Outings, education, communications: how the Bay Chapter reaches out - to members, to the world

The key to all the Bay Chapter's successes is the involvement of our members and concerned individuals throughout the Bay Area. We reach out in many ways to bring people in, educate them, and motivate them to action.

The Sierra Club has a unique tradition, reaching back over a century to our founding, of bringing people on outings to experience wild places. Nowadays the Bay Chapter sponsors hundreds of hikes, backpacks, snow camps, ski trips, car camps, river trips, and other outings each year, to virtually all the natural places of the Bay Area (and sometimes beyond). Our Hiking Section sponsors the largest number of day hikes, and many more are sponsored by Sierra Singles, Solo Sierrans, and Gay and Lesbian Sierrans, and by the Mount Diablo, Marin, and Delta Groups. Our Backpack, Car Camping, Snow Camping, and Ski Touring Sections, and the San Francisco Group's Charter Bus Section, take participants beyond the Bay Area to the mountains, coastline, and other wild places of California.

The Hiking Section's 62 volunteer leaders presented a total of 494 day hikes in the Bay Area (up from 465 the year before). The Backcountry Ski Section offered 25 trips last season, with 135 participants and a perfect safety record. The River Touring Section's big annual event is its Kayak and Canoe Downriver and Slalom races, held each May at the Cache Creek Yolo County Campground. This year 30 slalom racers participated.

About 30 active Backpack Section leaders, sharing a half millennium of collective experience, provided 50 separate mountain adventures for 535 participants during 2006, ranging from simple overnight jaunts suitable for beginners to extended wilderness tarriances for those seeking more than a brief dalliance with nature. Choices blanketed all seasons, commencing with the idyllic Dewey Point snow-camping adventure in winter, where rays of setting sun danced on icicles reflecting vistas of Half Dome, El Capitan, and the Clark Range, through a series of glorious kaleidoscopic spring visions of California's Lost Coast, moving into summer's Range of Light, closing with autumn in the Ventana Wilderness redolent with the smell of willows kissed by frost and the crunch of fresh-fallen leaves tossed by supple oaks, madrone, buckeye, and maples teasing approaching winter.

Sierra Singles' 30 active leaders offered over 200 day events, ranging from the Pinnacles to Tomales Bay to Mount Diablo, and 12 overnights to the Sierra in both summer and winter. Gay and Lesbian Sierrans, with 27 active hike leaders, celebrated its 20th-anniversary year with over 80 hikes, two large group camping trips, and two do-your-own-thing weekend getaways.

The Solo Sierrans (our activity section targeted to middle-aged singles) sponsored a variety of outdoor events such as hikes, monthly bike rides, and car-camping, as well as cultural events including its annual art and garden party, lectures, and theater parties. Events also included ballroom dancing, game nights, slide shows, and movie events. In 2007 Solos plans more of the above, plus even more parties, ferry rides, weekend trips, and other fun activities.

Sierra Couples, consisting of both married and unmarried couples, with and without kids, does a couple of activities (because once is never enough) in just about every category and then some. Every year it does a couple of hikes, a couple of car camps, a couple of barbecues, a couple of potluck dinners, a couple of parties, and a couple of boat trips in the Delta, plus a couple more things. If you're coupled up and you're into doubling your pleasure and fun, Sierra Couples probably has a couple of activities to your liking.

We also offer indoor ways for people to be inspired by the beauties of nature. Our East Bay and San Francisco Dinners offer regular slide presentations, usually about travel to wild and beautiful parts of the world, sometimes about environmental concerns. Many of our regional groups offer similar programs at their meetings.

The East Bay Dinners began in 1948 (yes, 1-9-4-8) under the guidance of Jack Sudall, who is still - 520 meetings later - an active powerhouse in running these meetings today - 58 years later! Look for him at the front desk at every single meeting. The first meetings were held in the long-gone True Blue Cafeteria on Center Street in Berkeley and were social get-togethers to talk about the Club and people's adventures in the wilderness. Building over the years, little by little, from conversations to the graphic arts, the dinners developed into visual presentations (photographs, then slides, and now digital performances) that have been focused on two facets of our world: the beauty, richness, and excitement of the natural world, and on what needs to be done to protect it. Today the meetings are held at the famous, congenial, and comfortable Berkeley Yacht Club and include a social hour, a delicious dinner, and a fascinating program. They take place from September through May, except for December, ordinarily on the fourth Thursday of the month. Attend, and you will be treated to some of the best teaching and entertaining in the Bay Area. See each Yodeler in the Events and Activities section for details.

This year the Chapter Activities Committee presented the annual Dave and Pat Michener Award for outstanding outings leadership to backpack and car-camp leaders Brad and Katy Christie. Such awards recognize just a sampling of the Chapter's outstanding activity leaders.

The best way to learn about the Chapter's outings and events is to come to one. Whatever your level of ability and experience, there's one for you, and probably not far from where you live. For information on all these possibilities see the "Events and Activities" centerfold section in each Yodeler or the calendar on our Chapter web site.

Not just recreation - but helping make the world better

A primary reason for all of the Chapter's recreational activities programs is to help educate participants about nature, and a number of them go beyond recreation by direct work to make the world a better place.

Our Inner City Outings program partners with community agencies to offer camping, hiking, rafting, and other outdoor activities to youth who might not otherwise have these opportunities. The ICO mission focuses on promoting appreciation and protection of the natural environment by engaging youth with the wilderness, thus fostering the next generation of leaders and environmentalists. ICO was founded in San Francisco, and our Chapter's is still one of the most active ICO sections in the nation.

