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A Million Snowflakes, 500 Elk,

At the Teton Science School in Wyoming, students and teachers

10 Moose Droppings, 4 Coyotes,

aren't just learning about winter nature. They're living it.

and a Bird Nest in an Aspen Tree

By Jennifer Bogo

Jeb Hilton is a wolf. After counting to 30, he turns slowly in a circle, scanning the snow-covered landscape. The Teton range's jagged, ice-blue peaks loom on the horizon. Surrounding Jeb is nothing but silence and lodgepole pines, their long, slender trunks stretching toward the wide Wyoming sky. Then—suddenly—a flash of cobalt blue. "I see Eric!" he yells, pointing. "And Jenny!" Two elk people emerge from behind trees. Soon all the "prey" are spotted and called out, except for one. "You'll never find him," says John Leonard, another high school senior. "He's a master."

Jeb squints. Under the bright sun of early afternoon, the snow's surface sparkles like diamonds. Finally, he detects his quarry. "Nick!" Snow slides away from the back of a bright yellow parka, and Nick, unfolding to his full six-feet four-inch frame, shakes snow from a head of frazzled red hair. "Got me," he admits. "Now," he asks the group, "why was it harder to play today in the conifers than yesterday in the sage?"

Nick Nelson is a field instructor and the unlikely king of "thicket"—hide-and-seek à la the Teton Science School (TSS). As his students try to conceal themselves behind fallen branches and slender tree trunks, they are learning about the challenges predators and prey face hiding in different environments. They've discovered that dense bunches of sagebrush are actually much easier than trees for the calves of large animals to hunker down in. And by lying motionless in a snowy hole, the students begin to truly appreciate the adaptations—like thicker fur—animals must make to survive winter.

Participating in the game are two instructors in TSS's Professional Residency in Environmental Education, plus six students and a chaperone from Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City. The students are here to spend a week snowshoeing and skiing their way around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Nick and 17 fellow instructors are here to teach them, and, more important, to spend a whole year learning how. They're enrolled for intensive training in environmental education, a field most university programs are only now beginning to acknowledge.

The residents at TSS take graduate-level academic classes in such subjects as ecology, place-based education, and curriculum design while earning credits that can be applied toward a master's degree at four universities. Although other residential environmental-education centers exist, only a handful—Wolf Ridge in Minnesota, and Island Wood and North Cascades Institute in Washington State, for instance—put as much emphasis on teaching teachers as they do on teaching students. And between classes, both teachers and students learn out in the field.

"Places like TSS are the acme of what education should encompass," says Ron Hellstern, past chair of the Elementary and Secondary Education Commission for the North American Association for Environmental Education, and a ninth-grade science teacher in Utah. "These [instructors] are not only going to be experienced in preparing lessons for class but will also learn to deal with unexpected situations and to have a general knowledge of everything around them. Being outdoors offers a whole variety of opportunities that you don't get in a standard classroom."

The Teton Science School could hardly be better located to inspire an appreciation of nature. Though the school was founded in a bus in 1967, since 1974 it has occupied the site of an old dude ranch in Kelly, Wyoming, just within the eastern boundary of breathtaking Grand Teton National Park. Elaborate snow sculptures built by visiting students—a giant guitar, a reclining mermaid, Stonehenge—dot the path that winds past the campus's rustic log buildings, where morning and evening programs supplement lessons learned outside.

After a rousing game of "glacial jeopardy," the students bundle up in enough clothing to fill an L. L. Bean catalog, strap into snowshoes, and follow Nick up the Beaver Creek Trail. The colorful snake of parkas ripples to a halt when Nick pauses halfway up the hill. He pulls a branch closer, pointing out how lodgepole pine needles grow in "packages" of two (as opposed to the "sharp, square" needles of spruces, or those of "flat, friendly" firs).

"I have a theory on this whole tree thing," says Jeb, when they finally reach the top. "I think they're here because a glacier melted and left a bunch of nutrients for trees to grow."

"Right!" confirms Nick. "So now we're standing on an end moraine—the last point where the glacier stopped."

He unfurls a topographic map and tells the students to "build the Tetons." They fall enthusiastically on a choice mound of snow. After consulting the map's contour lines, they use shovels and their mittened hands to pat the peaks into place. The real mountains are obscured by softly falling snow.

"What do you think?" Nick asks, standing back to admire the now three-foot-high sculpture.

"It's a work of art," decides Jenny Evans, a junior.

It's also a work of science. By constructing a snowy replica of the mountain range, the students are learning hands-on how glaciers helped shape the Tetons' peaks and carve its U-shaped valleys. Nick plants his size-12 boots on the newly constructed summit and then sits on it and slides down.

"The firn is where my bum is; the cirque is around it," he says, scooting to a halt. The students follow suit, using their snow pants to reinforce the geologic terms—referring to the compacted snow found at the top of a glacier, and the steep walls formed by glacial erosion—they had learned earlier that morning.

"I usually don't spend a lot of time outside," Jeb says. "I took a geology class last semester, and this has helped a lot. There I just looked at pictures; here I got to go out and stand on it."

"Where's Nick?" The question comes up again, this time on the tail end of an early-morning cross-country ski. And this time he's not supposed to be hiding. Nick reappears some minutes later, having followed four-toed prints off the winding trail until ropy scat revealed the animal he was tracking was a canine—a coyote—not the bobcat (which has segmented scat) he had at first suspected. His irrepressible curiosity spills right over onto the students, and into enthusiasm for his chosen career.

