Hurley, Purdue students learn about natural resource careers

By RICHARD JENKINS

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IRON BELT - A group of students from the Hurley K-12 School and Purdue University's Forestry and Natural Resources program got a chance to go out into the woods Monday and see firsthand some of the real world opportunities natural resource careers provide.

"What we're doing is, we're trying to expose both the Hurley kids and the Purdue students to natural resource (opportunities) - to diversify their experiences," said Zach Wilson, a conservation specialist with the Iron County Land and Water Conservation Department.

The field trip has been part of an ongoing relationship between Iron County and the university which first began when Wilson began working with Casey Day, a graduate research assistant who was doing research on Iron County's American marten population.

Wilson said Day was working to examine the animals' DNA in an attempt to determine where they came from.

Monday's tour began with the Purdue students visiting Saxon Harbor before joining the Hurley students and traveling to two timber sales on Island Lake Road in the town of Knight.

There they met Iron County Forester Eric Peterson, who talked about the county forest and explained some of the criteria the forestry employees are looking for when marking a sale for logging.

The group travelled to a second sale, which was being actively logged, to see that part of the process.

In the afternoon, the group visited an area that had been used in the county's marten study.

For Wilson, the day is part of the larger mission he is trying to accomplish by working with the local students.

"One of the things the whole program has always tried to do is get people to have careers where they move back here and live, because we're losing our youth. This is just one way to do that," Wilson said.

For the Purdue students, the day was not only a chance to get out into the field but also to see a very different habitat than the region around the university in Indiana.

"I'm more of a cold person myself, so I'm feeling a lot more at home up here than I do further south," joked fisheries major Daniel Snyder.

While he may be majoring in fisheries, Snyder is trying to gain experience in all the various subfields of natural resource management.

"I feel like you need to have an admiration and understanding for all the resources to be able to not only manage them, but to explain and educate the public on why you need to manage them," Snyder said.

Given that him and the other college students are a few steps farther down the career path than the Hurley kids, Snyder said he hopes the interaction between the two groups sparks an interest in the field with some of the younger students.

"Originally I didn't start out as a natural resources major, I was an art major at first. But I have always had that interest in the natural resource area and I kind of got pushed in this direction and switched over," he said.

While there aren't any future interactions planned between the two groups, Wilson said he hopes this isn't the end of the partnership.

"This is all new for us," he said. "This is our first time connecting like this, so hopefully it grows in the future."