Wilderness Institute Internship by Kaydee Borchers

For my Internship at the Wilderness Institute I will be working on some specific projects that are both long and short term throughout the semester as well as other smaller duties that will help things run smoothly in the Wilderness Institute. The larger projects include Wilderness and Civilization outreach, planning for the Freshmen Wilderness Experience, as well as the 40 year anniversary for Wilderness and Civilization Program.

Above is a scan of a Kodak slide taken by Bob Ream
during the first Wilderness and Civ trek in 1975.

My first project for the internship has to do with digging into the history of the Program. So far I have scanned photos from the first Wilderness and Civ. trek in 1975. Bob Ream has a collection of Kodak slides from that year and I got the privilege of browsing through them while converting them to digital files.

I am learning more about how the Wilderness Institute works as I spend time around the office. I am learning more about the Wilderness and Civ. program and what goes into making it happen. I am finding additional meaning to the program and appreciating the fact that it has not only survived but made significant difference for 40 years! I am learning all about the history of the program through interviewing alumni who are glad to help and have added to the stories in my mind about the program.

A photo take by Bob Ream while the students were
taking a load off on the Fall Trek, 1975.

The Interviews include a variety of questions that pull some interesting stores out of the program’s history as well as explain how Wilderness and Civ. helped these people become who they are. I will choose 5 or 6 of these alumni to feature on the Wilderness Institute webpage with a blurb and a photo. I will eventually represent the diversity that comes from the program by choosing the 5 or 6 that have all taken different paths in life. I will be interviewing people who are artists, scientists, activists, federal agency employees or maybe all of the above. I am thinking about doing a father daughter feature of my dad and myself on the alumni page because he was a Civ. student in ’83.

A potential profile for the Wilderness and Civ alumni
page  is my dad and me.  This photo was taken on a fun
day of fishing in the Narrows of Flathead Lake with
my dad, also Wilderness and Civ alumni, Bill Borchers.

Along with digging into some of the program’s history I have also been geared toward promotion of it for the future. Thanks to over a dozen class visits which put me on the side of the podium that I am rather unfamiliar with, I have gained communication skills. I also am becoming more familiar with techniques for outreach, from radio ads to stealthy poster distribution.

During classes last semester I gained a lot of passion and the internship has helped me follow through with inspiring people to do the same, even if they are not interested in the program I believe that through my enthusiasm I can inspire people to live it up and work hard. This internship has expanded on what I have learned in the wilderness and civilization program, specifically the history of such a program and what it’s all about.

I have been working on outreach primarily with Marie who has been working in the office as well. Marie and I are able to work very well together because we encourage each other to push ourselves and have high expectations for each other’s success. Because of this we can push against each other to get $hi* done! It doesn’t matter if it’s licking 500 envelopes to stuff the endowment proposals into or planning the 2015 Wild/Civ. spring campfire.

As this semester continues I will be learning about what goes into the planning of 2 projects. One is the planning of a program such as the Freshmen Wilderness Experience. The other will be planning the 40th Anniversary event. I am excited to contribute to these and put forth my ideas. My learning objectives for the remainder of the semester include those based around acquiring the knowledge of how a nonprofit operates as well as how the institute cooperates with the University of Montana and other agencies. I am also interested in learning as much as possible about outdoor education so I can be better prepared for my career after school in this setting.

Above is a photo of the most recent Wilderness and Civilization 

class taking a journal break in the sunshine. 

This photo is too great not to add to this blog. 

FOWL LANGUAGE by Lauren Korn

For some reason, I didn’t expect its blood to be warm. More than warm. Its blood was hot, and as it flowed down my hand – the hand that was wrapped around its neck – I was surprised. Hours earlier, I had been the one responsible for submerging this turkey’s already-dead companions in a hot water bath of 160 degrees; and now, being the one to nearly choke it, out of fear that it would struggle itself loose from my grip, being the one to slit – no cut; slit is too shallow of a word – its throat and hold its head while it bled out, while it died, was an altogether different experience.

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This year’s Wilderness & Civilization (WC) gang knew, in theory, what was in store for them come November. The WC program directors had more than alluded to our upcoming participation in the Thanksgiving turkey “harvest” at Prairie Heritage Farms, so as a vegetarian, I had had a few months to prepare myself for my role in the harvest on the 21^st and 22^nd of November.

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Prairie Heritage Farms (PHF) is a small farm near Great Falls, Montana on the Fairfield Bench, outside of Power, owned by Jacob and Courtney Cowgill. Hop on over to their website, and you will learn that the farm is family-run and a cultivator of organic vegetables, ancient and heritage wheat, lentils, a variety of other seed crops, and heritage turkeys – these turkeys – which are birds that a) are naturally-mating; b) have long outdoor lifespans; and c) have slow growth rates. One can compare these turkeys to factory- and commercially-farmed birds (which are none of these things) and see that PHF turkeys are happy and raised with care. The PHF website reads, “Our turkeys are more flavorful, juicier and just plain better than the factory-farmed ones you get at the grocery store. They're more expensive, yes, but they're worth it – not only because they're the best turkey[s] you'll ever taste, but also because they're raised with love and care.” This TLC is why PHF has sold every one of their turkeys every year they’ve offered them to the Montana public.

