♪♪ -Welcome to Windows to the Wild, I'm Willem Lange.

Today we'll take a boat ride to the Isles of Shoals, where a master gardener keeps a poet’s story, and her garden alive.

[water splashes] Then we'll head to the Bahamas, where young people learn old lessons about conservation.

First, Andrew Drummond is a North Country adventure athlete known far beyond New Hampshire's borders for his outdoor feats.

He skis, he runs, and he leads an effort to get people of all ages and abilities onto the mountains with him.

♪♪ On any given Friday evening in the summertime, runners and hikers gather at the base of Cranmore Mountain in Conway, New Hampshire, for an unusual activity, running to the summit of the nearly 2000ft peak and back down the mountain.

♪♪ The mountain run is part of the Friday Night Verte series, put on by White Mountain Ski Company founder and outdoor enthusiast Andrew Drummond.

♪♪ He's been on a mission to create outdoor community in the White Mountains.

-My name is Andrew Drummond.

I am the owner of White Mountain Ski Company, where we are right now in Jackson, New Hampshire, and we do ski, bike and run.

And right now it's summertime so we're really focusing on the run aspect.

[birds singing] I've been here in Jackson-- This is our sixth year in this location.

♪♪ And before that I was working out on my truck, in yeah, all over the White Mountains.

♪♪ -Andrew's been haunting these woods since he was a boy and took to the mountains early as a hiker, skier and outdoorsman.

♪♪ He took his love of the outdoors into young adulthood.

[birds singing] -I grew up here.

I grew up in Conway, New Hampshire.

I was raised by a very active, outdoorsy family.

Most of my summers I spent at summer camp and then I ski raced in the wintertime.

My parents would take me out hiking.

♪♪ I spent a lot of time in the White Mountains as a kid, and I think I took some of it for granted.

♪♪ It took me moving across the country to San Diego to really appreciate where I grew up.

♪♪ -Andrew returned to the White Mountains in 2014, this time with a camera in tow.

♪♪ ♪♪ [water splashing] -So when I moved back here, I sort of rediscovered the White Mountains, and I got to do it on my own.

♪♪ [Andrew shouts] ♪♪ So instead of my parents or my counselor-- Camp counselors driving me to the trailheads, I started to pull out the maps and figure out where I had been or hadn't been and where I wanted to go.

-He started uploading his excursions to social media to inspire others.

♪♪ -When I really moved back here, I got the bug of like-- The competition bug that I sort of grew up with came back and I saw that through trail running.

♪♪ I learned about ultrarunning and that really caught my interest.

♪♪ I was just looking for like, my adventure.

♪♪ [dialogue in background] I just had the opportunity to pace Scott Jurek on his Appalachian speed record, [dialogue in background] and I got to spend three straight days with him through the White Mountains, and it just made me want to do something similar, but like, not on that scale or that level, but I'm like, what can I do in my backyard?

[birds singing] That summer of 2015, I decided, hey, next year I'm going to do this thing called the White Mountain Direttissma which is thru-hiking the White Mountains, all 48, and doing it self support-- Or unsupported so you're carrying all your own food and gear and-- [wind blowing softly] -In 2016, Andrew completed all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000 footers in just under six days.

[wind blowing] -When I moved back here in 2014, the outdoor space felt very fragmented.

There weren't really that many-- There weren't many groups, and there was very-- It was very cliquey and people had their ski partners and their running partners and-- ♪♪ That all sort of changed throughout the following years.

In 2016, when I started White Mountain Ski Company, the same time there was Granite Backcountry Alliance, which was a user group for backcountry skiers, and that was a great way to meet people.

♪♪ [grassy footsteps] ♪♪ [labored breathing] And then the trail running side of things.

I started Run the Whites and started doing my Friday Night Vertical Series, and that was a way to catch up with people each week, ♪♪ hike up 1000ft.

It could take some people 15 minutes.

It can take some people like an hour.

It doesn't-- It doesn't matter.

But we all regroup and hang out and that's what I realized really quickly, early on, was that that's the stuff I enjoyed.

The core of everything we do is all focus on community, because without your community, you have no business there.

They’re the people that are my friends, and that support what we do here and that's meant everything along the way.

♪♪ [gravel crunching] -Though running and hiking can be solitary sports, Andrew saw how building community could bear fruit for the region and for his burgeoning business.

It's also more fun to hike with friends.

[indistinct dialogue] -Those are the people you'll see out on the trail.

There's so many neat relationships that form not not even with me, but I get to watch people form relationships and bridge these, bridge these gaps where all of a sudden someone has a trail running partner or ski partner, and that's super special.

[gravel crunching] -So I met Erin and McKenzie volunteering at Last Skier Standing in 2022.

And then-- Yeah and then Erin and I met through I think Bubba's just the year prior and we had just decided in like our sleepless delirium that we were totally already friends and we’ve definitely met.

