A chat with Charlie Pavlisich of Wolf Ridge ELC

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
I’m Charlie Pavlisich. I’m the STEM coordinator here at Wolf Ridge ELC.

CHUCK OLSEN
We’ve just gone on a massive tour and you do a lot, but what’s the overview of what you do here?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yeah, so I have my fingers in a couple different areas of the program. And so one thing I’m responsible for is a lot of the science-based curriculum that we teach to the students who come here. So when kids 4th through 12th grade come and visit Wolf Ridge campus for three to five days, I run a lot of the extreme study type class, air pollution type classes, things where they’re doing a little bit more science heavy rather than maybe just nature-based learning.

I run those curriculums. So I write the curriculum and then we have our kits that are in the rooms that the naturalists who teach the classes use as the materials. And so I keep the materials from breaking all the time.

I end up the one fixing them, repairing them, making improvements to them and things like that. And so that’s the curriculum stuff I do. I’m also our bridge to all of our citizen science that we’re partners with.

And so one thing our citizen science partnerships do is it bleeds into what we teach the kids. And it’s a nice bridge from the scientists to us, to the students.

CHUCK OLSEN
iNaturalist, you mentioned.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
iNaturalist, we do acid rain monitoring for the NADP. We do water clarity for the NPCA. We actually just joined another project called Lichen City Sci, which is using lichens as a proxy for air pollution.

Our graduate naturalists use iNaturalist to help their own training. So I help them navigate that website. We also work with the Midwest Peregrine Society.

I’m one of the climbers that helps with banding peregrines in the North Shore in the summer. And so there’s dozens of partnerships we have and it’s kind of my job to keep those partnerships alive, make new ones, and then also find that, bridge that into our curriculum that we teach the people who come here.

CHUCK OLSEN
So let me hear a little bit about your background. We’ll get back to the mission of Wolf Ridge, but how did you end up here? When and where?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
I’ve been in the Northern Minnesota area pretty much my entire life. I went to high school in Two Harbors High School.

I graduated from there and then I went to the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth for biology and education. And so what that gives you is the ability to teach high school biology and life science. Five through 12 is what my license was in.

When I was graduating college, I was 22. And I was like, I’m too young to go into a classroom right away. Or at least I felt like I was, I wasn’t quite ready.

And so my sister actually came here a year, year and a half before I did and joined the graduate naturalist program. And so when I was in college, instead of going other places on the weekend, I always ended up here, sleeping on the floor of the couch of the naturalist quarters and hanging out and meeting them. And it was kind of the first place I felt right at home.

I felt really welcomed. And it was also a place that I was just like, these people are so cool. And what they do every day is just so cool.

And so when I finished and got my degree, I kind of knew, I was like, I don’t want to go into a classroom. I want to be here. And so as soon as I graduated, I applied for the summer program and I was a summer naturalist here working at the summer camps.

I led angling to archery, where we took kids fishing at Lake Section 29 for a few days. We did a survival camp. I led all those.

And then I began my time as a graduate program where I spent nine months here, teaching classes to the school groups I visited, as well as then taking classes through Antioch University, which is where Wolf Ridge is partnered with currently. When I finished that, I stuck around for a second year as a mentor net, which you met a couple of mentor nets today. And then when that time was up, I spent those two years and three summers doing pretty much every odd job you could as a seasonal staff.

I led trips. I ran the tripping program for a summer when David Butcher, who was here at the time, left on paternity leave. And so I was like, well, I better get into a classroom now that I’ve been here for two years.

And believe it or not, I ended up back at Two Harbors teaching high school biology and math. And that was actually the year the pandemic hit. And so my first year teaching in a classroom was the year we all got sent home one day because of COVID-19.

And then I spent the next three years in the classroom doing that. And part of the way my contract worked, my job was kind of expiring at Two Harbors when I got the call that the person who has my job now was retiring. And I was slightly recruited to apply to come back.

And I was pretty excited for that opportunity. And so then I applied and I now got this job, which is an odd job because only one person has done it before and his name was Peter Harris and he did it for 40 years. So they said, you need to figure out what he does every day and then make it your own.

Good luck. And so I got six months with Peter. Peter retired and now it’s been a year of Charlie figuring out how to make it all work, which has been amazing.

CHUCK OLSEN
How’s it going?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
It’s busy. As I’ve told you, all the projects we’re in, but it’s really amazing. I get to work with new graduate naturalists every year who just are like the lifeblood of this place.

They bring in so many new ideas. They come from all across the globe. We’ve got people from California here. We’ve got people from Texas in years past. A lot of people from Minnesota and Wisconsin in the area, but we get people from all across the country coming to this graduate program who bring so many new ideas. And it’s my job because I don’t leave anymore to take those ideas and keep this place moving forward and bringing in new light.

