With its breathtaking sandstone bluffs and miles of wooded trails, Starved Rock State Park near Utica has long been a summer destination for Chicagoans.
But this year visitors will find several miles of trails closed to hikers because of erosion. Although the elements play their part, much of the damage to paths is caused by humans.
“If we had only 100,000 people a year coming here, it wouldn’t be quite as dramatic,” said park site interpreter Toby Miller. “But because we get around 1.5 million people a year, it is a tremendous problem.”
Formed more than 425 million years ago, when an inland sea receded, Starved Rock and its adjacent bluffs and canyons are made of a particularly fragile type of rock known as St. Peter sandstone, according to Miller.
“If you take a hunk of rock and just rub it, you can actually feel the grains come off right in your hand,” he explained.
While park officials have been monitoring the problem for the last 15 years and addressing it in various ways (typically by building boardwalks over the most severely affected portions of trail), during the last year they’ve had help from an improbable group of researchers.
Last September a group of 6th graders from Northbrook Middle School in Mendota, 30 miles northwest of Starved Rock, were on a field trip at the park. Before the trip, they had mapped different areas of the park they wanted to explore. When they got there, Miller reluctantly informed the children that many of trails they had earmarked were closed because of erosion.
“You should have seen their faces,” Miller said. “They were very disappointed.”
As he explained the scope of the problem to the kids, Miller also asked if they would be interested in helping do something about it. Their response: a unanimous “yes.”
But what the children didn’t know was that the whole thing was something of a setup. Work on the erosion project actually had begun more than a year earlier, and the entire exchange with Miller was all but scripted. Northbrook 6th-grade science teacher Dave Brewer, along with his wife, Amy, who heads the school’s gifted student program, had applied for and received a research grant from the Toyota Corp. The grant was to be used to study erosion patterns at Starved Rock, and the results of the students’ study would be turned into a display at the Starved Rock Visitors Center in the hopes of educating the public.
The Toyota Tapestry grant program began eight years ago and has provided more than $3 million to schools nationwide. The $10,000 awards are divided into environmental and physical science categories. The Brewers’ application, in the environmental category, was one of 1,400 submitted in 1997, and one of just 50 awarded.
“We first heard about (the grant program) in 1996 at a convention of the National Science Teachers Association. We were absolutely thrilled when we heard we had been chosen,” Amy Brewer said.
The Brewers structured their research around an instructional approach known as Problem Based Learning. Developed by the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora, the method presents children with a complex problem that has no simple right or wrong answer; instead, it allows them to work in teams to develop and use their own problem-solving abilities.
As originally conceived, the project would have given all children an overview of the on- and off-trail erosion problem, but the Brewers soon realized the students were gravitating toward their individual areas of interest and expertise.
“It has turned into more of a web,” Dave Brewer explained. “There are some groups who are very into making the maps, and others are into building the displays, while others very much like doing the presentations to the school board.”
And that lack of structure has yielded some very positive results.
“There are some kids who frankly are not very good `book learners,’ ” Amy Brewer added. “They are very shy in class and don’t respond well to a traditional approach. But in this program, they have come out of their shells and are very involved in a way they never were before. We even have one student who (speaks limited) English who has been quite active in doing artwork for the displays.”
Conducted during a free period in an empty Northbrook classroom, an impromptu round table of children involved in the project quickly confirms Amy Brewer’s observations. Kids who previously hated science are deeply engaged, and those who liked it to begin with have demonstrated above-grade-level abilities when taken out of a rigid textbook-based learning model.
Over the course of five day trips to the park, students surveyed designated areas of the park. Using trundle wheels and compasses, they made detailed maps of eroded trail areas.
Taking their data back to Dave Brewer’s classroom, the students also built three-dimensional topographic maps, paying close attention to soil conditions, composition of underlying bedrock, evolution of streams and human impact on the process of erosion.
With all their field work done, a handful of kids returned to the park recently with a digital camera to take panoramic pictures. The students’ findings will become a permanent display in the visitors center later this summer, and a virtual reality tour of the park will be posted on the school’s Web site by the end of 1998. A CD-ROM of their report is also in production.
“I actually hated science before we started doing this, but once we started getting into the erosion project, it was a lot (more fun) and I could understand it better,” said Tiffany Jordan, 11.
“It’s a lot more fun because you actually get to go out and see things for yourself, instead of sitting there having someone tell you about it,” adds Natalie Richardson, also 11.
Toby Miller says he hopes the students’ message about erosion comes across. “The more you talk about it and educate people, the more they will understand the damage that can be done,” he said. “Starved Rock is home to hundreds of species of wildflowers, trees and shrubs, some of which are on the state’s endangered list.” And if people understand the effects of erosion, he says, they may be more likely to avoid doing things that will harm the park.
“Almost every serious accident we have in the park is attributable to people being off the trails,” Miller emphasized. “We haven’t had a fatality here in two years, but we did have someone who fell more than 70 feet last year. They were lucky. They landed in a little splash pool in the bottom of a canyon.”
Miller points to changing patterns in park use as contributing to the trail erosion problem. More and more people are coming to the park to hike, where 20 years ago they were more likely to simply picnic or go fishing. And Starved Rock’s unique layout poses even more problems.
“Most of the studies that have been done nationally show that people only go about a mile away from the main parking lot or visitors center, and that is our most heavily traveled area. But because we’ve got so many outlying parking lots, people can hit every part of the park. All the trails are affected to some degree.”
Hikers can be arrested and fined for venturing off the marked trails, though Miller says those instances are reserved for people who blatant flout the rules.
“Mostly it is people who want to take shortcuts,” he explained. “For instance, if there is a trail above (them), rather than taking the long way around they’ll just cut straight up the hill. Because the soil is so soft and sandy, it only takes a few people doing that to form a little path, and it’s very hard for anything to grow back and hold the soil there once that’s happened.”
Starved Rock State Park opened in 1911 and was one of the first state parks in the Midwest. The bulk of the trails were cleared by hand by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.
The construction of boardwalks continues on the most affected sections of trail, part of a $1.8 million project funded by the state. And as the Northbrook 6th graders wrap up their work and ready their display for the visitors center, it’s obvious a seed of concern has been planted in their minds.
“We’re kind of happy that we will have the display in the visitor center, but you also wonder, `What if no one pays attention to it?’ ” Natalie Richardson speculated. “What if they think, `Oh, they’re just a bunch of 6th graders, what do they know?’ “
