Welcoming new Portlanders to the Pacific Northwest Forest via ORCAS (Oregon Refugee Children’s Assistance Services) & Watershed 101 Spring Break workshop

One of our favorite spring events has become an annual tradition between Tryon Creek Watershed Council and Oregon Refugee Children’s Assistance Services (ORCAS), where we welcome a multilingual group of students to the Tryon Creek State Natural Area. For many of these students it’s their first time visiting a Pacific Northwest forest!

Students who joined us this year have recently arrived to Oregon from around the world: Syria, Myanmar, Venezuela, Ukraine, Bhutan, Afghanistan, and a few other countries. When we went around the room introducing ourselves this year, at Daya’s (ORCAS staff member) suggestion, students shared their language groups: many of these youth spoke three or four languages. Most of them already understand spoken English, but we paused for interpretation for some of the students during the day together.

Friends of Tryon Creek’s staff members joined us in welcoming students to the Nature Center, and their Green Leaders joined us on our hike too. We were lucky this year to avoid most of the forecasted rain during our hike! This hike was more of a meander… we paused frequently – to taste licorice fern, admire Pileated woodpecker holes in a Western red cedar, and check out beavers’ recent handiwork along the Lewis & Clark Trail. We discussed anadromous fish and fish passage at High Bridge, passed around a friendly banana slug, and spoke about how the history of logging has affected the landscape along Tryon Creek. Students sat on chair-shaped roots from trees growing from now-decomposed root logs, and the roots of a Douglas fir which fell during the 2024 ice storm was a popular photo spot. You’ll see photos of most of these stops in the gallery below.

The Friends of Tryon Creek’s excellent field guide shows plants, birds, and fungi found throughout the park – students followed along in this guide when we paused throughout our hike. One of the Ukrainian-speaking students shared that he loved hiking, but hadn’t really spent time in nature in four years – for a seventeen-year old, that’s a long time, and it was really special to nurture new connections to nature here in the Pacific Northwest for him and his peers.

After lunchtime, we got hands-on in the area outside of the Nature Center, by weeding shiny geranium and planting some plugs of different rushes and sedges, with Friends of Tryon Creek’s Nanda. This activity was optional, which is important: not everyone is comfortable with off-trail, digging/weeding types of activities, so some students and staff chose to observe instead. Most of us were kneeling down, though, and with the rain waking up forest macroinvertebrates, we were lucky to have a large earthworm, banana slug, and snail all at the same time!

Our Watershed 101 Workshop programming is funded by the Bureau of Environmental Services, and we’re grateful for their support in our ongoing relationships with these groups.