My Digital Journey
This Journey is based off of the two books, Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Wild by Cheryl Strayed, all about journeys you can take through Nature and how a natural setting effects a person. Let's see how this journey effects me. To view the journey I took, click the button below...
For this project we are required to pick a place to "run" and then show our path using the program Google Earth. Be prepared for pictures and lots of tiring "my feet hurt" related posts.
Think about creating your own path on Google Earth. What characteristics do you think your path should contain?
I really want a view. Like a good view where you can see all kinds of different regions in one photo. One where you can't tell where the end is. Those are the coolest and always end up being the best photos. I also want multiple perspectives to show how far I've gone. This is me at the beginning look at how low/high I am and this is me at the end look at how far I've walked. I just want to feel like I've walked everywhere in one day: I want to walk along the beach, trek through dessert, scope mountain sides and peer over the giant drop of a mountain side. That's why I think the walk from La Jolla Shores up to Mount Soladad Cross is perfect because it hits all of those markers.
Think about where you would like to map your own journey. What are some highlights along your journey that you want other people to see? What about these locations are significant?
Well, I want the start when we're at the beach and then I want to show where we are going to hike so kind of a birds eye of view look up at Mount Soladad. Then I want little photos of where we're going, such as a view of La Jolla Village Drive, the trails we're going to hike up, and then, of course, the final "we made it photo" showing where we are and the tiny view of where we started out. The significance varies. The first and last photos are to show the length of our journey, where the pictures in between are to "bring" our audience on our adventure with us.
What would you add to this project to make it more of a personal journey?
I really want to do a time laps. It would be so long and probably waste a ton of batteries but in the end it would look amazing. I also want to add in some extra pictures just to show like, "oh we went to this really cool place" or "we found out that this restaurant was here" or even, "look this rock looks like my face" type of deal. Just to show things that we enjoy and be able to share them with everyone else. I also feel like a killer soundtrack would be just as cool to add to the time laps and would make a certain teacher very excited to watch our video.
I really want a view. Like a good view where you can see all kinds of different regions in one photo. One where you can't tell where the end is. Those are the coolest and always end up being the best photos. I also want multiple perspectives to show how far I've gone. This is me at the beginning look at how low/high I am and this is me at the end look at how far I've walked. I just want to feel like I've walked everywhere in one day: I want to walk along the beach, trek through dessert, scope mountain sides and peer over the giant drop of a mountain side. That's why I think the walk from La Jolla Shores up to Mount Soladad Cross is perfect because it hits all of those markers.
Think about where you would like to map your own journey. What are some highlights along your journey that you want other people to see? What about these locations are significant?
Well, I want the start when we're at the beach and then I want to show where we are going to hike so kind of a birds eye of view look up at Mount Soladad. Then I want little photos of where we're going, such as a view of La Jolla Village Drive, the trails we're going to hike up, and then, of course, the final "we made it photo" showing where we are and the tiny view of where we started out. The significance varies. The first and last photos are to show the length of our journey, where the pictures in between are to "bring" our audience on our adventure with us.
What would you add to this project to make it more of a personal journey?
I really want to do a time laps. It would be so long and probably waste a ton of batteries but in the end it would look amazing. I also want to add in some extra pictures just to show like, "oh we went to this really cool place" or "we found out that this restaurant was here" or even, "look this rock looks like my face" type of deal. Just to show things that we enjoy and be able to share them with everyone else. I also feel like a killer soundtrack would be just as cool to add to the time laps and would make a certain teacher very excited to watch our video.
My Digital Journey: Camping Addition
For my next journey, the Will Raschke - Eli Cameron half of the 11th grade went camping in William Heise County Park where we could study nature and the effect it takes on people first hand. What you see below is not a path that my group and I took together, but the places around the park that had the most meaning and emotional effect. You will see our campsite where we took multiple tents and attached them in such away that it was deemed "tent city". You will see our bathrooms, far from our camp and scary in the dark. There is also Glenn's view, a long hike up the side of a mountain with a beautiful panoramic view at the top, the small town of Julian where many people hiked six miles to go get pie from our campsite, and then a hike called Desert Trail. All our "special spots" are marked with different descriptions of plants that we found on the trip and studied. Enjoy...
Ethnobotany
Here we are, one week from our camping trip and the collective excitement of everyone is overwhelming. We finally got into groups that determine what we are going to study during our trip. For example, my group, Monica, Mabel, Mahli, Nairobi and I are all studying ethnobotany which is all about plants and their medicinal purposes. To view our next Digital Journey and where we discovered these plants, click the button below...
Snapshot Narrative
During the Camping trip, we were required to write 1 annotation per day for three days based off of different prompts of your choice and then choose your favorite when you got home. For my prompt I chose to go out and describe in detail my surroundings. Click on the button or read below to see the result
My Head Hurts
Elevation hurts my head. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,... “Did you drink enough water?” Well hear me out when I say that I have drank so much water over the past three days that I’m surprised I’m not drowning in it. It really hurts when I’m changing elevation. That’s when my head pangs with each step and my heart beats so fast it seems to leap up into my temple and pound on the sides of my skull, boom, BOOM! Boom, BOOM!
