Elementary and middle school students and community members across Northwest Indiana have gotten the chance over the last month to experience the outdoors and their local waterways in ways that they may never have before thanks to the Wilderness Inquiry, a non-profit who provides the opportunities for urban youth, families and people with disabilities to discover and take part in the benefits of experiencing the outdoors.
“We try and get people in the wilderness who don’t normally have the opportunity,” said Maddie Berrang, an Outdoor Director with the Wilderness Inquiry. “We really want to change their idea of local waterways and let them know they are areas of recreation.”
The Wilderness Inquiry was started in 1978, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with integrated trips for people with disabilities and morphed into day programs for inner city kids on the Mississippi River with the aim to get kids into their local parks and to teach them about their surroundings and how important these recreational areas are. The Canoemobile, the Wilderness Inquiry program spending time in the Region, engages students to improve their performance in school, cultivate a stewardship ethic and create pathways for students to pursue opportunities in the outdoors.
“It’s a great way to get kids out of the classroom,” said Berrang. “We work a lot with kids who might be fearful of getting in the canoe and on the water so we want to work with them to face their fears and rely on their classmates to get them through as a team. It gives the students a chance to see and learn about their local plants and animals who use these waterways and understand how everything is related and connected.”
The Canoemobile, which is a roving fleet of 24’ Voyager canoes travelling around the country, has worked with almost 10,000 students and community members since mid-September. In northwest Indiana, they’ve made stops in Hammond, East Chicago, Gary and Hobart. Along with getting on the water, the W.I. instructors teach kids about their environment using land based lessons and experiments.
“We do a wide variety land based lessons along with the canoe trips,” said Berrang. “The students get the chance to do water quality test, they look at and identify bugs and invasive plants and they learn how and where pollution comes from. We give them an idea of the history of their area. Here in Hobart they have a dam so we teach them how that impacts their area and then we take them out to see the dam from the canoe. It gives them a whole new perspective. Kids have so many questions and are so excited to learn and get outdoors.”
The Wilderness Inquiry works closely with the National Parks Service and that partnership has helped bring the Canoemobile experience to students and families around the country, and has had a big impact on connecting more people to the outdoors and their local and national parks.
“This has been so great!,” said Geof Benson, Executive Director of the Dunes Learning Center. “It’s been great for the kids and the administrators. They get to learn so many things about the environment and we’re doing it next year. We’ve already got three weeks reserved to do it all again.”
To find out more about the Wilderness Inquiry go to: https://www.wildernessinquiry.org/