This year our Chapter's more than 150 enthusiastic ICO volunteers, in both Backpacking and Rafting, completed many dozens of fun, educational, and inspiring outings with well over 1,000 urban underprivileged youth and adults. ICO also continued to recruit new volunteers and new leaders to expand its reach within the community. This past year's trips visited favorite local spots as well as locations throughout California.

Some of the Chapter's most important outings are our service outings. Gay and Lesbian Sierrans joins with Friends of Corona Heights Habitat Restoration for a monthly work party at one of San Francisco's prime areas of native habitat. This past year the San Francisco Group began co-sponsoring a monthly (first Saturday) habitat-restoration party on Mount Davidson. Since 1989 the Delta Group has held regular clean-ups at its adopted park in Antioch, Contra Loma Regional Park, including both the three-mile reservoir shoreline and the one-mile park entrance road (added in 1992).

Since around 1980 the Marin Group has sponsored two or three work weekends each year to help with maintenance at the Club's Clair Tappaan Lodge at Norden in the Sierra, and celebrated Public Lands Day with a habitat-restoration day at Point Reyes National Seashore. Sierra Singles too held three clean-up/maintenance activities in the North Bay and the Sierra.

A number of our activity sections also contribute funds to support other organizations' efforts. For example, the Backcountry Ski Section made donations to the Snowlands Network, an organization promoting opportunities for quality human-powered winter recreation and protecting winter wildlands, and to the Sugar Pine Point State Park Olympic Heritage Project. This park is commemorating the 1960 Olympics, held here in the Sierra Nevada, by revitalizing some of the crosscountry trails used during the international event. Gay and Lesbian Sierrans has contributed funds to the Corona Heights habitat-restoration project, the ongoing care of the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, and the Michelle Mazzei Fund for Environmental Education. Several activity sections have contributed funds to the Bay Chapter's conservation efforts.

Education for the outdoors

A key component of the Chapter's outings program is education. On all of our outings, leaders pay special attention to the needs of less-experienced and less-skilled participants. We believe too that bringing people to the wild places of the earth is the best way to educate them about how these places can offer us refuge from the stresses of everyday life and why it is important to protect these places. Beyond that, many sections hold formal training series on basic outdoor and backcountry skills.

The Backpack Section since 2002 has sponsored an annual beginning backpacker course, with 45 participants in 2006. The section this year had three new leader trainees.

In 2006 the Snow Camping Section introducted 75 new participants to the skills of winter camping through its annual Training Series and set up a new program of Alumni Trips for graduates who want to continue to practice their skills and enjoy the snow (to sign up for the 2007 series or trips, see article, page I). None of this could have taken place without the active involvement of more than 60 volunteers who do everything from setting up the big training meeting to taking care of the group's equipment and, of course, leading trips. The Training Series included 10 trips, and the Alumni Trips had 41 participants on its five trips. In addition, snowcamping talks and slideshows were given at six local REI stores.

The Backcountry Ski Section provides Sierra Club members with very popular Navigation and Avalanche Workshops.

The Chapter offers regular Basic Wilderness First Aid classes - for Chapter outing leaders as well as for members at large, and co-sponsors twice-yearly Wilderness First Responder courses. All outing leaders are required to have first-aid training appropriate to the type of outing they lead.

Conservation education

Our conservation subcommittees also sponsor visits to locations of environmental concern. This year the Energy Committee again co-sponsored a tour of solar homes.

The conservation subcommittees and regional groups also sponsor educational events about conservation concerns. The Wilderness Committee, for example, hosted a slide presentation about the Arctic and a day-long workshop on "Clearcutting and the Homebuilding Industry". The Energy Committee put on its annual session on solar power.

The Northern Alameda Group in May held a daylong forum on air quality in West Oakland. The event was aimed at educating the public to help generate momentum for changes that will reduce air emissions in this highly polluted area. The Group also hosted a presentation on "Healthy Development: New Tools for Interdisciplinary Environmental Planning".

The San Francisco Group hosted "Communities at the Crossroads: New Opportunities in a Green Economy" and a native-plant tour, as well as co-hosting "San Francisco Goes Solar (and Marin and the East Bay can be next) - an Evening with Adam Werbach". The Marin Group hosted programs on creek protection and restoration, SMART (the proposed Sonoma-Marin rail transit line and bike/pedestrian path), and "Sustainable Energy from Landfills", as well as two events on the Countywide Plan and its annual awards banquet honoring Marin environmental leaders. Other group events included presentations on Richmond shoreline issues (West Contra Costa Group) and "California's Water System and Our Delta in Crisis" (Delta Group).

We often have information tables at various fairs, Earth Day events, and other occasions throughout the Bay Area. For example, the Delta Group had a display and information table about the Club at three events last spring: the East County Watershed Symposium in Pittsburg, the John Muir Earth Day Festival in Martinez, and the Community Environmental Faire in Pittsburg. Gay and Lesbian Sierrans brought the Sierra Club message to the Pride festival and the Castro Street Fair.

The Yodeler

The Yodeler has been the Chapter's primary form of outreach to members and to the public since 1938. In addition to our regular coverage of Bay Area environmental news, elections (in this busy year three of our six issues focused on elections), and Sierra Club events and activities, in 2006 we did special sections on becoming an effective volunteer, communities stopping sprawl, healthy cities, and winter outdoors.

The Yodeler included post-card inserts (sometimes only to portions of the Chapter) on the Albany shoreline, Breuner Marsh, the Marin Countywide Plan, protecting Berkeley's creeks, the Oakland waterfront, and transportation choices for Berkeley. The thousands of members who return these post cards convey a powerful message to our officials. When you receive such an insert (none in this issue, however), please send your card in.

Donald Forman