Developed by PLIA in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, Conservation Corps New Mexico, the Whiptail Trails Club aims to make the outdoors more accessible to southern New Mexico's middle school students. The program serves as an introduction to the scientific, cultural, and recreational opportunities that can all be enjoyed on our public lands. Participating classes get lessons on agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and field trips to the nearby lands they manage. With a focus on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields, the goal is to inspire curiosity about what public lands are for and how to use them responsibly.
PLIA also hosted a week-long camp in the summer of 2022 for nearly a dozen girls to experience public lands and develop outdoor skills. Travelling to sites like Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, White Sands National Park, and the Lincoln National Forest, the girls got valuable lessons in camping and first-aid skills, biology and natural history, and potential careers on public lands. With a successful first year in 2022 thanks to contributions from the New Mexico Outdoor Equity Fund as well as a few generous individuals and businesses, other areas of New Mexico have shown interest in hosting similar programs of their own.
With your help, we can offer this program to even more schools across New Mexico. Even a small contribution can help us develop lesson plans and coordinate trips focused on more of our remarkable public lands and inspire future generations to pursue work or leisure outdoors.
We hope to raise $10,000 for Whiptail Trails Club in 2023. This amount would allow us to keep offering this program in Southern New Mexico, and expand into the Cibola National Forest near Albuquerque! Thanks to a generous contribution from our vendor Wild Tribute, we are already $1,500 closer to that goal!