Lightning survivor tells powerful story

by Allison Pease, Executive Director

July 10, 2008

As monsoons thunder in, my eyes now turn to the sky in a way they didn't when I was younger.

Four years ago, my family's backcountry experience was interrupted when lightning struck our camp. The bolt shredded our tents, killed our dog, and sent my daughter and me to the hospital. In the years since, the episode lingered. As our hearts and heads healed, I sought clarity about this beautiful and formidable force of nature.

Lightning strikes the earth's surface 100 times each second. In the U.S., lightning sets 10,000 forest fires and causes $100 million in property damage annually. Between 1940 and 1991, lightning killed 8,316 people, and on average, produces 80 lightning-related deaths a year.

Lightning is an electrical current that flows between clouds or from a cloud to the earth. It results from tiny charges on the surface of water droplets in clouds, positive charges are on larger droplets, negative charges on smaller ones. These droplets produce a spark or flash of lightning.

Flashes between clouds are mostly benign since they travel only through air. Conversely, flashes between clouds and earth cause damage and death since they pass through whatever is in the way - houses, trees or people. Lightning reaches 100 million feet per second, travels up to 20 miles between clouds, and spans eight miles between clouds and the earth.

The current in a mile-long flash is about 1 billion volts, enough electrical power to light 1 million light bulbs instantaneously or one 100-watt bulb for three months. In a half-second flash, surrounding air is superheated to five times the surface temperature of the sun, and the vibrating expansion of air produces the sound of thunder.

In the months after lightning struck us, I had a harder time healing. My physician explained that lightning is not a predicable entity in span, current or path. As a result, I may have been zapped more directly than my daughter, lying inches away. Or not.

Wounds showed I'd been lying on my back when the lightning entered between my shoulder blades, traveled my spine and exited the top of my head. Conversely, it entered my daughter's knee and exited her side through star-shaped blisters. Further, adult bodies, with higher water content, are more conductive than children's. All of that, explained my physician, is why I needed a year to recover, while my daughter was up the next day.

Now, as I look skyward each afternoon, I'm struck, not by lightning, but by irony. The event left a legacy of trepidation, one that has me wondering if I'll ever again dance in the rain and one I keep trying to understand. You see, ironically, I can't even remember it.

Bees: Sometimes the sting is worth it

by Allison Pease, Executive Director
June 11, 2008

My first memorable bee experience was the day my brother yelped in terror from a sting on his pinkie toe. Scooped into the arms of my mother, he emerged a short time later with a poultice of baking soda on his foot.

Eight at the time, I was unconcerned with my younger brother's malady. Instead, I pondered why the bee lay dead in the grass after afflicting such terror and whether the encounter meant something more. Years later, two events have prompted my return to pondering - the disappearance of bees and the purchase of them by friends.

Scientists estimate there are more than 20,000 bee species worldwide. Except for the highest altitudes, poles and some oceanic islands, bees thrive in warm, arid and semi-arid areas like ours. Ranging in length from 0.08 to 1.6 inches, their colors include black, gray, yellow, red, metallic green and blue.

Bees include three subsets - solitary, parasitic and social - each providing a natural laboratory for studying insect social behavior. Female solitary bees construct burrows of earthen chambers with enough pollen (food) for a young bee to grow from a hatchling to larva. After depositing her eggs, she moves on to construct another chamber.

Conversely, the two parasitic bee types don't forage or make nests. Instead, they capitalize on the workings of other bees. Cleptoparasitic bees invade solitary bee burrows, hide eggs in the chambers before a solitary female can and then close off the chambers. Social parasite bees kill resident queens, lay eggs in the host's chambers, then force hive workers to raise the parasitic young. Ugh!

Social (Winnie the Pooh) bees form highly specialized colonies. Through touch, sound and dance, individual bees focus on defense, food or reproduction. Mating once with multiple drones, the single queen remains fertile for life, laying 2,000 eggs daily. Fertilized eggs become female workers, unfertilized eggs become male drones, and new queens are "created" by feeding young larvae "royal jelly."

Simply through pollination, bees added $15 billion last year to crop values at a time when bees began disappearing at a phenomenal rate because of colony collapse disorder, called CCD. To date, many beekeepers have lost two-thirds of their colonies to CCD. While scientists now believe CCD is attributable to a highly pathogenic virus, others question why the virus was able to invade bee colonies and suggest that environmental factors like pesticides weakened the insect's ability to fight off infection.

As for me, I wonder which sting is worse - my brother's pinkie toe, $15 billion in lost crops, or the long-term impact to blossoms everywhere that rely on bees.

So, to my friends who've bought bees and built hives for an insect that sends shivers up our toes, thank you.

Sometimes the sting is worth it.

Spring hiking helps youngster spin a winning tale of bear

by Allison Pease, Executive Director
May 8, 2008

When I walked into Backcountry Experience last Saturday, I thought I'd be walking out with a water bottle.

Instead, I left with a story. Actually, two.

Amanda Rydiger, a student in Robert Aspen's sixth-grade class at Miller Middle School, delivered the first; Becky Rockis with Backcountry Experience delivered the second.

Amanda recently won the third annual Backcountry Experience Outdoor Writing Competition in the middle-school class. Backcountry Experience has sponsored the area-wide school competition for the last three years hoping to empower education through nature writing. Backcountry's Becky Rockis said the store gave away more than $3,500 this year to six winners. For Rockis, stuff isn't important.

"I'm passionate about education and nature," she said. "Our writing competition is a way of getting kids involved in the world around them."

