sheet, and put it on warm in the barbeque grill. All the eggs for breakfast are broken and placed into one gallon plastic jugs so they can be poured into a frying pan and cooked. Eggs in Yellowstone are only served one way — scrambled.
Lunch is made by each individual on the trip. A table is set aside with everything one needs to make a lunch. Most of the kids will make a couple of either roast beef, ham or turkey sandwiches, grab an apple or orange, maybe a muffin or candy bar, and they are ready for the day.
A typical day in Yellowstone starts at 5 a.m. for the students. They know beforehand they get to sleep in until five. They get up, roll their sleeping bag, and get to the kitchen for breakfast. Then they make their lunch and get it on the bus. Next they are back to their tent to make sure everything is secure and off the floor, and proceed to get their chores for the morning done. As soon as everything in the morning is done, we are off for the day’s adventures, usually leaving camp around 6 a.m.
I always tell the students that Yellowstone is a working vacation. Everyone has to do chores, including kitchen duty, washing dishes, cleaning the bus, cleaning the tents, being a gopher and scout duty.
Kitchen duty is helping with the set up and tear down of meals, washing dishes is just that, plus the pots and pans created in the preparation of the meal.
Cleaning the bus includes sweeping, organizing, dumping the trash and possibly window washing.
Tent cleaning is making sure the tent and cover tarp is secure, staked down and tight to the ground, sweeping, as all the tents have floors in them, and trying to figure out who misplaced items belong to.
Scout duty is new this year, and used to be cutting firewood with 6-foot crosscut saws. Scouts will go in groups to make a perimeter sweep around the camp. This is just security in letting us know if there are any bears around us.
We do a lot of hiking, plus see all the iconic sites of Yellowstone.
Last year we had wonderful weather, but every day we look up and out before we decide what is on the agenda. We will try to hike Amethyst Peak and Specimen Ridge, go out into Swan Flats and up to Druid Peak if the weather is nice. We will see Mammoth Terraces, Norris Geyser Basin, the fall on the Yellowstone River, Tower falls, Mud Volcano and Sulfur Caldron, Yellowstone Lake, West Thumb Geyser basin, Old Faithful lodge and Black Sand Basin, Fountain and Artist Paint Pots, plus everything else we find of interest during the week.
In 2014 we had an incredible trip. We took 35 students and 16 chaperones. We had four canvas wall tents, plus extra smaller tents for the chaperones. We saw a record 18 grizzly bears during the week, plus almost every other animal in the park. Group camping in Yellowstone is an great experience for the students.
This year we hope to have almost the entire class going to Yellowstone. I have been leading the trip for 23 years,, 17 of which have been in Arlee. We have about 14 really good chaperones on the list for this year, I like chaperones with Yellowstone experience, who know how the trip is supposed to run, where things go and an overall good sense of what the trip is about. All of the kids and chaperones in the past have created memories for a lifetime.
