September 30, 2010

As the van pulled back into the HMI driveway from our hour in town on Saturday, we saw a man in a huge white cowboy hat setting up some speakers in the parking lot. We then remembered that we only 20 minutes until the square dance! 

Many of us has bought plaid shirts, cowboy boots and hats at the local thrift stores or at the antique mall in preparation for this event. We all rushed back to our cabins to pull on our boots and button up our flannels. A few of the cabin one girls even donned mustaches.

Soon we all gathered in the parking lot, laughing and taking pictures while students and faculty continued to file in, wearing rather ridiculous attire, all with the sounds of country music in the background. 

The caller, Randy, taught us many dances, including one of his own design. We learned how to do-see-do and how to do "the real cotton-eyed-joe."  We danced for hours, but all of us could have danced for many more. When the dance was over, and we waved good bye to Randy, we went into Who's hall for a fantastic meal, and had some rare down time to hang out with friends and laugh about what a great and unique time we had at the square dance.

A few days ago (well, last week actually - time flies here!), we had to make a very important choice for our entire cabins, and that was the selection of our cabin representatives. The cabin representatives are chosen by the entire cabin to be the student voice in faculty meetings and such. The meetings are on Mondays during activity period, and the reps have to be present for the last fifteen minutes of the meeting, so they can't go on activities that are off campus. For our semester, the representatives are Pablo, Kat, Jack, and Trudi. We are excited to have such enthusiastic students representing our entire semester.

Classes continue to roll along, and we've had a lot of deadlines due to our upcoming expedition.  In fact, this week was shortened due to our special schedule for the second half of the week and the rest of the weekend. We will be taking the Wilderness First Aid course, which includes many safety lessons like CPR. This is exciting because not many people our age get the chance to take this course and we'll learn useful skills to know while we're at HMI and beyond.

We all received our expedition assignments over the last few days because we leave this Tuesday. We will be completing a history assignment on Leadville, writing poems for English, and doing another field study and species account for science. In science we found out who our partners are going to be for our field study (we get to work in pairs this time!).  We also talked about a trophic cascade assignment due in about a month. During French class we presented articles from a French newspaper on current events and studied grammar because we have a test on Friday. In Spanish we presented our projects on immigrating from a Latin American country. One Spanish class also started an exchange partnership with a local Hispanic women's group.  They got to talk with and get to know many women who immigrated to the Leadville from Mexico. They said it was cool to speak Spanish with real Spanish speakers! During history we took a quiz on the Boston Tea Party and discussed our expedition assignment. For English class we sauntered through the woods and wrote poetry using all of our senses to create our poems. In Practice and Principles we learned about RAD (route and directions) plans, which taught us specific ways to plan out our navigation on and off trail. We learned about the law of sines and cosines in math and tried to prove these laws.

Interspersed with all of this learning, we had activity periods.  We had an auto-maintenance activity where we learned how to change the oil and a tire on a car. We each took turns jacking the car up in order to take off the tire and drain the oil. Even though most of us don't even have our own cars, it was still a lot of fun to learn about the inner-workings of a car. Other activities included ultimate Frisbee, tutoring sixth graders in science and math, drawing the mountains, and bike riding. Every week there are new activities to choose from so every week is a new adventure!

This week, however, was even more exciting than usual, because Thursday was Project Day. Project Day is a day in which classes are canceled and all the faculty, staff, and students spend time working together on different projects, which maintain and/or add to the campus. This morning, one group organized the wood piles in the wood-chopping area. We gathered many piles of logs and separated them into already chopped wood, big logs, and logs that cannot be chopped. After lunch, we built a fence on the edge of the soccer field. People worked all day long organizing the gear room, fixing walkways, making a telescope stand, cleaning the library, organizing the ration room, staining wooden walkways and furniture, making a Frisbee golf course, cleaning the new building and doing many more laborious tasks. Though it was a lot of work, at the end of the day HMI looked amazing and everyone had contributed to make it better. 

By: Jamie Sarafan, Louise Owens, Stephen Irving, & David "DP" Parrin