And so there’s that aspect. I get to teach them. I’m a teacher for their natural history class.

And so one of my favorite jobs is they take three or four of them about once a week, somewhere in Superior National Forest to places off the beaten path. We look for rare lichens. We look for rare ferns.

And I just teach them about the landscape, how fire ecology changes the landscape, how succession occurs and how we can see the stages of that. Things like the new topics around here, the spruce bloodworm and how we can see their signs. And like, what is that doing to our forest right now?

Because so many people aren’t from around here who are teaching these classes to kids.

And so it’s my job to teach them about the landscape so when they’re out there with the fifth and sixth graders, they know the difference between a fir and a spruce tree and so that they can teach the kids that as well.

CHUCK OLSEN
There was a big story at the beginning of the year of we’ve just had the hottest year on record, and the hottest decade on record. But you also mentioned showing some success stories of how we’ve dealt with that. So kids aren’t completely bummed out.

Do you just want to talk a little bit about how that affects your environmental education?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Absolutely. And so springing from some of our citizen science projects, one is phenology, which is a study of how basically animals, nature’s timing. When do the trees drop their leaves?

When do songbirds return every year? And so one thing we track is Wolf Lake’s ice in and out dates and since 1988, we’ve lost about a week of ice in the fall. It comes in about a week later and we submit that data to the NPCA and our conversation with them is, it’s been the same pretty much across the state is we’ve ice in is now almost a week later on average, which is insane, but it’s an amazing thing to show kids as a physical, temperatures on a scale and things like that are hard to understand, but knowing they’re like, oh, ice fishing season is now over a week shorter every year is something people can really wrap their heads around. And so one class we have here is, we call it climate change or climate change solutions, where we look at things in the past that a lot of people have already forgotten about, such as acid rain and CFCs.

And so we look at, well, for just an acid rain station, I still do the monitoring every week and we take that data and show that we kind of have solved a lot of acid rain. How did we do it? And so I take, well, the data we’ve collected here and that story of, well, people pushed for laws and regulations and forcing policies to make energy companies in places accountable for their actions.

And we demonstrated with a little burning activity where it shows you we burn some sulfur and test the pH of the smoke after it goes through a buffer and all that. And so the kids can see stories that we’ve overcome in the past and how we have done it. And that’s kind of the through line of that classes.

We face this problem and as a society, we came up with policies, procedures, laws, and even penalties for people who broke them. And that’s how we overcame acid rain. We overcame CFCs, which created the ozone hole, which is now repairing itself.

And we take those stories and tie it back to the new issue that we’re facing today, which is climate change. And so what can they do moving forward? Well, there’s things you can do on your own, but as a society, we need to pull together.

But we’ve overcome things in the past. So it’s not all doom and gloom, even though we know things are gonna get a little bit worse before they get better just based on the trajectory. You gotta have some hope.

And that’s what we instill in the kids. So, hopefully anyway.

CHUCK OLSEN
Yeah. You instilled some hope in me because we don’t focus on the success stories so much.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
We don’t dwell on success, do we? No, it’s always the next thing.

CHUCK OLSEN
Yeah. Give me the lay of the landscape here. For our listeners, how big is Wolf Ridge? What’s the landscape like?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
So right now we’re in the Science Center where a bunch of classrooms are, but we’re on top of what we call the main campus. We’re on top of Wolf Ridge where there’s about a dozen buildings. We have staff housing, two different buildings for students to come up and visit, a dining hall, a main office, two classroom buildings, a maintenance building, our furnace building that heats most of the buildings on campus.

And so when you come up here, you might not expect it, but we’re basically a college campus feel with all the dorms and all the classrooms and things like that. And that’s just on top of the ridge, which is a small portion and around us is 2000 acres of forested lands that Wolf Ridge has trails spanning. And so on an average day, a kid might walk two miles in the morning for class and three miles in the afternoon going out somewhere else.

And so we’ve got two main directions you can really go. We’ve got North into the Simil

Creek Valley or South towards Wolf Lake. And so on a given day, a kid might end up in two different places that are almost three or four miles apart, and they’ll never leave Wolf Ridge campus, which is really, really cool.

And they’ll be exploring things from looking and tracking wolf tracks in the North Valley or deer tracks links or bobcat to the South Valley, going out on Wolf Lake, which is frozen right now and putting underwater cameras underneath the ice and trying to catch perch and trying to learn from what a lake looks like during the time that’s frozen.

