Opening the Door to California's Wild Places

Most of our students spend their days in buildings, moving between schedules someone else set. Overnight trips offer something different: the chance to figure things out together, like how to set up a tent as the sun sets and the fog rolls in, how to filter water from a stream, how to read a trail map, and how to cook dinner for fifteen people over a camp stove. Then, once the work is done, the chance to just play, to wade into a creek, to lie in the grass and do nothing, to be young people awed into silence by the beauty of the ocean and the grandeur of the Sierras.

The conversations get longer and more personal. Kids notice things: a bird song they have never heard, a puffball mushroom, the bright green new growth on a tree's branches. For high school students in our conservation and horticulture job-training programs, these trips carry the environmental work they do back home beyond the East Bay and deepen it into lifelong values, showing young people that recreation and careers in the outdoors are real and within reach. By day two, every student is planning the next adventure and deciding who to bring along. Machu Picchu topped the list this past trip.

Four days on the Mendocino coast

This past spring, Druids interns spent four days and three nights camping at Van Damme State Park: old-growth pygmy forest, estuary exploration, coastal hiking, tide pool ecology, and four days of living and working as a team in an unfamiliar place. For many of them, it was their first time camping.

Along the way they practiced the skills that make a trip like this run: basic first aid, plant and animal identification from field reference books, navigation, time management, and the harder skill of asking each other for support. The trip is built so students arrive ready to lead, not just to participate.

Into Yosemite's backcountry

The Druids take to the mountains, too. This past June, students spent four days backpacking in Yosemite's backcountry with WildLink, a wilderness scholarship program of NatureBridge. WildLink brought expert wilderness leadership, curriculum, gear, and logistics. Growing Together brought the chaperones, the relationships with students, and the weeks of preparation that made the experience possible.

On the granite above Yosemite's backcountry

Our partners let us go further than we could alone. Bay Area Wilderness Training loans students tents, sleeping bags, pads, and water bottles at no cost to them or to us, and the Student Conservation Association embeds a Climate Corps fellow with the program. Students never pay out of pocket, and they arrive equipped for whatever the trail asks of them.

The internship behind the trips

The Druids Environmental Club is a paid student internship at San Lorenzo High School, now in its fourth year with Growing Together and its 35th at the school. Interns work alongside our staff and community partners on real environmental projects: habitat restoration, biodiversity monitoring, community education, and advocacy. The work is rigorous, and it is designed to develop students as environmental leaders in their own communities.

Overnight trips are central to that work. They build the trust, resilience, and shared purpose that no classroom can replicate, and they show a group of students, many of them first-generation and college-bound, that the wild places of California belong to them too.