A Spooky Success!
In our Delridge community rests a Park of 68 acres filled with trails, rock climbing structures, and high ropes courses. This space also hosts magical and important connections to salamanders, owls, bats, and fungi. What is this amazing space, you may ask? It’s Camp Long! Here at DNDA, we have worked within and partnered closely with Camp Long for many years through extensive forest restoration, hosting EcoArt Camps, Arts and Nature Festivals, and even Family Campouts.
Camp Long continues to be a hidden gem of our Delridge and West Seattle community. Many people are not often aware this Park is here or how much this wonderful space has to offer! DNDA and the Seattle Parks and Recreation Team at Camp Long wanted to provide community fun and engaging opportunities to get folks out to this hidden gem that lives right in their backyard. On October 12, DNDA and the Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) Team at Camp Long hosted a collaborative community event for youth and families named ‘Spooky Scavengers’!
A photo of Nicole Parish-Andrews from Seattle Parks and Recreation’s Environmental Education Team. Nicole, dressed in a black cape, speaks to a group of young people surrounding tables at Camp Long.
At our ‘Spooky Scavengers’ event, the goal was not only to have more people come experience the Park, but to also celebrate our “spooky” Beings that live in the Camp Long ecosystem. The SPR Environmental Education Team created an interactive scavenger hunt, led by Seattle Urban Nature (SUN) Guides. Each SUN Guide team got a “top secret” envelope which started the participants on a journey of solving clues and riddles that led groups from place to place in the trail system. Receiving these clues helped the youth and adults who participated learn more about where owls and salamanders nest and hide in the park, as well as having them locate fungi, centipedes, snakes, and spiders.
Two pictures are above. Each has a scavenger hunt made up of a small group of younger and older people surrounding Environmental Education Guides. The Guides are prompting the groups to learn about the site and work to figure out a way for the group to solve their location clues. The group looks and listens to the Guide giving them more information about owls and centipedes to continue on their mission around the Park.
As the scavenger hunt crews came back, DNDA Teaching Artists and DNDA Environmental Education Coordinator Jules Hepp facilitated an EcoArt’s craft. Our EcoArt’s craft used recycled and upcycled egg cartons, paint, pipe cleaners, and googly eyes to create our ‘spooky’ friends such as bats, pumpkins, insects, spiders, and even invented beings! Once all of the teams came back together, we talked about what we learned and found together. Some favorite learnings and reports were our love of finding crawling creatures like insects, solving puzzles and riddles, and making our spooky crafts! Our spooky scavenger mission was completed with an invitation to choose a small section of candy prizes.
Egg carton crafters work on their crafts above in these two pictures. In the picture on the left, two young people are working together to add googly eyes all over an egg carton cut into a wing shape while a DNDA Teaching Artist appreciates their work with a smile. On the right, a young crafter holds up their finished egg carton bat while smiling.
We want to shout out a big, huge thank you to everyone who was able to make it out for Spooky Scavengers! We especially are grateful for the time and energy of our SPR Environmental Education Team including Nicole Parish-Andrews and the SUN Guides who created such a fun hunt around Camp Long. We would also like to give a big shout out to our amazing DNDA EcoArtists present – Kim Hamlet and April Alley for their time and energy in making such a fun activity possible!! We look forward to having another Camp Long family and community event – save the date for February 15th from 10am-12pm!
Our Spooky Scavenger team is pictured above featuring DNDA Teaching Artists (April, Kim) and Staff (Jules) and SPR Environmental Education team of Seattle Urban Nature Guides and Community Naturalist (Nicole).
Overall, DNDA, the SPR Environmental Education Team, and our community members present all had such a fun time! We were excited to see 28 participants come out – many of whom had not been to Camp Long before. In that regard, we also succeeded in our collective hope to have community members come to Camp Long! We are also grateful to the many people who expressed how much they enjoyed coming out and complemented both SPR and DNDA alike for hosting an engaging and well-run event!
-Written by DNDA’s Environmental Education Coordinator Jules Hepp