News

This summer, 19 high school students from Chicago, DC, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle spent a month in the North Cascades. For many, it was their first time camping. They hiked to glaciers, swam with bull trout, dodged thunderstorms, taught fifth graders about CO2, and went canoeing for days. It was an opportunity to both connect with a national park and witness impacts of climate change.

When Benj and I were asked to create a multimedia piece about the Parks Climate Challenge program, we knew that we couldn’t be with the group for their entire stay. It made more sense to facilitate photo and audio journals, which would not only capture the moments we missed, it would enable the students to tell their own stories. North Cascades Institute purchased two Canon G10 cameras and an Olympus LS-10 audio recorder. This equipment was assigned to two photographers and a two-person audio team each day.

Benj and I joined the students three times throughout the month. At the very beginning of the program, we introduced ourselves, the equipment and the idea of documentary storytelling. We also did video interviews with everyone during those first few days. Our second visit was after the group’s first week with the cameras and recorder. We reviewed the material with the students, answered questions and presented our work from Facing Climate Change. At the end of the program, Benj and I returned to do closing interviews and edit the students’ work (over 200 audio files and 9,000 images!) into a first draft to show at their amazing closing ceremony.

After the students went home, Benj and I made some adjustments and incorporated the closing interviews into our final piece. But, this is not the end for the Parks Climate Challenge team or for us. In September, we are following the students to the other Washington to meet with experts in climate change policy, national parks and community engagement. We will also be visiting some of their home communities, where they are working with teacher-mentors to design a service project at a local national park that engages more youth with doing something about climate change. If you enjoy this multimedia story, get ready for chapters two and three!

The Parks Climate Challenge program is a partnership between North Cascades Institute, North Cascades National Park, and the National Parks Foundation, made possible by generous support from PG&E.