CHUCK OLSEN
When I hear about these classes, I want to shrink down to kid size and sneak into these classes.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yeah, you forget how magical it is until you’re part of it. I’ve got one, when I was a naturalist, there’s one class that just, I still don’t believe that it was real. I was teaching an animal science class.

And so in that class, we put out a whole bunch of things in the classroom that are animal science from like beetle shoes on bark to bones remains of a critter to footprints that you might find out in the snow. In that class, we left and we went down the North stairs, which is about 240 stairs down into the valley. And we were going out to the Forest Ecology Building, which is over a mile away.

And we weren’t coming back to the main campus for lunch. We were eating out there. And as we were walking through about three feet of snow and I took him off trail into this random spot, a kid comes, I say running, but it was three feet of snow.

So he was plowing through three feet of snow back to me, the sixth grader. And he goes, I found a pheasant. The first thing I think is there’s no pheasants in Northern Minnesota.

And I was like, well, let’s go see what you found. And I thought he found a grouse or something and it probably flew away. And out spread across the snow was just a smattering of feathers.

And as I walk up and look closer, it’s not a pheasant, it’s not a grouse. It’s a dead barred owl, splayed out across the snow. And I’ve got 15 sixth graders gathering up around me like what’s going on?

And as we uncover this like murder scene out in the woods, miles where they feel like they’re miles from anywhere, we find a barred owl that was killed by something. We had to figure out what happened. And we actually ended up talking to another naturalist on campus.

And we think it was a fisher based on the way the back of its skull was basically scooped out. And a lot of it was left behind. But as a bunch of fifth and sixth graders, we were exploring the kind of the battle scene that took place on the snow.

And then we went and had lunch at the Feb. And it was just an amazing thing. And yeah, we went and we actually collected the owl.

We put it in a bag and we brought it back and we sent it to the Forest Service for them to kind of figure out. That’s what they think as well now. Weeks later, they told us, yeah, it was probably a fisher or a weasel of some kind.

But yeah, with fifth graders, we were able to find an eviscerated barred owl in the snow in the middle of the woods. And it was just one of those days. You’re just like, I just go home and go back to bed.

I guess, you know, it’s just another day as a Wolf Ridge naturalist. And so you never know. It’s just such a real experience.

So like when I go, because we don’t know what we’re going to find. I know, you know, you go out there and you scout, you know where the tracks are and you know where some spots might be cool. But yeah, there’s days where you’re as surprised as the kids are about some of the things you come across out here.

CHUCK OLSEN
The outdoors is the classroom. What kind of benefits does that have for the kids?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
And it’s amazing watching them change throughout the week and get comfortable being outside. And a lot of kids now, I believe there’s a study, kids spend about 10 minutes a day on outside activities that are unstructured. And so outside of sports, outside of soccer or football or things like that.

Yeah, they’re spending around 10 minutes outside. So a lot of kids just aren’t comfortable being outdoors. And so to go from being the beginning of the week, just getting them acclimated to being outside, to them tracking critters up and down Sawmill Creek and digging through the snow and just finding these things.

And there’s a different type of learning that is just so hard to do in a classroom. It’s just so hard for teachers. Being in a classroom like myself, it’s so hard to get the time to take kids outside.

In high school, you have a 40 minute class period most days or 50. Well, by the time they put their boots and jackets on, yeah, you got 10 minutes outside, 20 minutes. Whereas here to have those three hours to bring them out and let them ask questions and really get into that self-driven learning.

I think nowadays people learning how to ask questions is such a huge part of learning. Because if you don’t know what to ask, someone can tell you stuff all day long, but if you’re the one asking the questions, that means you’re actually learning something. And out here to get them outside, to just look at like, oh, what’s going on over there?

How can you tell the difference between these trees? It’s some of my favorite ones in the winter and all those things. I do have to plug one thing before we go, which is, or before we move on, which is there’s a new bill being proposed in the Minnesota Senate this spring called Outdoor School for All.

And what that bill would do would be provide funding for every student, regardless of private, public, whatever schooling they’re in in Minnesota to go to an outdoor learning residential facility at some point during their schooling. And that bill is being proposed. It’s being headed up by a lot of RELCs in Minnesota.

There’s a bunch of other great places like Osprey Wilds and Eagle Bluff that do overnight residential education like we do. But this bill would be to provide state funding for every student in Minnesota to have this opportunity, which I think is really, really cool. And it’s a really great time to push for it with kids spending so little time outside now.

CHUCK OLSEN
Yeah, and access is not equal, certainly.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
No, and so Emily, my wife, she works a lot. There are a lot of grants out there for schools that are lower income to get groups up here. And that’s another just amazing thing is, I wish we had more gear to outfit these kids sometimes a little bit better, but you had to bring kids up from urban Minneapolis, or we even bring kids out from some very rural places out in North Dakota, and to have them see this landscape.

