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 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, Gay and Lesbian Sierrans, and 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 Backpack Section alone sponsored 55 trips in 2005, with 450 participants, and the Hiking Section's 75 active leaders presented a total of 465 day hikes in the Bay Area. Sierra Singles held around 200 events, and about 200 people came to its annual picnic. The Backcountry Ski Section offers ski trips almost every weekend of the winter to skiers of all levels.

The Charter Bus trips reported increased attendance for its three trips in 2005, and plans three more in 2006, probably two to the Monterey area and one to the north (see future Yodelers). Trip organizer Myra Forsythe thanks participants for helping to publicize the trips to allow more people without cars to visit California's beautiful places and give an opportunity, especially for the less physically active among us, to get out into the natural world.

This year the Solo Sierrans (our activity section targeted to older singles) celebrated the 90th birthday of two of its members and regular hikers; one of them, Sol, still leads hikes. The section also sponsors potlucks and cultural events such as an annual art and garden party and theater parties.

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.

A very special activity section is the Chapter's Inner City Outings program, which offers outdoor trips for people, mostly youth, who would otherwise lack such opportunities. ICO's more than 150 volunteers had another year of impressive accomplishments. The Backpacking and Rafting volunteers completed 90 safe, fun, and educational outings with more than 1,400 urban underprivileged youth and adults. ICO also ran three leadership-training programs and certified eight new trip leaders. Last year's highlights included a six-day rafting expedition on the Middle Fork of Idaho's Salmon River and backpacking trips to some of California's most beautiful places.

New ICO Backpacking chair Craig Gordon echoed the sentiments of many ICO volunteers when he said, "The thing about ICO that got to me right away was that I could be a positive part of these young kids' experience in nature. And they have become a positive part of mine! In the end, I only hope they learn a little about how they relate to the larger world, and have some fun along the way, too." Two of our most dedicated leaders were recognized for their accomplishments. The national Sierra Club awarded its 2005 Oliver Kehrlein Award for outings leadership to Patrick Colgan, an ICO co-founder and still a leader after 30-plus years, while Jon Wurl received the national ICO Regional Service Award.

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. The Delta Group holds 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. The Marin Group sponsors two work weekends each year to help with maintenance work at the Club's Clair Tappaan Lodge at Norden in the Sierra.

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. This year the Chapter Activities Committee presented the annual Dave and Pat Michener Award for outstanding outings leadership to Jack Sudall, honoring his more than 50 years of leadership and work in organizing the East Bay Dinners. The section also honored Karen Anderson and Bill Loughman for their five years of service as program coordinators for the series.

Such awards recognize just a sampling of the Chapter's outstanding activity leaders.

Education

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.

For example, each spring the Mount Diablo Group sponsors an annual series of hikes for beginning hikers.

The Backpack Section since 2002 has sponsored an annual beginning backpacker course, with an average of 40 participants. Each year around 10 of these become regular participants on the section's trips, and five graduates have become new leader candidates. In 2005 the section approved three highly qualified candidates as new leaders.

In 2005 the Snow Camping Section's annual training series introduced 85 participants to the skills of winter camping. More than 60 volunteers helped lead the course's 12 snow-camping trips.

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. All outing leaders are required to have first-aid training appropriate to the type of outing they lead. In 2005 the Chapter introduced a new optional second day of the training to offer more advanced skills and more intensive hands-on practice.

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. The Wilderness Committee, for example, hosted slide presentations at its meetings about the Arctic, Nevada wilderness, and Cache Creek, and co-sponsored "California Wild" slide shows by photographer Tim Palmer. The Energy Committee put on its annual session on solar power. Group events included talks on the Iron Horse Trail (Mount Diablo Group) and global warming (Tri-Valley Group); a session with Jim Motovalli, a co-editor of Green Living - the E Magazine Handbook for Living Lightly on the Earth (San Francisco Group); and "What's Ahead for East Contra Costa in 2005?" (Delta Group). The Chapter, and especially the San Francisco Group, also helped put on several events for World Environment Day in San Francisco. In connection with the event the Group helped publish "Nature in the City", a beautiful full-color map and guide to the city's natural areas.

This summer the Chapter launched our first official Volunteer Training Series for members who want to become more involved and more effective at working on conservation issues. We held three introductory trainings and one advanced session, training about 50 people, who seemed very pleased with the skills they gained and left the trainings feeling more prepared and more inspired to make an impact on our community. Many of these volunteers went out and collected letters, made phone calls, turned out to hearings, and have made a critical difference in our campaigns this fall. Stay tuned for our 2006 Training Series in the spring! If there are particular skills you'd like us to focus on, now is the time to give input, by contacting Cathleen Sullivan at cathleen-at-sfbaysc.org or (510) 848-0800, ext. 316.

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.

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, and Sierra Club events and activities, in 2005 we did special sections on creeks, rivers, and watersheds; energy; becoming an effective volunteer; Bay Area shorelines; solid waste; and winter outdoors. The September- October issue included an unprecedented two-page color map of the Bay Area's shorelines, prepared by mapmaker Ben Pease. Readers may notice that the Yodeler is making increasing use of color for its front pages and centerfolds.

The Yodeler included post-card inserts (sometimes only to portions of the Chapter) on key elections, Tomales Dunes, and promoting livable, walkable areas around transit centers. The thousands of members who return these post cards convey a powerful message to our officials. Copies of this Yodeler going to several portions of the Chapter have enclosed post cards related to important local issues; if you live in one of these areas, please send your card in.

One of the most popular Yodelers each year is the issue where we publish the winners of our annual Photo Contest. The volunteer Photo Contest Committee also arranged for a public exhibit of the winners in the exhibit space at EBMUD Headquarters in Oakland and prepared a display for the nationwide Sierra Summit in San Francisco in September.

This year Sierra Club California presented its Mary Ferguson Award (for a staffperson who has served the Club in California) to Yodeler editor Don Forman.

Donald Forman