Vibe-Fall-2024 - Flipbook - Page 51
After Years of Connecting with the Saco River,
Local Students Complete Their Source-to-Sea Journey
T
he Saco River holds a special place in
the hearts of many living and vacationing in the Mt. Washington Valley.
It is home to some of the area’s finest
swimming holes, and its deeper pools offer
favorite places for fishing. In the summer
months, the river is well known for its sandy beaches, rope swings, and a flow that is
just fast enough to propel throngs of tubers
downstream. And of course, particularly
in recent years, its mighty surges during
storms have impacted countless families
and businesses in the Valley.
The students of Northeast Woodland
Public Chartered School in Conway are
also no strangers to the river. Beginning in
name, they will tell you emphatically that
pirates do, indeed, live on the river due to
their ship running aground on an upstream
journey to find treasure. For them, their
relationship to the Saco and its shoreline
is one of excitement and curiosity—where
small tributaries are dug in the sand,
homemade birch-bark boats are launched
to float downstream, and the everchanging
beaches offer new places to explore after
each storm erodes roots and shifts sand. To
them, the Saco River is “Sister River.”
As the students move through the
grades at Northeast Woodland, this
relationship develops and deepens. In
the fourth grade, as students study local
During the first week of June 2024, just one week before
the class of nine graduated, the students, joined by four
of their teachers, spent five days traveling by canoe down
the river to reach the ocean.
pre-school, students frequently walk the
trails from the school to the water’s edge.
They visit “Pirate’s Cove,” named such
during the school’s first year in operation
due to the pirate flag that neighbors
frequently fly on the far shore. If you ask
a student in the younger grades about the
Fall 2024
geography, they learn about their place in
the Saco River Watershed. They test the
healthiness of the water, measure the rate
of flow, and look for macroinvertebrates.
They travel to Crawford Notch to see where
the mighty river begins as a small trickle
leaving Saco Lake and then venture down
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