KABT Ashfall Field Trip

Blog Revival:

I can’t really believe how long it has been since we last posted to this blog. I knew that as biology teachers trying to maintain a blog would be difficult so I thought I’d share the load—still too big of job while class is in session. However, it is summer and I’m on a leave of absence so I’ll try to revive this blog….

Kansas Association of Biology Teacher Spring Field Trip Report:

Each spring for the past 4 decades the KABT has led field trips to sites of interest throughout Kansas. Once in a while we also venture to adjoining states. This year the board elected to go to Ashfall State Park in Nebraska. The itinerary and links can be found at: http://kabt.org/F_Trips/KABT_Spring_Field_Trip_2005.htm

Field trip members included: Sandy Collins, Paula Donham, Carol Williamson, Josie Stiles, Shari McDougal, Eric Kessler and family (Christin, Mara, Rebecca, and Owen) and myself, Brad Williamson. It’s a long road trip to Ashfall. This, along with the weather forecast doubtlessly limited our attendance.

We all took our own routes and met at the Nebraska State Museum on the Lincoln campus at about 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. This museum is really a gem.

Nebraska is one of the best locations in the world for studying the Cenozoic and mammal evolution. I organized this trip based on the premise that mammal fossil history has great untapped, educational potential.
While dinosaurs and dinosaur evolution serve to really motivate students it seems to me that many of my students regard dinosaurs as almost fictional characters. This is not as big of a problem with mammal fossils—everybody connects to “warm, fuzzies.”

We spent a couple of hours touring the fossil exhibits. The museum has a great display of mammoth and mastodon fossils.

We were amazed at the diversity of elephants found in Nebraska. A bonus was a new exhibit of Ivory Billed Woodpeckers and Eskimo Curlews as well as Joel Sartore’s Photograph exhibit—extraordinary. The museum displays helped us to get our arms around the diversity of extinct animals that once populated the Nebraska plains and helped us build a time framework to begin understanding the fossil history of mammals.

After a quick lunch we drove on to Niobrara State Park. This park is at the confluence of the Niobrara River and the Missouri Rivers. It was one of the sites described in Lewis and Clark’s Journal. The panorama is spectacular. We timed our arrival to take advantage of their Saturday night Bison Burger cook out. The park personnel invite park goers to a BBQ and program each Saturday night. The food was great and the program was interesting. A local mountain man enthusiast shared his view of the history of the area and his mountain man gear.

Earlier, I mentioned that the weather forecast may have contributed to low attendance. The forecast called for strong to severe thunderstorms with possible tornados. Most of the tornado activity was forecast for much further south. One of the advantages of the wide open plains is that you get to watch storms develop in late afternoon. While we were eating at the BBS the thunderheads were building off to our south. By the time we were done we thought we’d best be getting our campsites ready for the impending storm. We dodged the first storm...

But later, just after sundown, one of the park rangers came by and informed us of an approaching storm, 20 minutes away, with high winds and hail. He strongly suggested we take shelter in the bathhouse in the RV campground. We all loaded up in our cars to get to the bathhouse but it was actually almost 2 miles away—the storm hit before we made shelter. Blinding rain, golf ball sized hail and 60+ mph winds made for a very hazardous situation. We could not see the roads to drive on and to make matters worse we were on steep hills. Luckily we all eventually made shelter or lasted through the storm in our vehicles. After the storm, Josie (a second-year teacher) accused me of creating a stressful situation just to facilitate the transfer all they’d learned into long-term memory. (If it works I’ll have to try it again, sometime….) We returned to our tents about 12:30—the tents were all standing and we slept well.

After drying out, showering and breakfast at a local café, we loaded up and headed to Ashfall. I had prearranged for a guided program but had not counted on the program being led by Michael Voorhies, himself.

Mike is the guy who discovered Ashfall. His enthusiasm for paleontology and science is truly contagious. The uniqueness of Ashfall is that the dozens of specimens are largely complete and articulated—a very rare occurrence. Mike’s inspiration to complete an on-site museum with the specimens in situ and not transferred to a museum display was brilliant.

The impact on learning is immense and especially for biology teachers. We all left with books, ideas and inspiration for how to supplement our evolution units and most of all we all wanted to volunteer to help with future digs at Ashfall.

While an old standby I think that a revisiting of the evolution of horses would have a number of advantages for evolution education. Several of the teachers were very impressed with a simple display of the lower legs of the 5 species of horse found at Ashfall compared to the modern horse.

Here is a reference to a PBS site that might provide a beginning. http://www.pbs.org/wildhorses/wh_origin/wh_origin_intro.html and another from Kathleen Hunt: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

I think that a good measure of the quality of a place is the books for sale in the gift shop. In my opinion the books for sale at this little gift shop speak volumes about the folks that run it. I said as much to Rick Otto, park superintendent, and he expressed his appreciation and indicated that he had selected books to be informative and educational along the themes of Ashfall.

Ashfall is truly remote from the general flow of travelers across our country but by all means try and find time sometime to make it to the excellent resource—you won’t be sorry.

Challenge: To the KABT members attending this field trip enter your impressions of the trip by posting a comment to this post—just click on “Post a Comment”