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| 6/16/2009 6:00:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article |
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Journal/Sam Green
Students view the kiva at Escalante Ruins near the Anasazi Heritage Center Wednesday when the group of high school students toured the area as part of a youth conference. |
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Youths see public lands
Summit generates students’ ideas about management in SW Colorado
Kristen Plank
Journal Staff Writer
Students all across Colorado became stewards of Southwest Colorado last week during a summit aimed at capturing youth interest in public lands.
Approximately 110 students and teachers journeyed to the Cortez area as part of the Colorado Preserve America Youth Summit, sponsored by Colorado Preservation Inc. Each year, new students visit different public lands sites across the state to give input on how the areas can be managed and how to better attract youth.
The annual summit spent its fourth year in Cortez.
"The whole motivation for us doing this is to make kids and teachers more interested in historic places and to have a greater appreciation of history through historic places," said organizer Ann Pritzlaff, who also works with the Advisory Council for Historical Preservation. "All the time we hear kids say, 'Textbooks are so boring,' and our goal down here is not just to learn about public lands, but for kids to have an eye-opening experience of all cultures that have lived here before and that live here now."
Students spent much of last week visiting public and not-so-public archaeological sites. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Anasazi Heritage Center and Mesa Verde National Park housed the participants while the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and archaeologists allowed students to peer into the past and history of Southwest Colorado.
The summit focused on its own version of the SOS signal, adapting the "Save Our Souls" message to become "Sustainability, Opportunity and Stewardship," Pritzlaff said.
"We literally mean the economic sustainability, or balancing the use of our public lands with tourism, oil and gas, and recreation," she said. "They also focused on environmental and cultural sustainability. We really want all of the kids to realize that public lands are all of our lands and we all need to be better stewards - not just point our fingers at the federal agencies."
Questions posed to students during the summit included how technology can be used to capture the imagination of other youths, how people can become better stewards and why youths should care about public lands.
Youth summit participant Alex Latham, 13, along with other students, answered these questions in skits at the end of the week. Latham's group used the game of Jeopardy to explain how the area's public lands could become more interesting to younger generations. One suggestion her group posed was to allow greater public access to unexcavated archaeological sites.
"I completely understand why they can't allow (public access) because people could take advantage of it and ruin the site," said the Broomfield student, who had never visited Southwest Colorado before. "But we all believe that if they could find a way to let the general public there, without ruining the site's integrity, then that would bring a lot more tourism in."
Additional hands-on experiences would also appeal to youths, she said. The weaving and corn grinding stations at the Anasazi Heritage Centers held much of Latham and her friends' interest.
"Me and my friends loved that," she said. "We spent 10 minutes trying to weave at that station."
Pritzlaff said learning about the area's history and engaging students was part of the summit's goal.
"We want them to go away and be ambassador's of Southwest Colorado," she said. "We want them to understand more about other cultures and why they should care about them."
After the summit finished, Linda Towle, a retired chief of research and resource management at Mesa Verde who helped organize the summit, said the experience was a success.
"The kids seemed to have had a really great experience," Towle said. "I think that, for most of them, this was really a much more in-depth exposure to the Four Corners. I think it was a positive experience."
Reach Kristen Plank at kristenp@cortezjournal.com.
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