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Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend October 27, 2005 She gets a gold star for her wildlife teachings Outdoors By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune Leah Schrodt cannot forget the day she hiked to the top of Lower Table Rock with her fellow Ashland fifth-graders and stood face-to-pedal with one of Earth’s true rarities. "It was the dwarf woolly meadowfoam," Schrodt recalls her guide explaining. "It’s on the Table Rocks and nowhere else in the world. It’s oil type is very similar to the sperm whale." Those tidbits aren’t on any test at the end of the trail. But they are part of Schrodt’s presentations when this Bureau of Land Management environmental education specialist leads hundreds of kids on hikes annually atop the natural oasis she calls "islands in the sky." "I remember how that hike at Table Rocks really stuck with me, really made an impression upon me," says Schrodt, 29, of Ashland. Schrodt now is making a big impression upon federal land managers for her style and charisma while teaching of meadowfoams, meadowlarks, wild salmon and underwater bugs to Rogue Valley youth. Advertisement Schrodt is the new recipient of the BLM’s top educational and environmental interpretation award for how she has expanded and run the agency’s environmental education program out of the Butte Falls Resource Area. Similar awards also will go to recipients representing the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during a Nov. 10 ceremony in Mobile, Ala. For the past six years, Schrodt has run the education effort here, the only full-time employee in the $115,000 program that includes 10 seasonal employees. She split her efforts among the spring Table Rocks hikes, McGregor Park Visitor Center along the upper Rogue near Trail and various other environmental education programs involving everything from wild salmon and American Indian culture to forest ecology and the threats of noxious weeds. "Her passion for the program makes it all work," says Doug Lindsey, Schrodt’s boss in the BLM’s Medford District Office. "She wants to have a working program that supports the community and the kids, and she’s able to do that," Lindsey says. The program seems almost the birthright of Schrodt. A true product of the forest who was born in the New Mexico woods and counted trees and streams as her baby-sitters, Schrodt grew up the daughter of environmental activist Gary Schrodt. She tagged along as Schrodt taught outdoor lessons to kids in New Mexico and later during his activism in Ashland that once included a 1995 arrest for protesting an old-growth timber sale on the Siskiyou National Forest. "It was natural for me to have the forest and the trees as my playground," Leah Schrodt says. That background has proven priceless in connecting will all the different community factions in the Rogue Valley. She speaks about the environment in the first person, combining the science of ecology with her outdoor background and Evergreen College degree that focused on cultural studies, fine arts and Spanish. "There’s a deep connection that goes beyond learning it from textbooks," she says. "People don’t realize that, in the forest, you can have your whole meal there. "In TV Nation, where food comes from a microwave, that kind of connection gets lost in our culture." Within the BLM’s own culture, education programs usually take a public back seat to logging and mining operations. Yet Lindsey says the program has skirted cutbacks suffered by other departments, in part because of its three decades of educational effectiveness in the valley. "It has a long-standing tradition in this community," Lindsey says. "That, and Leah’s passion, helps keep it in existence." Schrodt’s passion for doling out tidbits about the frail existence of the dwarf woolly meadowfoam remains as strong as the day she was introduced to it. The plant’s sperm whalelike oil has a strong resistance to heat, she says. It’s used now in lubricants on spaceships and jets. The oil is even part of high-end Japanese cosmetics. That’s all in her interpretive talk, too. But it’s more than just fun flower facts to Schrodt. It’s a venue for new groups of fifth-graders to get a sense of place in nature by introducing them to places like Table Rocks and their rare residents. "I’ll never forget being in that field of grass and wildflowers," Schrodt says. "This has all been a passion of mine for a very, very long time." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail She gets a gold star for her wildlife teachings ">[email protected] . 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