Many take Get Outdoors Day to heart

You could learn fun stuff like how to shoot an arrow, play lacrosse, throw a flying disc. You could learn serious skills like how to avoid grizzly bears in the wilderness and how to rescue someone who’s fallen into a mountain crevasse. You could sign up for baby-toting hikes and hiking-trail work parties. You could climb a towering rock wall.

You could even learn something about science and the environment.

Saturday was National Get Outdoors Day, when public parks and related organizations go an extra mile to welcome children and families to the outside world. Forty regional agencies and companies — including five different national parks as well as recreational climbers, archers, anglers, equestrians and many more — were gathered on the grounds of the Fort Vancouver National Site for activities and education.

“The point is to get these outdoor-enthusiast organizations together and give people an easy way to connect with them and with public spaces,” said park ranger Bobby Gutierrez. “It’s about getting people outside their walls and away from their TV.”

Getting them while they’re young is a key strategy of National Get Outdoors Day. That’s why the Southwest Washington Anglers were there with a stocked pool and helpers with nets. They helped 2-year-old AraLeigha Ludwig of Yacolt have a life-changing experience: she caught her very first fish.

Then she had another life-changing experience: she watched another helper chop off its head and tail and clean it. “That’s a priceless look,” AraLeigha’s mother, Nicole, said of the obvious shock.

“My thinking is, we want to give them a chance to feel the fish. Give them a sense of what it means to fish,” volunteer Bob Sarvala said. “It’s something their grandparents’ generation enjoys and their parents’ generation enjoys. We need to let them try it, too.”

Over at the Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center tent, volunteer Patrick Estenes was quizzing kids about tree leaves and their useful properties. Did you know that Douglas fir needles and twigs produce a mild, energizing tea that’s rich in vitamin C?

“Too many city kids don’t have the opportunity to spend time in the woods and learn about the woods,” Estenes said. “It’s important knowledge.”

Helping everything run smoothly on Saturday were the volunteers of the Timber Lake Job Corps, a federal job training and high school equivalency program based in Estacada, Ore., and focused on outdoor education, according to leader Colmon Fuller.

Snap your hoop

You can’t have a Get Outdoors Day at a site like Fort Vancouver without making it historical. Just up the hill from the outdoorsy agencies lined up along East Fifth Street was the fort’s annual Brigade Encampment, featuring costumed re-enactors circa 1840 demonstrating camping, cooking, crafts, games, music and much more.

For example, are you graceful enough for the Game of Graces? That’s a hoop-tossing game intended for girls of yesteryear who needed to learn to move with ladylike elegance. The trick is snapping your hoop into the air with a pair of wooden rods — while always staying gracefully feminine. Boys were taught different sorts of vocational skills, volunteer Annalisa Quarto said.

That was then. Quarto, 21, said she has graduated from both “Young Engag? School” (traditional training for boys) and “Dame School” (for girls) at the Fort’s youth-volunteer program. She now teaches classes for both, she said.

Of course, fort settlers of the 1840s would have found the very idea of a “Get Outdoors Day” incredible. “Not so long ago, camping was not a recreational activity, but rather an essential way of life,” said Fort Vancouver Superintendent Tracy Fortmann.