Day 2 at Tremont – Great Smoky Mountains

This morning we stepped right into the heart of the Tremont learning cycle—three simple but powerful stages that shape every experience here:

*Invitation – sparking curiosity and drawing you into the moment, asking just enough questions to make you want to lean in.
*Exploration – hands-on investigation, noticing patterns, gathering data, and making sense of the world through experience.
*Reflection – stepping back to connect the dots, drawing meaning from what you’ve done, and considering how it connects to the bigger picture.

We put this cycle into motion with three activities:

1. To Each Their Own – discovering unique stories told by our Sweetgum leaves.

2. Data Sets – crunching all kinds of math using our collective leaf data.

3. Flip the Script – writing from the perspective of our leaf, letting imagination and science meet on the page.

After a hearty Sloppy Joe lunch (cue the Saturday Night Lunch Lady song), we dove into salamander studies—learning about their habitats and then creating their own dating profiles. It was all clean educational fun… until Rodney shared his.

This afternoon brought a truly wild moment—a very large male bear strolled right behind the pavilion while we were there. Dinner was a full-on Taco Tuesday feast, complete with enough queso at each table to fund STEAM in the PARK for several educators next summer.

We ended the day with a session on Carbon Sequestration, followed by our 11th viewing of Out There: A National Parks Story. There’s something magical about watching it under the stars with friends who started as strangers just days ago.

Tomorrow promises another full slate: shelter building, mystery stations, pollinators, polar plunge, night hike, Cherokee stories, and bat detectives. Buckle up—it’s going to be a good one.