I’ve have never panted so much in my life. I’m a swimmer, see, and breathing is something I don’t normally fret upon but even the small hill that lays behind me, the one that takes us to our campsite, seems to squish my lungs and compress them into dust. I have to remind myself how to inhale or else I flounder, a fish on dry land, searching desperately for the oxygen I lack.
And yet, despite the thin air and the headaches and the nausea that accompanies them, I can’t help but to appreciate the beauty of this place. Let me show you...
I sit on a rock in a small clearing beneath our campsite hill. There is a trail on my left, and baby pines on my right, and everything around me, trees, rocks, dirt, even the air seems to glitter with thick dew and rain from the night before. The wind blows cold and noisy, and through the patches of my trees, I see the breeze force away the cloudy sky, fast like a timelapse video. The dew falls in marble sized drops from the leafy tree tops and sometimes, when the wind’s ferocity is too great, the rattling branches release a small drizzle, making me crouch over my journal to keep it dry.
But what really brought me here, to this teeth chattering sanctum not so far from camp, was a tree. It’s a large tree, much taller than my house and covered in green leaves and moss. It’s quite a vibrant sight. However, at its base, it is blackened to charcoal. There is a large doorway that leads you inside the tree, like the hut of a forest hermit or something of the sort. Around it, the tree is living, breathing, thriving on the life it was given. But inside, I can only see an ugly black, not the glowing obsidian everyone admires.
Did you know, that the worst kind of forest fire is not one that you can see, but the one that travels inside the trees itself? The heat of the flames, visibly attacking one tree, can travel down through its roots and up into the trunk of another tree, eating it from the inside out and killing much of the forest life. Worst part is, is that it’s very hard to detect, so if someone comes by and say, oh I don’t know, leans against said tree in pursuit of rest, they’ll get a pretty big surprise when the weakened trunk snaps under their weight.
But this tree doesn’t look like it’s going to snap. In fact, it looks happy and alive. A woodpecker has just come to peck at it’s branches. The quick tap, tap, tap of its beak is so fast, he looks like a blur. He concludes my story. Life goes on, like the woodpecker, like this tree, and like me when I go back home and my head stops hurting and there’s enough oxygen in the air that I can sleep with a blanket over my face. But, I know, I’m going to miss it here. Even though I am in desperate need of a shower. So goodbye tree! You keep on living, and I will too, and everything will be alright.
I’ve have never panted so much in my life. I’m a swimmer, see, and breathing is something I don’t normally fret upon but even the small hill that lays behind me, the one that takes us to our campsite, seems to squish my lungs and compress them into dust. I have to remind myself how to inhale or else I flounder, a fish on dry land, searching desperately for the oxygen I lack.
And yet, despite the thin air and the headaches and the nausea that accompanies them, I can’t help but to appreciate the beauty of this place. Let me show you...
I sit on a rock in a small clearing beneath our campsite hill. There is a trail on my left, and baby pines on my right, and everything around me, trees, rocks, dirt, even the air seems to glitter with thick dew and rain from the night before. The wind blows cold and noisy, and through the patches of my trees, I see the breeze force away the cloudy sky, fast like a timelapse video. The dew falls in marble sized drops from the leafy tree tops and sometimes, when the wind’s ferocity is too great, the rattling branches release a small drizzle, making me crouch over my journal to keep it dry.
But what really brought me here, to this teeth chattering sanctum not so far from camp, was a tree. It’s a large tree, much taller than my house and covered in green leaves and moss. It’s quite a vibrant sight. However, at its base, it is blackened to charcoal. There is a large doorway that leads you inside the tree, like the hut of a forest hermit or something of the sort. Around it, the tree is living, breathing, thriving on the life it was given. But inside, I can only see an ugly black, not the glowing obsidian everyone admires.
Did you know, that the worst kind of forest fire is not one that you can see, but the one that travels inside the trees itself? The heat of the flames, visibly attacking one tree, can travel down through its roots and up into the trunk of another tree, eating it from the inside out and killing much of the forest life. Worst part is, is that it’s very hard to detect, so if someone comes by and say, oh I don’t know, leans against said tree in pursuit of rest, they’ll get a pretty big surprise when the weakened trunk snaps under their weight.
But this tree doesn’t look like it’s going to snap. In fact, it looks happy and alive. A woodpecker has just come to peck at it’s branches. The quick tap, tap, tap of its beak is so fast, he looks like a blur. He concludes my story. Life goes on, like the woodpecker, like this tree, and like me when I go back home and my head stops hurting and there’s enough oxygen in the air that I can sleep with a blanket over my face. But, I know, I’m going to miss it here. Even though I am in desperate need of a shower. So goodbye tree! You keep on living, and I will too, and everything will be alright.