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Part One: The Killing Station

The Killing Station is more of an open shed situated between a large, closed barn and familiar amber waves of Eastern Montana pasture. There are two plastic, white buckets on the ground at the left of this shed, which sit directly under two metal cones. In the barn, the stomachs of one hundred and thirty-some turkeys, which were herded from the farm’s open fields a day earlier, are getting lighter and lighter. Because these turkeys are raised outside, they eat the grasses and the bugs that exist there; and because it is easier to process turkeys whose gullets and gizzards are empty of these foods, they are barricaded in the barn a day prior to slaughter.

Enter four students charged with the most physically challenging part of the process: catching the turkeys. Once the first turkey is caught and killed, it is evident that the remaining turkeys are, to some extent, aware of their fate. Cornering them seems to be the way in which most students are able to catch them. Me, though – I’m not able to catch a single one; the feeling of their weight and their frightened stiffness makes me anxious and hesitant, two things you cannot be if catching a live bird is your end goal.

Once caught, they are taken from the barn to the open shed and held upside down, one student containing their legs, another guiding their bodies through the aforementioned metal cones. Their heads are pulled through the smaller, bottom hole, their necks held firmly. With a steady hand, a knife is pressed to their jugular vein.

It takes a turkey somewhere around five minutes to bleed out.

Part Two: The Plucking Station

Once a bird is caught and killed, it is brought around the barn to the Plucking Station, which consists of: a scale on which the bird is weighed (this immediate weight is called its “live weight”); a large tub of scalding-hot water in which the bird is plunged for a minute and half – this bath allows its feathers to be easily pulled and plucked from its body; an automatic turkey plucking machine (what I will call a “turkey spinner”) that does exactly what it sounds like it does – at its best, it completely plucks the feathers from a turkey in a whirlwind of water and extremely fast rubber “fingers” or knobs; and a stainless steel table around which one to four people stand, plucking the remaining hangers on.

Part Three: Necking

Featherless, the turkeys are then carried from the Plucking Station to two large sinks where the necks are removed from the bodies. My participation at these last stations is limited to observation, so I’ve enlisted the help of Jacob Cowgill to explain these processes. (Matt Freeman, a WC student and KBGA college radio personality spent the weekend recording the harvesting process for a radio spot, and I’ve used his audio to paraphrase Jacob’s explanation about this processing stage.)

“You’re going to cut back towards the base of the neck. Here, you’ll find the trachea and the esophagus, held together by a membrane. Peel back the membrane, and you’re going to follow the esophagus to the crop (which is where food is pre-digested), and what you’re going to do is loosen the crop. You’re not going to take it out, you just want to get it loose. The crop is sort of hard to see, but it’s a sack – a thin sack – and it’s fairly tough, but it can break. You want to prevent that; you just want to loosen the membrane from the wall with your fingers. There, at the base of the crop, you’ll find the trachea. Clean up the skin here. Peel the skin off the neck. Cut off the neck. You’re going to save the necks; they’re put back inside the bird before they’re bagged. Finally, you’re going to want to cut off the scent gland. You’ll see some ‘yellow stuff.’ Clear that yellow stuff away.”

Part Four: The Evisceration Station

The turkeys are then transferred to the Evisceration Station, where they are gutted and given a final inspection. Here, any remaining feathers are plucked, and organs are removed and sorted; livers and hearts are saved, to be joined by the necks inside the turkeys before they’re packaged.

Part Five: Post-Processing

The turkeys’ legs are zip-tied together and they’re placed in coolers until they reach a temperature of forty-one degrees (or less). They are then put in a bag, which is placed in hot water in order to seal them. They are then weighed (given a “dead weight”) and transferred to the truck that will deliver them to the Montanans that bought them so many months prior to this weekend.

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There is a disconnect in the American food system. Many people are unaware of the production and processing methods that make a delicious Thanksgiving meal possible. So we, as a relatively conscientious group of university students, set out to learn what one of those processes consisted of. While doing so, we made sure to thank those that were “giving” us their bodies; as each throat released hot blood, and while each turkey struggled to survive the Killing Station – in a gesture meant to convey the heavy-hearted emotions most of us were feeling and the respect we had for their lives – we thanked them. We thanked them for being unknowing participants in our food system and thanked them for the transfer of energy from their living bodies into, theoretically, our own. In this sense, the weekend was not only an education in poultry processing and ethically-sound consumption, but it was also an exercise in mindfulness. 

I went into the harvest weekend believing that, should I be able to kill a turkey, I would or should re-evaluate my own consumption, re-think my vegetarianism. As it turned out, however, the weekend was lifestyle-affirming. I am still a vegetarian, but should I ever choose to drift back to my omnivorous self, I know that I will be an educated meat-eater, and I have no doubt that I will be a thankful one. Happy [Belated] Thanksgiving.