Like we talked a little bit about, I forget how special it is sometimes until some of these kids see it. And you’re like, yeah, this is an amazing place.

CHUCK OLSEN
Yeah, this is my first time here. I stopped the car on the drive multiple times, especially when I saw Wolf Lake.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
That overlook over Wolf Lake with Marshall Mountain and Mystical and then Lake Superior in the background is one of a kind. And like you said, it’s one of those things that I’m glad I’ve never gotten used to. But if I do, I’m glad there’s people like you who come up and are like, I had to stop!

It’s really cool. And yeah, the kids, just on the view sometimes, the kids will just stop. And it’s like, what are you looking at? And I’m like, that. And you’re like, oh. Oh yeah, that. Oh yeah, that.

CHUCK OLSEN
That is good.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
That is pretty good. That’s pretty amazing.

CHUCK OLSEN
Give me an idea of the types of activities you’re doing here with kids. You showed me snowshoes, a rock climbing wall, a box with bones in it.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yeah, yeah. So out of the, I think we have about 40 different classes kids can choose from. We have an indoor rock wall.

We have two indoor rock walls where they learn to rock climb. But as I talked to you a little bit, they’re also learning to belay. It’s not a class where they just get to climb all period.

They’re learning to trust one another. And one kid is responsible for the other kid. And we have the parents and chaperones.

Everyone goes through a training to make sure everyone stays safe. But it’s also a lesson in building teamwork, trust, and just relying on other people in this day and age. So yeah, I have to trust you to belay me.

You’re the one keeping the rope tight and keeping me safe on the wall. That’s a really cool class. And we also do animal signs.

I told a story about animal signs, about tracking. And we just look and follow to try to figure out what animals are doing and how they’re acting based on the signs they leave behind. We have a changing climates class.

We dive into the different stories of humans facing different ecological issues like acid rain and how can we apply those lessons. We go down to Wolf Lake, the frozen lake, and try to see and understand what’s going on underneath the ice. And we even do ice cutting.

And so we have the big ice thaws. We have kids out there and we’ll cut the blocks out and put them up. And so they can look at the different layers of our ice forms and what’s good ice and what’s not so good ice and what’s going on with the bubbles and just all the different formations that honestly I didn’t get to look at until we cut ice here at Wolf Ridge.

You know, it’s not every day you pull a 40 inch piece of ice out through the ice and set up and analyze it. We do skiing, cross-country skiing. The first time for a lot of kids to ever cross-country ski on the trails here.

And we do Superior Snowshoe, which in the summer is called Superior View Hike. We hike out to this beautiful overlook and we learn about the ecology and the history of Lake Superior on the hike. But in the winter, we don’t have to follow trails, which is really, really fun.

And so we find our own overlook. We cross Wolf Lake and then bush crash through these trees till we find whatever ridge works for us, you know? And they get to look out at the lake from their own spot that they chose.

And we tell stories and talk a little bit about how the lake influences the landscape in those classes. Voyager Life and Ojibwe Heritage, where we talk about the cultural history of the area and our naturalists then have to learn about the cultural history before they teach it. And both those classes are where we work in partnership with the Grand Portage Tribe and Grand Portage Monument for those classes curriculum.

And so we’re working with the people in the area who understand it better than we do to make sure we’re doing it the right way, which is really cool. So we have a class completely devoted to lichens, which I know you’re a big fan of lichens. And they’re such an amazing thing because everyone has seen them before, but so few people have noticed them.

And it’s the same with kids for them to go out and be like, there’s lichens everywhere. I’ve never seen them before. And then to talk about how they tell us about the landscape and how many different species there are and how to get them to make observations.

Lichens are amazing for getting kids to just make observations and focus on little details. It’s really, really cool. Yeah.

CHUCK OLSEN
Do you wanna talk a little bit about the history of Wolf Ridge? And you kind of told me an interesting story about it. It wasn’t always called Wolf Ridge.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yeah, back when we were up in Isabella, BC before Charlie anyway, we were called just the ELC because we’re the only residential ELC really operating anywhere in the area. And so a lot of the folks in their 60s and 50s who have been to Wolf Ridge, they might just know it as the ELC. And then when we moved to Wolf Ridge and we were putting in this three mile long driveway, we were trying to build partnerships even back then.

And one of the fun side stories is we were trying to become partners with the International Wolf Center. We were trying to kind of court them into putting the International Wolf Center on our driveway somewhere. And so that was part of the reason we called ourselves Wolf Ridge was to kind of court the International Wolf Center a little bit.

