Tuesday, June 18th

We started the day by offering kids an opportunity to participate in the World’s Largest Swim Lesson. We had twelve kids participate: both BIGS and LITTLES.  It was chilly but a great opportunity to practice a really important survival skill!  Mountain Kids joined swimmers around the world to make it the largest simultaneous swim lesson ever. We hope. 🙂

Afterward, we headed out to hike and marvel at Tsankawi, a part of Bandelier National Monument. It was a beautiful and perfectly cloudy day for such an adventure (for the morning anyway)!

The paths there are grooved three feet deep in places (!) and there are many, many caves from the “masters of survival skills”  – the Ancestral Pueblo people. It was a big hike for the LITTLES but we took plenty of breaks along to way to drink water, and to look for pottery shards, apache tears, petroglyphs, and hollow rocks!  We all climbed several ladders and got to enter several big and small “cavates.”  We learned that Cavates are caves that were dug out by the Ancestral Pueblo people. They were not naturally formed.

The BIGS did the same loop and stopped to eat and listen to a story told by Ashley in one of the caves.  They had fun exploring and imagining what is was like to live here.  In the van everyone enjoyed listening to My Side of the Mountain, a great tale of survival to complement our day!