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Roam School Family: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Erika
We're learning our way through America's wild spaces with our two kids, and this podcast is where we tell you the stories that didn't make it onto the visitor center signs. Why that lake is so blue it looks fake? Whose village got destroyed to make this a park? ...and why that matters. The woman who lived in a tree for two years to save it. The bacteria that thrive in boiling water. The 17-year fight to protect one forest. Every episode digs into one park's weird geology, real history, and the people who refused to give up when everyone said these places weren't worth saving. We explain things to kids without dumbing them down, because the kid who's asking "why?" seventeen times is the one who is asking exactly the right questions.New episodes drop when we visit new parks!
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 6 days ago21 min
Crater Lake National Park | How do you save a lake — twice?
This episode explains how Mount Mazama collapsed into the bluest water in the world, and the native origin story of the lake. Then we tell the story of William Gladstone Steel: a fifteen-year-old kid in Kansas who read about a mysterious blue lake on his sandwich wrapper, spent fifteen years just trying to find it, and then spent seventeen more fighting to protect it — a thousand letters, one book mailed to every member of Congress, six dead bills, and finally a president willing to lean on the Speaker of the House. And we ride the trolley along Rim Drive to see what all that stubbornness bought: a lake saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations.Sign the kids' petition to Save the Mazama Newt: https://www.change.org/p/director-nesvik-list-the-mazama-newt-as-endangered-before-it-s-gone/Thanks to Mac Savage (https://www.youtube.com/@MacSavage503/) a documentary filmmaker and his mother Barbara Alatorre who worked for over 40 years, writing stories and preserving the history of the Klamath tribe. We are grateful for their permission to share and amplify this history. You can hear the full oral history in this video: Klamath Tribal History & Legends Part I (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHIYWCxlfMLearn more about the Klamath Tribes — the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin, whose homeland this has always been — at klamathtribes.org.Find every episode, our travel maps, and more at roamschoolfamily.com.
- 2 weeks ago17 min
Lassen Volcanic National Park | How many rules can one park break?
Lassen gets a fraction of the visitors Yosemite does, and we think that's because nobody knows what to make of it. This park is a rule breaker and in this episode we catch it bending five rules of science, one at a time. Keep a tally with us.We explain how all four types of volcano on Earth ended up inside a single park. We stand at a lake that looks like it's boiling but is ice cold, and climb a 300-ton boulder that an avalanche carried five miles. We meet Kendall Bumpass, the cowboy who discovered and lost a leg to the hydrothermal basin that bears his name. We tell the story of Benjamin Loomis, who walked toward an erupting volcano with a box camera, and whose six photographs helped turn Lassen into a national park in 1916.And we end by talking about how life thrives in boiling acid and howNASA scientists (and actual high school students) come to this park to study life's potential in the farthest reaches of our solar system -- Jupiter and Saturn's moons. It's an odd park but we had fun. We hope you'll join us.
- Jun 30, 202616 min
[Detour] The Wave | We won the permit lottery. Now what?
There are 64 permits available per day to get to The Wave. During peak season, 300 people compete for them. We won! …and then we realized we had an 8-year-old who had never hiked 6.5 miles in his life, a 90º & sunny weather forecast, no trail and no shade.This episode explains the geology of The Wave: Jurassic sand dunes, 200 million years old, turned to stone but caught mid-motion. We're guided by Jaron Tylock from Dreamland Safari Tours, who spent years taking people into the desert wilderness. UCLA PhD student Alana Archbold helps explain the stripes and the Moqui Marbles. We stand on actual dinosaur footprints. And we find out why geologists fly to southern Utah to study Mars — and what it means that two worlds billions of miles apart ended up looking remarkably similar.And we talk about what it actually feels like to be one of 64 people allowed into a place on a given day — and whether it lives up to the hype.Keywords: the wave, arizona, vermilion cliffs, coyote buttes, national parks, homeschool, worldschool, geology, desert, hiking, science, family travel, permit lottery
- Jun 12, 202617 min
Redwood National and State Parks | How do the world’s tallest trees hold each other up?
Redwood trees have roots only ten feet deep. For a tree that grows as tall as the statue of liberty, that should be a problem…This episode is about why it isn't.We explain how redwoods manufacture the fog that feeds them, what a banana slug actually does for a forest, and what the Yurok people understood about these trees long before anyone else was paying attention. And we tell the story of four women — Laura Mahan, Lady Bird Johnson, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Amy Cordalis — who have spent the last century making sure these forests survived.
- Apr 27, 202617 min
[Detour] Searching for Black Hole Collisions at the LIGO
This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signal they caught in 2015 had been traveling for 1.3 billion years before anyone caught it. We talk about Einstein getting fact-checked by a journal reviewer, refusing to believe it, and eventually being proven right sixty years after he died. And we look at what's coming next: a detector in space with arms two and a half million kilometers long that might — just might!!!— let us hear the echo of the Big Bang.
- Jan 2, 202615 min
Joshua Tree National Park
Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks.This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent. We meet Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, the wealthy socialite who shipped seven freight cars of desert plants across the country to convince people this place was worth saving. And we talk about what's happening right now: animals so desperate for water they're showing up in people's backyards, and what that means for the future of the desert.
About Roam School Family
We're learning our way through America's wild spaces with our two kids, and this podcast is where we tell you the stories that didn't make it onto the visitor center signs. Why that lake is so blue it looks fake? Whose village got destroyed to make this a park? ...and why that matters. The woman who lived in a tree for two years to save it. The bacteria that thrive in boiling water. The 17-year fight to protect one forest. Every episode digs into one park's weird geology, real history, and the people who refused to give up when everyone said these places weren't worth saving. We explain things to kids without dumbing them down, because the kid who's asking "why?" seventeen times is the one who is asking exactly the right questions.New episodes drop when we visit new parks!
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