The environment I live in and the activities I have grown to enjoy throughout my life have significantly increased my appreciation and awareness of the importance of keeping the bay and surrounding tributaries clean. For all the boating and swimming I do during the summer it is important that the rivers and bay and as clean as possible for our safety as well as the wildlife. In our community, Dobbins’ Island is an island in the Magothy River just across from our house. Hundreds of boater’s flock to this island to relax during the summer. Due to some inconsiderate people, the island often gets trashed. We take our Jon boat to Dobbins’ to swim during the summer, and as a part of each trip we often clean up the trash on the island. After holiday weekends, we make it a family outing to check the island for trash. It's not the most pleasant task but when the island is clean it is a very nice place to visit. Also, at our dock we also have held oyster beds because the oyster population is declining. Through this you feed the beds with oysters and keep them to start their growth, then you transfer them to the bay in an attempt to improve their population. I try to help out even if its just in simple ways just as this.

We were also able to get out in the environment during class a couple of times. No one complained as it was an excuse not to sit in class in front of a computer for three hours. Our first trip was to the Robert Treeman State Park to go on a hike along the Gorge Trail. We struggled to find a day as it had been really cold so far during the term, but finally we found a decent day. It was fairly sunny and moderatly warm when we left for Ithaca that morning. We arrived there and met up with the class ready to set out on a two mile hike. Right from the beginning we were faced with a fairly steep slope. By the time it planed off again my legs were already burning. What a great start. However I was soon distracted from this by the company from my classmates and the scenery along the trail. It was a beautiful trail making the trip more enjoyable. We reached a point along the way where the paths split and the main one that went right along the gorge was closed due to winter conditions. This was a bit of an upset on the trip but we still make the hike to the top of the tree line and were able to see the falls from slightly further away. It was exciting when we finally reached the top and took a few pictures. We then remembered we had another two mile hike back down. It went much more smoothly than on the way up to the top and we were relieved when we reached the bottom. Having never done this before I really enjoyed being able to experience something new and be out in the environment. It was actually a harder hike than I had expected and seemed like a bit of a workout. I would probably consider doing this again on an even nicer day and explore a little further to where you could swim. That I'm sure I would enjoy.

Our next class trip was to go geocaching! This was a completely new experience to me. Before this class I had never even heard of this and wasn't exactly sure why someone would choose to do this. However after a little explanation and hearing how fun it is, I was looking forward to it. We found a great day to go and left for the Tanglewood Nature Center. Once we got there it took some time to figure out the GPS and make sure they were all working. We ran into a bit of a battery issue and decided to split into two groups instead of three to be on the safe side. My group took the two questionable GPS's and put in the coordinates. We were finally ready and set out to look for the first geocache. We followed along the trail until it said we were right on top of it and we found it fairly quickly. We opened it up, logged our names, but didn't choose to take anything. We made sure to put it back where found and covered it with a log and some leaves. After the first one I figured this would be fairly easy and that we had it under control. Seems I was mistaken. We were on our way to find the next one straight up the mountain through the muddy trails when what do you know, one GPS lost signal. Imagine that. We followed the other a bit further but lucky for us the other GPS lost signal too and turned off. This made things a little more difficult and its a good think we brought a map to help direct us along the trails. It was a little upsetting that we were only able to find one geocache after all that time but the GPS issue proved a minor setback. At the end of the the day it was still interesting trying to find our way along the trails.