Sally Jewell hopes to change lives by bringing children to National Parks

WHITEWATER >>A group of about 25 mostly environmentalists and high-level public lands managers bolted into the new Sand to Snow National Monument one afteoon last week.

Setting a blistering pace was Sally Jewell, the 51st Secretary of the Interior, who at 5 a.m. that moing had been hiking with Native Americans in Montana, not far from the Canadian border.

An avid outdoorswoman, Jewell has climbed Washington’s 14,410-foot Mount Rainier seven times and Antarctica’s highest mountain.

After graduating with a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Washington in the late 1970s, Jewel said she put “15,000 miles on her Fiat and saw National Parks and public lands across the United States and Canada.”

“I think it’s important to experience our public lands,” Jewell said in an interview before the hike.

The former CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc., known better as REI, was in Southe Califoia last week for a celebration of three new national monuments, totaling nearly 2 million acres, which were approved by President Obama in February.

Jewell believes that outdoor experiences are part of the DNA of humans and is conceed that today’s children are not getting out into the wildland frontiers of America.

That’s why she believes the Obama administration’s “Every Kid in a Park” initiative is so important.

Launched in September 2015, the Department of Interior program provides all fourth-grade students and their families with free admissions to National Parks and other federal lands and waters for a year.

Jewell spoke about the sedentary, urban lifestyle of young people in America after she negotiated a log bridge over the rapidly flowing Whitewater River and nimbly danced around numerous rock obstacles.

The trail Jewell and the other 24 briskly walked on goes from the Wildlands Conservancy’s Whitewater Preserve to Mission Creek Preserve.

Both properties are privately owned but fall within the Sand to Snow National Monument boundary line, which extends to the 11,500-foot Mt. San Gorgonio on the west to the Sonoron Desert to the east.

Most of the distance traveled on this hike, however, was on federal lands which recently won heightened protections when Obama used his powers under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to get National Monument Legislation. The Mojave Trails and Castle Mountains national monuments were also created at the same time.

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Jewell said she believes the “Every Kid in a Park” program will help tu the tide for decreasing the amount of time children are spending in front of video display screens.

Citing a Kaiser Family Foundation study, Jewell said that young people are spending more than seven hours a day using electronic media.

But it’s not just the inactive kids she’s worried about.

It’s also those who are spending virtually no time at all in unstructured outside play. Many are locked in intense sports training schedules that span the year.

“They are not finding their natural curiosity, seeing the shapes in clouds” or seeing a stick tu into a familiar object, she said.

While the program won’t convert all to career wildlife and nature advocates, it will help them “love or at least value the outdoors and what is at stake,” Jewell said.

She hopes it will help create the next generation of environmental leaders.

After leaving Washington life, Jewell said she plans to take off again and go on “a long, slow road trip and enjoy public lands and spend quality time in a place that fills my soul.”

With just eight and a half months left in her term, Jewell said, “I’m feeling the pressure of time” to accomplish what is left to do.

For more information about the “Every Kid in a Park” initiative go to: everykidinapark.gov