Day 4: Rock climbing!
We started off our third full day on Hurricane island with some delicious blueberry pancakes. We were on dish duty today!
After breakfast, we gathered as a group and headed out to the quarry to start our rock climbing adventure. Although some of us were more fearful than others about climbing up the tall, granite slab, everyone successfully made it to the top. We all thought that belaying each other was the hardest part, trusting each other with our lives. When we left the quarry two hours later, we all had callouses on our hands but smiles on our faces.
Right when we got back to the cabin, we zoomed with our first guest speaker on this trip, Yvonne Thomas. She talked about her life, the fisheries, and her tight-knit community of Vinalhaven, a small island near Hurricane. We can even see it out the window of the Swallow’s Nest. Then for lunch, we enjoyed some pasta and salad before heading out in the field to collect data. Our (Anna and Ayla) study is focusing on the correlation between the damage/strength of hermit crabs’ shells and empty gastropod shells in tidal pools. Our hypothesis was that in locations where there were stronger empty shells, the hermit crabs would also have stronger shells. We have collected data from two locations, Two Bush Island and Gibbon’s point. The data from Two Bush Island disproves our hypothesis, the gastropod shell quality is much poorer than the hermit crab shells. Our favorite thing about this study has been finding and observing these hermit crabs. Some are cuter than others and some are more aggressive than others… we’ve only had two hermit crabs fatalities so far, and we’re hoping to keep it at that!
Another exciting thing about today was that we got our first shower day! It was so nice to truly clean off for the first time on this trip. Later tonight, we are planning to eat dinner and word is… we’re having whoopee pies for dessert! After that, we’re going to transfer all of our data collected today onto the computer so it can be analyzed. We’re excited to see what we found and how it compares to our previous data. It can get pretty cold at night, so we plan to bundle up to go to bed.
CSW—a gender-inclusive day and boarding school for grades 9-12—is a national leader in progressive education. We live out our values of inquiry-based learning, student agency, and embracing diverse perspectives in every aspect of our student experience. Young people come to CSW to learn how to learn and then put what they learn into action—essential skills they carry into their futures as doers, makers, innovators, leaders, and exceptional humans who do meaningful work in the world.