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Jan. 26, 2012 – Creek Camp, a residential environmental science camp for students entering 10th or 11th grade, will take place this summer at Allegheny College. Campers can choose from two nearly identical sessions on June 24-29 or July 8-13.

Now in its seventh year, Creek Camp is hosted by Creek Connections, a watershed education outreach program of Allegheny College.

Most activities take place in and around the waterways of French Creek, the most biodiverse stream in Pennsylvania. Campers in the camp for rising 10th and 11th graders perform water chemistry tests, collect aquatic macroinvertebrates, canoe French Creek, snorkel for freshwater mussels and search for reptiles and amphibians in and around the water.

“A typical day at Creek Camp is far from typical,” said Laura Branby, Creek Connections field educator. “And with such a small group, there are rarely more than one or two students from any one high school. Teens from Costa Rica often attend one of the camps and last year’s campers came from Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Ohio and New Jersey.”

Each session is limited to 12 campers, who arrive on Sunday afternoon. Throughout the week, they participate in on- and off-campus activities, including a student-designed research project and visits to numerous locations in the French Creek watershed.

By the end of camp, students are very familiar with the flora and fauna of French Creek. “They’ve been wet, they’ve been dirty, and they wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Branby.

Creek Camp for 10th and 11th graders concludes with a luncheon for campers and their parents, including the campers’ presentation of their research project and other aspects of the week’s activities.

In addition to the traditional camp, Creek Connections is introducing a Family Creek Camp, July 15-19, to its schedule this year. Families will live in dorms on campus while exploring the biodiversity of northwestern Pennsylvania streams. Individual adults are invited to attend in addition to families, which could be parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren and even groups of friends.

All activities in Creek Camp and Family Creek Camp are hands-on and led by Allegheny College faculty, students and staff as well as environmental professionals.

Online registration for Creek Camp and Family Creek Camp is available. The site also includes blogs written by past campers, photos and the counselors’ end-of-camp presentation.

For more information, contact Laura Branby at 724-822-3290.

About Creek Connections
A watershed education outreach program of Allegheny College, Creek Connections works with K-12 students throughout the school year to help them understand the importance of healthy waterways in their community—local, nationwide and global. Their community’s “backyard” waterways are the laboratories where the students perform chemical tests of the creek, search for aquatic macroinvertebrates and understand the many connections between their actions and the waterway’s health, between their waterway and the many rivers and lakes in the area, and between the health of the waterway and their own health. Creek Camp started as a natural extension of Creek Connections’ school year program. It is an in-depth, up-close, hands-on experience for high school students to study an exceptional waterway and to meet representatives of a variety of environmental-related career fields.