Today the river was covered with a blanket of mist- slowly disappearing as the sun peered over the mountains and hills around us to look at it. As we pull out our boats from Pot Point House, Ms. Couch, our teacher, stops to take a picture of us as we start to load our kayaks into the tranquil water.
The kayaks create a ripple, one that stretches far over the Tennessee River Gorge, where we are in the middle of a 9 mile kayak. As I push past the water, I hope that maybe we can all make a ripple, but instead a ripple in people. One that might just stretch a little farther, and a little deeper. We all manage to pull our kayaks together so that we can take a photo with Terry and Bailey, our kayak guides from Outdoor Chattanooga.
As we paddle on, we see a small, green cylinder up ahead, a buoy. I'll have to tell you more about this in person but it brought out the true friends and true river fellows in our group. After the buoy fun, we paddle to the end, but not before seeing a dragonfly larva, and a Kingfisher. The dragonfly larva climbs out of the water to the side of a rock, where it hatches out as a majestic dragonfly and leaves its casing behind. On the other hand, the Kingfisher starts out in a nest above the water, and finds food using shallow dives. This is how it earned it’s name, the Kingfisher.
As we finished up our two day kayak trip, we traveled back to GPS to regroup and meet a TVA Archeologist. This same woman told us about the Atyl-Atyl, a spear type weapon used to kill animals many ages ago.
She explained how Radio Carbon Dating (a way to find out how old an artifact is) worked. She talked about the National Historic Preservation Act, which keeps people from digging in areas without a government permit. The reason why it is so important that these places of artifacts are not touched is because it is almost like a crime scene. When someone is found dead, and a knife is three feet away from them, if someone moves or takes that knife, that could mean the difference between two possible suspects going to jail. It is almost exactly the same in these historical sites, but instead the “crime scene” is 1 million years old. However, when a Native American Indian burial is found, the remains are decided by the tribe as to what to do with the remains, instead of the government, in memoriam and out of respect for their people. This law is called the NACPR law. The challenge for today is to figure out what NACPR stands for, since I didn’t write that in my notes!
The kayaks create a ripple, one that stretches far over the Tennessee River Gorge, where we are in the middle of a 9 mile kayak. As I push past the water, I hope that maybe we can all make a ripple, but instead a ripple in people. One that might just stretch a little farther, and a little deeper. We all manage to pull our kayaks together so that we can take a photo with Terry and Bailey, our kayak guides from Outdoor Chattanooga.
As we paddle on, we see a small, green cylinder up ahead, a buoy. I'll have to tell you more about this in person but it brought out the true friends and true river fellows in our group. After the buoy fun, we paddle to the end, but not before seeing a dragonfly larva, and a Kingfisher. The dragonfly larva climbs out of the water to the side of a rock, where it hatches out as a majestic dragonfly and leaves its casing behind. On the other hand, the Kingfisher starts out in a nest above the water, and finds food using shallow dives. This is how it earned it’s name, the Kingfisher.
As we finished up our two day kayak trip, we traveled back to GPS to regroup and meet a TVA Archeologist. This same woman told us about the Atyl-Atyl, a spear type weapon used to kill animals many ages ago.
She explained how Radio Carbon Dating (a way to find out how old an artifact is) worked. She talked about the National Historic Preservation Act, which keeps people from digging in areas without a government permit. The reason why it is so important that these places of artifacts are not touched is because it is almost like a crime scene. When someone is found dead, and a knife is three feet away from them, if someone moves or takes that knife, that could mean the difference between two possible suspects going to jail. It is almost exactly the same in these historical sites, but instead the “crime scene” is 1 million years old. However, when a Native American Indian burial is found, the remains are decided by the tribe as to what to do with the remains, instead of the government, in memoriam and out of respect for their people. This law is called the NACPR law. The challenge for today is to figure out what NACPR stands for, since I didn’t write that in my notes!
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