[laughing] And then the same thing with Amanda, I was like, yeah, no, she's amazing.

-I just was a time in my life I really needed community and it was a crazy weekend we were together for like 60 hours or something and like very little sleep it was so cold, but it was one of the best weekends of my life.

And then I just kept coming back and volunteering and now I'm like one of the core team members at White Mountain Ski Co.

and like, we've been through so many of the events together, it's just kind of, I don't know, but it's because of White Mountain Ski Company, because of Andrew and Monte it like, yeah, it's great.

♪♪ -And so watching someone that starts out from zero kind of move through this, like all these different experiences and these different sports that they didn't grow up doing like I got to do growing up is really rewarding because you get to share something that's so meaningful to you with someone else and sort of watch them evolve.

♪♪ [applause] That's been really refreshing and rewarding.

♪♪ [cheering] -C’mon Everett, don’t give up.

[overlapping dialogue] ♪♪ -It's hot.

-Especially the first-- -It's-- It’s super fulfilling you know?

Like, people's time is important and they're here at one of our events and watching everyone catch up and make connections goes back to, you know, when I, moved to a new area or moved back here, and I wanted to meet friends it's like stuff like this is, it’s meaningful you know?

It makes a difference.

♪♪ It's fun you know?

we got this whole mountain as our own little playground.

♪♪ What's really important is that it's a very accepting community.

♪♪ We all get to share the same trail, the same sunset or rainstorm.

♪♪ And so we'll have this common bond.

♪♪ -Poet Celia Thaxter grew up on the Isles of Shoals.

That's where she met writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In the last year of her life, Celia wrote An Island Garden, which describes her garden that still blooms on Appledore Island.

That's where we meet Terry Cook.

♪♪ -The roses I have in the garden are from 1815 to 1900.

Every other plant I find-- I try and find is heirloom.

I source them from anywhere in the US, the UK and even Germany this year.

♪♪ -If you love a garden, I grew up on a ranch in Texas.

So we didn't have this.

We didn't have a lot of poets but we had a love of flowers.

-You'll want to meet Terry Cook.

-Another plant that she used a lot was Echinocystis lobata or wild cucumber.

-He's the Celia Thaxter garden steward.

-Behind me here is a very special one.

These are sweet peas.

-Hello, Terry.

-How are you-- -But to meet him here, ♪♪ you'll need to book a ride to Appledore Island.

♪♪ [engine rumbling] Appledore Island is one of the Isles of Shoals, ♪♪ [seagulls squawk] seven miles from New Hampshire's coastline, It’s home to the Shoals Marine Laboratory, run by the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University.

There's always something new to learn on Appledore every day.

Terry Cook is always ready to share the story of the island's famous garden.

-Poppies.

She had five-- She notes five different types of poppies in the book.

This is probably her favorite, which was a Shirley poppy.

-Terry is a retired peanut farmer from Texas.

He now lives on New Hampshire’s seacoast, where he volunteers a lot of his time to gardening.

-So my job every year is to recreate this garden and make it as true to life as possible.

-His skills as a master gardener and his love of history, make him an ideal guard for the Celia Thaxter Garden Tour.

-You see things blooming here.

One thing that Celia loved and the first plant that she ever planted was calendula.

And we-- Or we call it calendula-- Calendula now.

It was pot marigold then.

[seagulls squawk] And so this is what she grew at four years old.

-You know you’re spending a lot of time-- -And I kind of equate it-- -You’re preserving a-- A 100 year old garden.

Why?

-Well, good question.

This is the 50th year that the garden has been back on the island.

It's been here every year since 1976, with the exception of two, which was during Covid.

During those two years, we did a version of it at Prescott Park in Portsmouth, and we had literally thousands of people coming, to see what we did there.

It was a great outreach for Shoals and for Celia.

-Yeah.

-Then we brought it back to the island.

And, Celia is just part of the fabric of this island.

You know?

It goes along with the history of thousands of years ago with the early settlers, and before that, the Abenaki tribe.

And she's a part that she really brought science to the island.

♪♪ -Celia Thaxter was born in the 1835, in Portsmouth to Hampshire.

She spent a lot of time on Appledore Island, where her father built a large hotel.

♪♪ The location became a popular draw for writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, ♪♪ Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Visiting writers and artists strongly influenced Celia.

She became known for her poetry and the garden she created here more than a hundred years ago.

♪♪ In 1977, the garden was reconstructed.

♪♪ You've tried to keep her garden as it was, right?

-Very much so.

We honor the book that she wrote in 1893.

In the title of that was An Island Garden.

And Celia was very famous at the time as a poet and as an artist and she had many famous friends, not super wealthy friends, but just famous friends of the arts community.

And so she brought that arts community that she had met in Boston to the island, and, they spent the summer largely talking about art and beauty and life on her piazza in front of her house or her front porch.