And so that’s a little bit of where our story came from. And it’s kind of fun to see other places take similar names. We’ve helped other ELCs a little bit in getting going and things like that.

And so the pattern of Wolf Ridge is now not a unique thing when you think of Osprey Wilds and Eagle Bluff. It’s kind of fun to see that pattern take place across Minnesota.

CHUCK OLSEN
And was Wolf Lake always called Wolf Lake?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
So Wolf Lake and Raven Lake are still, I think legally on maps called Johnson and Kennedy after the presidents. And so if you look it up on Minnesota Lake Finder or things like that, they’re still legally, I think, named Johnson and Kennedy. But to stick with the theme of the landscape, we gave them our own little names.

CHUCK OLSEN
And they’re better.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Some people, you know, everyone likes to stick to the old things sometimes. But yeah, they’re fun names.

And there is a Raven Nest on Raven Lake. That’s the reason that got that name is there was Ravens nesting there. And they still come back.

There’s a certain ledge on Marshall Mountain that you can see ravens nest every March or every year that it could decide to anyway.

CHUCK OLSEN
Speaking of nesting birds on ridges, do you wanna talk a little bit about the Peregrine Falcon Program?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yeah, so Wolf Ridge has been partners with the Midwest Peregrine Society for a long time now, since the 80s. And this is one of those stories that Wolf Ridge has a ton of connections with all these other projects. And this is just one of them, where Wolf Ridge was a hacking site.

And hacking is where you take the chicks and you don’t want them to have human interactions. You wanna raise them as wild as possible, but we’re trying to reintroduce them to the Midwest. So it’s kind of an issue, like how do we take these chicks and get them to survive, but not get them used to humans in an area where there’s no other peregrines?

And so in the 80s, we actually had a, basically a big cage set up on Marshall Mountain with a big tube and humans would come up and the chicks were in the cage. And we’d put chickens, chicken meat in this tube and we’d feed it down through the tube, this 20 foot long tube into the cage so that we’d never interact with the chicks. And when they got so big, you’d take the top of the cage off and they’d fly away.

So they’re raised on their own with just food coming down. And it was a releasing site for the chicks to reestablish peregrines on the North shore. And the amazing thing is I believe in the 1960s, there was zero peregrines in all of the Midwest.

And now there’s over 700 nesting pairs, which means including juveniles and others, there’s probably over 2000 peregrines in the Midwest, which is an amazing, amazing recovery story. And so now, as I guess the next generation, I still help with the Midwest Peregrine Society. I go out and I work on the climbing crew.

And so we go down the cliffs. We have volunteers who monitor where they nest every year. And then we find out when they lay their eggs, when the eggs hatch, so that we know the exact time to head out and band the chicks so that they’re big enough that the bands still fit on their wrists and they’re adult bands, but they’re not so big that they’re tempted to try to fly early, which is a narrow window.

It’s about 15 days or so. And so, yeah, we go out every spring, spring, May and June, and rappel down cliffs and get peregrine chicks to band and keep track of their populations and their stories.

CHUCK OLSEN
Cool. So you’re on a break right now. One of your few breaks where there aren’t students on campus. Gearing up for them to return next week?

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Yep, we got 120 come in the first half of next week and about 120 come in the second half. So next week we’ll have, give or take, about 250 students and about 300 or so people coming through Wolf Ridge campus, which is pretty normal for a week. I’d say our average around a year is about 10,000 people coming through Wolf Ridge campus.

And so with the last few years, of course, with the pandemic and all that, numbers have fluctuated quite a bit, but at any given time, we can host about 350 people here at one moment. And so if we have a turnover in the middle of the week, that can change things and stuff like that. But yep, they’ll be here.

Kids will be here for three days the first half and three days the second half, taking all those classes I’ve told you about. They’ll be down in Sawmill and tracking wolves, hopefully, or tracking bobcats and deer and all those other critters that are roaming the woods. And they’ll be down on Wolf Lake, checking out the ice, and they’ll be out hiking the forest and snowshoeing and skiing and learning all about being outside and learning about the environment while they’re doing it.

CHUCK OLSEN
Good, good stuff.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
It’s pretty awesome.

CHUCK OLSEN
Charlie, thanks for talking with us. And yeah, we’ll hear you again on North Shore Morning.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Oh yeah, second Wednesday of every month, 8:40. That’s when we do our phenology update. Hopefully people get a kick out of it.

CHUCK OLSEN
I think we do. Thanks for your good work.

CHARLIE PAVLISICH
Thanks, Chuck.