Wenatchee River Institute

Streaming link: https://youtube.com/live/Y3AbqeQaUl0?feature=share

This is a FREE event with a donation basket at the door.
Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase. The presentation will start at 7:00pm.

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Conservation Northwest, the Okanogan Nation Alliance, the Province of British Columbia, Okanogan Region Trappers and a team of dedicated individuals have begun implementing a five-year project that will restore wápupxn, one of our brothers, back to their ancestral lands. Our high mountain ecosystems have been out of balance since the disappearance of wápupxn in the 1980s when they vanished from the landscape.

Have you ever seen a bat up close? Are you curious to learn more about these nocturnal, flying mammals? Wenatchee River Institute is teaming up with Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) for a night of bat education. You’ll have the chance to see these creatures up close! WDFW biologists will be using mist-nets to catch bats, a technique that’s often used by bat researchers during field work. They will be collecting data on any captured bats before releasing them. In addition to the mist-net stations, there will be other bat educational resources and activities – including moth expert Peter Smytheman with some moth and insect traps to help us observe these amazing night-flying insects!

Age Limit: 8+ years old
Ages 15 and under must be accompanied by an adult.
Registration for this event is required, but cost is Pay What You Can. Please choose an amount that fits within your budget to attend this event, even if that is $0. We want anyone who is interested to be able to attend!

Learn how to make simple and functional coiled baskets out of local and abundant material. Participants will be instructed in making a small round basket out of Ponderosa Pine needles. This is a great intro to coiled basket techniques, which have been utilized by indigenous peoples across the globe. This technique can be adopted to an endless variety of shapes, sizes, and materials. We have a limited number of spots available, so sign up soon.

Space is limited, class size: 20 people.

Join us for an introduction to the creative art of Cyanotypes! Learn how to create blue photogram prints with this non-toxic, antique, photographic process. We will place found objects from nature (such as leaves and flowers) on sheets of paper coated with a light-sensitive solution. The images will be exposed by the sun and made permanent by rinsing with water.

Participants will learn about the process through a demonstration and will then be able to make their own series of prints. All materials such as acid-free, precoated paper are provided.

Optional Friday evening session to learn how to coat the paper with the cyanotype solution.

Join WRI for our Plant Foraging Series. We will be hosting plant foraging workshops to introduce people to the abundance of local plants and their edible, medicinal, and functional uses. Each workshop will feature a new plant at its unique harvest time. Participants will learn hands-on how to identify, harvest, propagate, and make use of the plant. Our goal is to empower people to respectfully and reciprocally engage with the plants that live here.

Registration required.
Space is limited, so sign up fast! Class size: 15

Cost is Pay What You Can. Choose a price that is reasonable for you. WRI offers this in recognition that not everyone can afford to pay for classes. We hope that people who can, will pay to help those you cannot.

September is a great time to observe migration of all types of birds, especially hawks and raptors. These captivating predators are best observed from high ridges. For this birding trip, we will meet at WRI and load up in our van for a one-hour drive up to Sugarloaf Peak. We will hike roughly 0.5 miles up the unpaved road to reach our destination at the top. Once at the peak, we’ll settle in and scan the skies for migrating birds!

You’ll learn about these fascinating birds and their migration from WRI Educator, Tucker Jonas, and ornithologist, Neil Paprocki. Plan to sit on rocks and hang out near the summit for about 3 hours.

Transportation provided from WRI.

Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase

Big River: Resilience and Renewal in the Columbia Basin

In BIG RIVER, award-winning photographer David Moskowitz and writer Eileen Delehanty Pearkes illuminate the natural history, hydrogeology, beauty, and human activity on the Columbia River, while also highlighting the challenges facing the region and the people working on sustainable solutions.

The culmination of Moskowitz’s many years of photographing the river and exploring its watershed and Eileen’s decades of research, Big River seeks a path forward for the Columbia River Watershed, balancing the demands around water, salmon, agriculture, energy, and climate with the fundamental need for a sustainable living river.

Join WRI for our Plant Foraging Series. We will be hosting plant foraging workshops to introduce people to the abundance of local plants and their edible, medicinal, and functional uses. Each workshop will feature a new plant at its unique harvest time. Participants will learn hands-on how to identify, harvest, propagate, and make use of the plant. Our goal is to empower people to respectfully and reciprocally engage with the plants that live here.

This fall workshop will be with local herbalist Kyra Skaggs. The class is designed to instruct you on foraging and harvesting elderberries and what you can make with them. This will be a hands-on class to become more familiar with this plant.

This will be an opportunity to harvest chicory on the WRI campus and learn how to process the roots for making your own drink. Plan to wear clothing to get dirty, something to collect your harvested roots, and a long-handled shovel.

This workshop will be instructed by our WRI Land Steward Tiffany (who also goes by Tiffa). She is madly in love with native plants, lichen, and fungi in general and has a BA in Environmental Studies/Biology from UC Santa Cruz.

Cost is Pay What You Can. Choose a price that is reasonable for you. WRI offers this in recognition that not everyone can afford to pay for classes. We hope that people who can, will pay to help those you cannot.

Streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZVMVlkbTRk

Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase. The presentation will start at 7:00pm.

Grizzly bears roamed the North Cascades region for thousands of years as a key part of the ecosystem. They distributed native plant seeds and kept other wildlife populations in balance. Since then, populations declined primarily due to direct killing by humans. The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in the U.S. portion of the North Cascades ecosystem was in 1996. In April 2024, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decided that restoring grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem (NCE) would be undertaken by relocating grizzly bears from other ecosystems. National Park Service Wildlife Biologist Dr. Jason Ransom will discuss the ecology of grizzly bears in the NCE, what the restoration process looks like moving forward, and best practices for coexisting with both black bears and grizzly bears in the Cascades.