William A. Clarks Legacy at Milltown By Cory Hoffman

Weather in Montana can be fickle, and so it can be difficult sometimes to plan ahead for trips outdoors. This was the case when we had planned on touring the superfund complex up the Clark Fork. While we didn’t get to see the Berkley Pit, we did get to concentrate on the down-stream part of the trip, at the Milltown superfund site.

The close proximity to the University made the trip seem even more relevant in a way, knowing that millions of dollars were being spent to clean up a part of the river only a short bike ride from our classroom. Knowing that the cleaning was being done on a river I walk over all the time on my way to class, maybe even to talk about this very ecological disaster.

First we met up with the park manager, Michael Kustudia at the parking area to the Milltown overlook. It turns out that he was very familiar with the area before working here, having grown up just across the highway in Bonner, and spent time at Milltown Reservoir as a kid. This gave him a personal appreciation for the way the dam and reservoir were perceived by the local community.

Michael gave us a history lesson starting with the Salish use of the area. Before the Clark Fork was dammed up, there were large bull trout that migrated up the Blackfoot river all the way from Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho.The confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot was a popular fishing spot for people living in the area hundreds of years ago.

But then of course, “The richest hill on earth” was discovered, in the later part of the nineteenth century, forever changing many parts of western Montana’s landscape including the Clark Fork River. Copper king William A. Clark who owned much of Butte at that time had a lumber mill in Bonner. In order to get power for his mill he built the dam in 1908. Shortly after the completion of the dam, a giant flooding event washed huge amounts of heavy metals from upstream where they eventually settled behind the dam. This caused contamination of the local ground water, and eventually leading to the designation of the sight as a superfund site.

Michael was quick to point out where artificial logs made out of coconut fibers were installed near the bank of the river to plant willows in and stop erosion. He also pointed to a group of willows that had come back on their own, along with some cottonwoods. He said some people had theorized that the seeds had been under the soil for over one hundred years, waiting for their chance at life in an entirely different world than that of their ancestors. The reseeding that was done by park employees was part of what Michael called the three R’s of superfund sites, remediation, restoration, and redevelopment.

            We could look just upstream at where the cottonwoods were already mature, and get a good sense of what the area would look like in the future. Although humans have a knack for disturbing ecosystems, and in the case of the upper Clark Fork, really, really disturb it. It’s good to see that we can put some of these landscapes together again.

Tracking: The Odyssey by Simon Dykstra and Luke Santore

Casey Teaching

Its safe to say that none of us knew what to expect when we learned that we were going on a wildlife tracking field trip. Even more confusion was caused upon learning that our first stop was Walmart. 

We spent the first hour of the day perusing the wrong Walmart for any sign of our teacher. Unfortunately we had not yet learned how to track, so we resorted to direct communication. Once we arrived at the right Walmart (who knew there was two??) our teacher quickly grasped our attention. He lead us past the neighborhood pawn shop and pointed out some stray beer cans. "Signs of the local denizens! We may wake someone up." In classic Wilderness and Civ style, we proceeded to tromp through the underbrush until we reached our destination- the underpass under Reserve. With a four lane highway roaring overhead, we studied the ground at our feet. Most of us had never tracked anything before. Raccoon prints were baby hands and cranes were clear evidence of Big Bird. We never expected to find a major wildlife corridor under a heavily trafficked bridge. By mornings end however, Casey had given us a wealth of tracking knowledge. Enough to go make educated guesses at the MPG Ranch. 

Corey Knoweldging

We pulled up next to an excavator and a half built mini-shed and wandered down into the floodplain that borders Highway 12 and the Bitterroot river. Over the next seven hours, we hiked about a mile and a half and had a great time doing it. Every aspen grove and field was filled with adventure and knowledge. We learned the story of the field mouse a.k.a the vole. Its a tiny thing with big impact. Casey revealed its corridors within the grass. Barely noticeable to the untrained eye. He told us that they are in fact ecosystem engineers on par with beavers (wow!). In the winter they nibble on baby trees just budding out of the ground, effectively stalling forest succession. The effect is a more open and varied habitat more suitable to the likes of Elk and other wildlife. This is but one example of how much Casey had to say about every track or sign we passed. Each one held a bit of history in it. They could tell us how and when an animal moved through. Tracks and signs could also tell us the way in which an animal moves through the forest. This simple bit of info seemed to, as Casey said, develop a more direct and personal, even intimate, relationship with wildlife. It was plain to see that plenty of animals lived inside of Casey considering how he emulated the cambium-gnawing Elk with such precision. 

Beautiful sunset while waiting for certificates

Tracking is often called natural literacy. Not being able to read and write is as much of a hindrance as not being able to read the sign in the landscape around you. We all found a new value in the outdoors that we never knew had existed. Tracking wildlife gives you a unique perspective into their world and behaviors, making them more than just animals who live in the woods. Each sign we observed told a story of the intentions and intelligence of the creature making it. Wether or not we earned certificates in tracking, the knowledge we gained was invaluable. We all walked away with a new appreciation for the life of ecosystems, an impressive feat considering our background in the outdoors.