Teachers from all over Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming converged at the Colorado Mountain College Campus this week for a Project Learning Tree workshop focusing on fire and forest ecology.

An interagency effort between the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Colorado Division of Wildlife, Colorado State University and Colorado State Forestry, funded by a National Fire Plan grant, 29 teachers came to learn, free of charge, about bugs, trees, fire prevention and fire ecology. The hope is to have teachers bring fire ecology knowledge and materials back into their classrooms.

"When we first started this annual workshop there was an emphasis on writing curriculum that would help teachers teach students how to think, not what to think," said Colorado Project Learning Tree Coordinator Shawna Crocker. Crocker started the workshop five years ago; CMC also hosted it last year. "This is just such a great place to come and learn," Crocker said.

Teachers, who became students for the week, took field trips and participated in hands-on learning, visiting a local area houses to learn about fuels reduction close to homes, with Ron Biggers of the Glenwood Springs Fire Department.

Biggers talked about clearing out brush and trees around houses, using fire resistant building materials and the need for fire prevention in the wildland urban interface becoming ingrained in our culture.

Next stop Baylor Park, where students learned about spruce beetles and the current beetle infestation in the area.

"It's good to know your bugs" said Forest Service entomologist Tom Eager, who peeled off the bark of dead trees to show everyone the tiny spruce beetles and the tunnels, or galleries, they create that eventually kill the tree. Baylor Park experienced a large windstorm in 1999 that blew down a significant amount of trees in the popular recreation area off four mile road, southwest of Glenwood Springs.

Beetles began to quickly multiply in the ideal habitat created by the windstorm. The beetles have since emerged from the blown-down trees and have begun to successfully attack spruce trees resulting in a spruce beetle outbreak, and a lot of dead trees. A plethora of dead fuel on the ground, and still standing, could increase and make fire suppression extremely difficult.

"I didn't realize how insects were so related to the stresses of the forest; they come into areas and are all part of the cycle," said Payton Elementary school teacher Jennifer Hoelscher, who plans on using the information from this workshop in her classroom.

Most of the time, spruce trees are able to defend themselves from bark beetle attack. However, when natural events such as a windstorm damage large numbers of host trees, the spruce beetle populations are able to increase rapidly in the weakened and dying trees. Large numbers of spruce beetles are then able to overwhelm and kill adjacent healthy trees.

George Schaefer, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade teacher on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, went to learn and share insight with his students. He explained that students in his school are often shy and won't ask strangers questions.

"When we went on a field trip to Yellowstone, the students wouldn't ask any questions during presentations," said Schaefer, "but they sure had questions for me when they got on the bus."

Merrill Kaufman, with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, was there to talk to the students, encouraging them to look at the big picture.

"This is one of the most important things going on in the state right now," said Kaufman. "So many people do not understand the importance, that fire exists and we need to use it to our advantage." Kaufman said he chooses to dream that, through education, fire and smoke and will be better understood and accepted in these increasingly urban interface areas people are living, especially in the West.

Project Learning Tree began in 1976 when natural resource managers and educators from the American Forest Foundation and the Council of Environmental Education formed a partnership to develop an unbiased, educationally sound program for elementary and secondary students and their teachers.

The partners designed project learning tree to be shared through trained facilitators, educators, resource managers, or other interested people, who, in turn, train others in how to most effectively and efficiently use the curriculum and materials. Today, project learning tree programs are active in a majority of the states in the U.S.