"I grew up going to a traditional high school in Cape Cod, where we never went outside," says Nick. "We never learned about glaciers—and the Cape's an end moraine. It didn't make sense." So after graduating from Williams College last May, he decided he wanted to go back to high school, this time as a teacher, and introduce the kids there to nature.

He could have applied to a school for conventional teacher certification, grounded in classroom theory and experience. But here at the Teton Science School, he is immersed in the environment he's learning about while at the same time teaching it to others. "When you translate what you learn for kids is when you really start to own it," says John Haskin, the school's director of education. "It's so essential to that first year of teaching for them to repeat classes over again, which they don't do in a regular classroom with the same group of kids. Here they get to try again each week with a brand-new class as a brand-new teacher."

Such teaching training is gaining urgency, since today schools must meet challenging academic standards in reading, math, and (soon) science or risk the loss of federal funding. According to the 2004 Report Card on the Status of Environmental Education in Washington State, written by Audubon Washington, students who learn through the medium of the environment perform better academically and show more interest in learning. The report card summarizes information from the Pacific Education Institute's Environmental Education Assessment Project, which studied 154 schools across the state. It found that the 77 schools with environmental-education programs had significantly higher standardized test scores in reading, math, and writing, as well as more students who met state standards.

"In class I really like hands-on stuff," says Katie Huber, a 16-year-old junior at Judge. "If someone had showed me a picture of a stellar snowflake, it would have gone in one ear and out the other. But this morning it was snowing, and I looked at the kind of snowflakes falling and thought, 'This is cool!' " (For more about snowflakes, see "Artistry in Ice.")

"Sometimes it just takes that one little spark to put it in perspective for the student," confirms George Angelo, Katie's science teacher at Judge. He's been a national park ranger in the Tetons for 28 summers and, as a teacher, has been bringing students to TSS for nearly as long. "The confidence they gain there elevates them a notch. They are presented with new challenges in a different setting, and they learn they can achieve."

Tom and Jerry—two solid draft horses—pick their way across the snow-encrusted National Elk Refuge, pulling the Judge students behind them in a creaking wooden sleigh. The refuge, just northeast of Jackson, is winter home to one of the nation's largest concentrations of elk. The students twist on the wooden benches to get a good look at a large bull, which is returning their curious stares from a few feet away.

"Elk don't get cold until it's minus-four degrees Fahrenheit," explains Nate Doer, a TSS resident who is earning credit as a naturalist at the refuge. He passes around a piece of hide covered in long, soft fur. "One of the reasons is that their hollow hairs keep them warm, like air trapped in down feathers."

"What are the red spots on their sides?" asks Ryan McCrory, a junior.

Nate explains that these are made by paintballs, which mark animals vaccinated against brucellosis. Ryan has just touched on one of the most contentious debates in Wyoming: whether or not to continue the winter feeding of more than 7,500 elk at the refuge, which has been an annual practice since 1911.

The Judge students' ride is very different from one a class of TSS residents took at the refuge that very morning. They rose at dawn to bounce along in the back of an elk-feeding truck, atop 25 tons of cold, green alfalfa pellets that were slowly siphoning out from below their feet. Nearly 3,000 elk lined up shoulder to shoulder behind the snaking feed truck, muzzles to the ground, white rumps in the air.

The students' experience was part of a two-week class called Ecological Inquiry, which, among other things, sends the instructors out into the Jackson community to talk to people on all sides of a controversial environmental issue. Opinions on elk feeding run hot and strong and in all directions. Some people fear that animals feeding in unnatural clusters will only hasten an epidemic of a disease like brucellosis, killing most of the elk and then spreading to nearby ranches and wiping out cattle, too. Others fiercely believe that if feeding stops, elk will starve to death anyway—development has greatly diminished the animal's natural winter range.

"One of the raps on environmental education is that it's extremely one-sided," says Doug Wachob, director of the science school's conservation research center and the class's instructor. "The point of this course is to give students a multifaceted experience, so they understand more than one point of view. This is the most powerful course I teach."

The Judge high school students are spread across a hillock, each quietly scribbling in a three-ring notebook. Keeping journals helps them practice how to write and draw clearly—both good naturalist skills. It also gives them a few moments of quiet contemplation.

Soon Nick makes the soft, low oowoo-woo-woo-woo of a mourning dove—the signal that everyone should gather. Donning cross-country skis, they zip across the frozen crust, pausing here and there to examine the tight, serpentine tracks of a red squirrel (a "hopper") or the long, broad stride of a coyote (a "walker"), its fat toe pads clearly imprinted.

"Hey, this is new!" says Ryan. Next to a fir tree, a round depression in the snow tapers off into a sweeping brushstroke about three feet long. The students look for footprints and, not finding any, speculate that the unusual track must have been left by the tail feathers of a bird—most likely a sage grouse—taking off or landing. They now know that every track tells a story, and so they try to decipher it. Just yesterday they saw the bounding prints of a weasel stop abruptly and reappear some distance later, and concluded it must have dived for a mouse under the snow.

When they reach Upper Meadow, along the school's four miles of trails, the students circle up. It's been a long week, filled with winter science and more peanut butter sandwiches than anyone cares to count. And yet in this relatively short period of time, the Judge high school students have all become amateur meteorologists. They've learned to identify moose scat—smooth, like frozen pecans—and distinguish the deep howl of wolves from the eerie cackle of coyotes. They've become curious about this ecosystem and compared it with their home environment, which they've realized is worth protecting, too.

As for the other students, the teachers at TSS, they've learned a lot, as well. They've tried out lesson plans (some worked, some didn't) and decided how to tweak them for next time. They've gained confidence in teaching math, science, and English—all within the context of nature, and without the benefit of a bell.