Copyright 2021
During the first day we spent on Session 2 of the Cardigan Mountain trip, the stage was set for a three-day marathon of outdoor exploration. After we exited the bus that had transported us roughly one hour away from Hopkinton Middle High School, we played mountain baseball as a group before splitting off into our smaller 8-person groups led by an AMC Guide. We stopped to sketch the AMC Lodge in our sketchbooks before we got going. As a group, we hiked slightly more than four miles total throughout the day. Along the way, we explored multiple rivers, learned about Cucumber of the Woods plants, learned about ideal toilet paper plants, and played a clothespin search game. This brought us to our lunchtime destination of Welton Falls, where we also learned the story of the personality of a hemlock tree and climbed on an uprooted fallen log. At this point, it started to lightly rain, but we kept hiking along the Back 80 trail and eventually along a logging road, where we also played a game of marshmallow river. We wrapped up our day by playing extreme red light green light before boarding the bus to ride back to the Middle High School.
I think that this day best represents movement. Movement is the transportation of things or ideas to and from, or from and to. We were moved from Hopkinton Middle High School to the AMC Cardigan Lodge, via the school bus. Our sketches of the AMC Lodge were images of a building created by presumably imported materials. In addition to this, we moved through three regions of the Cardigan Region Forest Boundaries throughout our hike - AMC Cardigan Reservation, Brown, and Welton Falls State Forest. Alongside the trail we were on was a stream, which was in the process of moving water from the Cardigan Mountain region to the Atlantic ocean, which is depicted on the arcGIS map. We also picked Indian Cucumbers, whose seeds can be transported through wind, roots, or birds. The rain that began to fall from the sky came from clouds that had come from other places, and the logging road that we walked on was a route of movement between two destinations. Lastly, the apple trees scattered around originated in central Asia, and the various Scotch pines originated in Scotland.