A suspicious person might have figured Tom Keck set it all up.
There he was on Rapid City School District property across the street from Stevens High School, talking about engaging youth in the outdoors, when — voila! — youth showed up.
A string of children following the squeals of their own delight wandered up a grassy slope in fits and starts toward us from the scant trail winding through a tree grove below. They were followed closely by a watchful-but-patient young woman acting as a trail guide.
“We’re from the childcare across the street,” she said when the group arrived at the partially reconstructed stretch of trail where Keck and I stood talking. “We come over for a hike pretty much every day.”
Keck smiled at that and glanced at me. And we both smiled as we watched the children and their guide continue on their way back in the general direction of the daycare, at an unhurried pace appropriate for children.
And for the place, too. Not rushing helps you appreciate it.
Shortly after the kids left, Keck was explaining the outdoor-recreation, outdoor-education values and potential of the school property, when a woman from a nearby neighborhood walked past with a pair of aloof Weimaraners and offered effusive praise for the property.
“This is amazing, for the school and the neighborhood,” she called out. “I love this place.”
Probably not quite as much as Keck does, however. But then, she doesn’t have quite as much invested in the place.
Falling in love with the land
The 58-year-old Rapid City native and retired math teacher got to know the 38 acres of hills and dry creek beds and trees and grasses, which border the more developed football practice fields, pretty well during his time as a student at Stevens and later during 22 years teaching math there.
And he has come to know the place even better since that day in August of 2016 when one of his high-achieving former students died.
Tom Pfeifle was a renaissance teenager with talents expressed throughout his high-school years in running, music, academics, theater and outdoor recreation. The Rapid City native and Stevens graduate was on summer break from Pacific Lutheran University in Parkland, Wash., four years ago when he suffered a severe head injury in a fall during his descent from 12,807-foot Granite Peak in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana.
Pfeifle died on Aug. 29, 2016. He was 19. And he was not to be forgotten.
Friends and family and fundraisers like the Tom Pfeifle Memorial 5k Run/Walk see to that. So do the Tom Pfeifle Trails at Raider Park, where Keck was busy overseeing heavy machinery grinding out a trail upgrade earlier in the week.
Visitors to Raider Park get a glimpse of Pfeifle’s life through an interpretive sign at the main entrance off the parking lot. They can also get a glimpse of Pfeifle’s outdoor love on the land itself.
The trails have been in use for a couple of years, for running, hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing and simply strolling across a patch of country tucked nicely inside the city.
“There are people out here all the time already — biking, hiking and, as you know, doing some cross-country skiing in the winter,” Keck said.
From “ankle buster” to outdoor education center
But there’s more coming, in people and improvements. The current upgrade of the trail system is part of a long-range plan that includes cross-country meets, outdoor classrooms and restoration of native prairie.
“The cross-country runners have been using this (to train) out here forever,” said Keck, who coordinates improvement efforts at the park with former Stevens math teacher Seth Keene. “But it was really kind of an ankle buster.”
Improvements in the trail with the help of a grader took out ruts that were a couple of feet deep in some places. And now the mix of earth and mulch will help provide a cushioned base for runner and hikers.
“I can’t wait to run on it,” Keck said. “We want to get it to where we could have cross-country meets here, and maybe a state meet.”
The potential cross-country routes all include some hills. That’s the nature of the property. Keck loves the idea of designing the course to fit the terrain and thinks that will make for more interesting races. He knows that some runners might prefer a flat, golf-course type race but believes the undulating course will be popular with most.
Concrete chunks left on the property from previous deconstruction nearby are being buried and the surface will be re-contoured and restored. Keck wants to remove invasive Chinese Elm and Russian olive trees and focus on native tree species along with native grasses and flowers.
It’s the perfect place for school outings and beyond-the-classroom study of environmental conservation, biology, wildlife, botany and agriculture. But Keck thinks teaching subjects that aren’t directly outdoors related will work well on the land, too.
And musical events, plays and other seemingly indoor events could come outdoors, in the right situations and settings, he said. He and Keene intend to look for grants to help with some of that work.
Considering the value of outdoor space, and the future
“I’m so interested in this. I just want to see it done right,” Keck said. “I think we could see it tied in somehow to every single classroom. I’ll be out here hiking and looking around and wondering ‘What will work?’”
The potential for learning experiences in the outdoors is boundless, especially perhaps, during a time of COVID-19. Social distancing in the great outdoors makes sense in terms of both education and good health. So, Raider Park and the Tom Pfeifle Trails are full of possibilities, for the present and the future.
The writer Terry Tempest Williams touched on our obligation to care for what has been given to us when she wrote: “The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us, and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”
In seeing beyond our own time, which means seeing beyond ourselves, we might focus on our responsibility to the future and the need to protect what we have, in our landscapes and in our communities.
Wild places are essential in that, Tempest Williams says, because they allow us to “remember the sacred,” and also to find our own humility.
If you aren’t humbled by a grand piece of landscape — by a waterfall, a mountain, a sprawling piece of prairie — perhaps you can’t be humbled. And perhaps you should think about why that is, and what you can do about it.
I think there is value in finding our own humility and in the search itself. It might help us understand our responsibilities to the land and water and air, and to fellow human beings.
That’s education. And the outdoors, when the facilities and the weather allow, can be the perfect place for such learning, regardless of whether the area of study is the life cycle of cicadas or the heartbeat of literature.
Finding knowledge in a winter stroll or the calling of geese
I don’t expect to see kids freezing out in a windblown meadow across from Stevens at 10-below zero. But a trip to Raider Park for a class hike in the middle of January might help students feel the reality of winter in something they’re studying indoors.
Maybe, depending on the class, it could be the winter described by Willa Cather in “O Pioneers,” when the ground is “frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the plowed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is depressed by its rigor and its melancholy.”
But on another day, say a lovely day in spring or fall, the spirits of students could be elevated by the sounds and sights of wild things on and over Raider Park, adding impacts to life-affirming, encouraging words such as Mary Oliver’s in her poem Wild Geese:
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Finding our place in the family of things is easier if we have a complete education, with expanded insights and understanding. And outdoor connections help make education complete.
They’re also good for the body and spirit. And they are simply a lot of fun.
I know that personally in regard to Tom Pfeifle Trails at Raider Park because I stop there from time to time to take a walk or sit on a ridge and think a bit. In the right conditions during winter, I do some cross-country skiing there with my wife.
I stop, too, to see how a newly planted grove and its 20 fruit trees are doing. The trees were planted by volunteers, including former and current Stevens students, overseen by Sky Lawlor and his dad, Brett, as part of an urban orchard program.
The trees looked great Monday, despite the heat and the dry conditions and the challenges to Keck and others in watering the trees, mostly by hand. It’s a challenge worth taking.
And the promising piece of landscape that holds the Tom Pfeifle Trails — and his memory — is a place worth getting to know and love.
All with an eye toward the future — which, as Terry Tempest Williams says, is looking back at us with hope.