For Durango Nature Studies, Amanda's and Rockis' words are magic. Like Rockis, Durango Nature Studies hopes that students like Amanda keep writing, drawing and exploring. Thus, Durango Nature Studies is proud to offer the writings of this year's middle school winner, Amanda Rydiger.

• • •

"Amanda, wake up. We need to be outside. It's a beautiful day," my dad told me early one Saturday morning.

I told him I was tired and didn't want to wake up. "We're going on a really fun hike up to a waterfall," he said. We'd done that hike a few weeks earlier, so I didn't want to give up sleeping. I got up because he told me we were meeting friends. I've learned it's always more fun to hike with friends.

We got to the top of the waterfall and played in the water. Above the waterfall were small stairs someone had made in the rocks. We walked up the stairs and found a giant mud pit. After a great mud fight, we swam in the water and cleaned off.

We were heading back to the mud pit for another mud fight when I saw something moving in a tree. My dad said it was probably just a crow. "Ya!" I said. "Probably a really big fuzzy bird." My sister shouted, "That's definitely not a bird!" Someone else yelled, "That's a bear!" Looking closer, we saw a mother bear and two cubs.

Everyone freaked. We walked away saying the "Pledge of Allegiance" loudly. We saw that the mother bear had sent her cubs up the tree, and we were scared that she was going to come down, but the mother bear didn't. As soon as I got home, I jumped out of the car and ran to tell my mom.

I am so glad I went on our crazy adventure. It was fun to see three bears on one hike. What a great day outside!

Volunteers – Outdoor splendor of the best sort

by Allison Pease, Executive Director
April 10, 2008

Some of the most amazing things in nature are people. Really.

These are folks who hike, bike, raft or sit under a tree letting the splendor of the outside world engulf them. They are farmers, ranchers and business owners who understand that a connection to nature is a connection to their home and livelihood.

Yet each year, natural changes created by fire, flood, drought and blizzards influence how we work and play. Understanding these changes is essential to ensuring both our present and our future. Even more importantly, as our world becomes more complex, connecting kids to their surroundings is vital. So, how do we gain such understanding and how do we pass it on?

At Durango Nature Studies, we do this in part through volunteers. This last weekend, we completed our 30th volunteer naturalist training. Since 1994, trainings have included fall, winter and spring seasons in which students participate in outdoor education programs. More than 50,000 children from Silverton to Farmington, Pagosa Springs to Dolores, have experienced DNS programs. Guiding them have been community volunteers who have shared experiences, wisdom and passion with children while learning as an adult as well. For example, this weekend we saw more scat than in previous years and wondered if it was because the Durango Nature Center had more protected snow-free areas than other areas. We explored bite marks on trees, tracks and the nipped ends of bushes from rabbits and deer.

When we started DNS, we served primarily Durango. Today, we serve students from across the region. State and county lines don't matter to the students, teachers and parents. What does matter is the education and experience. Our greatest limitation is finding the necessary resources to give all these learners what they need. Our resources include the Durango Nature Center, established programs and a volunteer pool that is vital to helping us keep costs low for schools. Our greatest challenge is finding and training new volunteers who have the time to deliver programs during the school day. It comes down to increasing our capacity to serve.

We are thrilled then to be joining four area nonprofits in sponsoring AmeriCorps VISTAs - Volunteers in Service to America. VISTAs will join DNS, Del Alma, Southwest Conservation Corps and the Boys & Girls Club in helping increase our organizational capacity. While each organization has specific goals, our hope is to provide more services to youths. We know the need is there - we just have to find a way to make it happen.

For DNS, it's about connections - children with nature, adults with nature, and especially adults with children. After all, sharing bunny bite-marks with a child is a natural connection as beautiful as all the other outdoor splendor that engulfs us.

Our unique sun: Bringing light and warmth to Earth

by Allison Pease, Executive Director
March 13, 2007

As the heaping piles of snow finally start to melt and the days at last grow longer, the sun's warming glow is a welcome reprieve from this winter's snowy blasts.

And as next week's vernal equinox approaches, I thought I'd share some tidbits about the sun.

Two unique characteristics of our sun are that it's the only thing producing light in our solar system and that it's quite big compared to the other celestial globes in our corner of the universe.

Although you can block the sun from view with your thumb, the sun is actually enormous and contains 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system. How big is that really? If you used a ball 8 inches in diameter to represent the sun, the Earth would be the size of a 0.08-inch-diameter peppercorn. If the sun were hollow, 1 million Earths would fit inside. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the sun would be the Louisiana Superdome looming over the court.

All that mass ultimately fuels another unique characteristic of the sun - light. Our sun is a gaseous globe containing mostly hydrogen (the most basic element) and a spattering of other elements such as helium. The enormous amount of stuff in the sun creates a huge well of gravity. On Earth, gravity keeps us rooted to the sidewalk as we spin about the axis at 1,000 mph and cruise around the sun at 67,000 mph.

The same gravitational forces that keep us rooted to the sidewalk on Earth exert tremendous pressure on all that hydrogen in the sun. That pressure is so great that hydrogen atoms are squeezed (fused) together, producing a thermonuclear reaction. In simple terms, for every pair of hydrogen atoms that are fused, a helium atom is produced and energy (light) is released. That energy reaches us in the form of delightfully warm solar rays.

Because the Earth's axis is tilted 23.5 degrees to its path around the sun, these solar rays reach us at different angles throughout the year, producing seasons.

During our winter, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun. The sun appears low in the sky and we receive less light and warmth. During our summer, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun as we bask in the sun's more direct and warming light.

Next week, the vernal equinox will mark the moment when day and night are the same length. From this point on, our days will grow longer until the summer solstice in June. As for me, after this winter, I can't wait.