♪♪ [seagulls squawk] We think about her bringing art to the island, but she really brought science to the island too, and that she loved the study of flowers.

She was a wonderful illustrator of of, say, seaweed or marine plants.

She was amazed by marine life.

[wind blows] [seagulls squawk] She was fascinated with the intricacies of a flower, and how a flower could come up from a small poppy seed and give so much pleasure, and how that the miss-- the mystical way of that happening and the scientific way of that happening.

So, in a way art and science works hand in hand here.

♪♪ -Along with public tours, Appledore is a classroom for students and faculty.

It's an open air learning environment where Celia herself, learned about the natural world she lived in.

♪♪ -Students are out going all the time.

This is a very much living, ♪♪ classroom, that they're not stuck in a classroom.

They're out doing things, exploring nature in its own right, exploring the water.

♪♪ [seagulls squawk] -UNH played a really big part this year in the garden, in Celia's garden.

Terry has been really strategic in partnering with an entity on campus, that grew all of the plants in the greenhouse for the garden, so they were carefully tended to over the winter in the UNH greenhouses, and they were transported by our boat over to Appledore Island and we had a big planting day, and a lot of the students that were involved in growing the plants for Celia's garden were involved in that and helped bring out all of the small seedlings and helped plant them for the garden tours.

And so you can see today what that has grown into, and they're super proud of their achievement.

♪♪ [seagulls squawk] -And I think, that's part of a sense of place, which I think is so important, bringing the students to this and we always give them the background on the island, and we want them to have a sense of place for them to know that they're not the first people here, that people have been here for thousands of years, and hopefully people will be here for thousands more years, and we can recreate that little spot of beauty that's only 15ft wide and 50ft long for them to enjoy, and for the other people to enjoy in a historic way that Celia did.

♪♪ -Celia Thaxter died in 1894.

20 years later, the hotel that her father built burned to the ground.

♪♪ What remains of Celia’s legacy at Appledore, can be found at her garden.

♪♪ And in the stories that Terry shares, -This is where she found solace.

While she was out in the morning, she talks about being out here at 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning before breakfast, and tending her garden.

♪♪ Remarkable, remarkable person, so we're sitting here literally on her porch steps, ♪♪ and the garden is exactly where it was when she was here.

♪♪ And we try and recreate to the extent that we can, everything that we-- That she did and she enjoyed.

♪♪ [seagulls squawk] ♪♪ I'm glad you've been out today.

I hope you've enjoyed the day.

-Perfect day jeez-- -Yeah?

It's always nice to share our our little spot out here or, Celia’s spot and the island and what's going on and we think it's important.

♪♪ ♪♪ [waves ripple] -We take you from the Isles of Shoals to the Bahamas.

Fish for Change works with young people there on education, conservation and environmental stewardship.

-That’s a real polar bear guys.

-Oh this is from a polar bear?

-It’s from polar bear, fleece.

-Seven years ago, we introduced you to Alec Griswold.

We joined him in Massachusetts, where Alec and leaders from Elevate Youth explored the outdoors around Boston.

♪♪ For a group of Roxbury School students, it was a chance to move out of one classroom and into another.

♪♪ -Alright, let's see em.

-Let's see how different they are.

Alright.

Those all check out.

Well done.

♪♪ -Today Alec is in the Bahamas.

[muffled shouting] ♪♪ We met with him during the late evening after a day of outdoor fun.

♪♪ -I'm Alec Griswold.

We are here in the Bahamas currently, we're on an out island or a family island.

Currently running a teens fishing camp, for an organization called Fish for Change.

♪♪ -Fish for Change is a national organization that uses fly fishing to bring together young folks in the outdoors.

-I’ve got a group of, of six US teenagers from all over the States, and we have two local kids here as well from our, our island.

And we are really focusing on learning fly fishing skills, but also community and conservation is a huge part of this program and, and how we go about that I mean, today we were-- We were doing some mangrove propagating, so we were getting seeds from our mangroves here on this island and actually going to be transporting those seeds to, to another island in order to, to replant mangroves that were destroyed by Hurricane Dorian back in 2019.

[branches rustling] -So these are the mangrove propagules here that we've been collecting with seeds.

As you can see these plants are nice and ready.

The seed is fully intact and we’re gonna put it in the nursery, we'll plant it out to here.

When we remove this fruit cap at the top, this terminal bud will start to unravel and we'll get leaves.

And then it's just going to grow straight up from there.

♪♪ -Nina Sanchez is an educator for the conservation group Bonefish & Tarpon Trust.

She and her colleagues work alongside Fish for Change in the Bahamas.

Nina grew up here, and spent a lot of her time on the water.

She took time out to attend school in Atlantic, Canada, then returned home to promote education and conservation of the local ecology.

♪♪ -Through Bonefish & Tarpon Trust and Bahamas Outreach & Education Program we're able to get students out onto the flats.

So in these mangrove habitats waiting, we do things like looking for fish.

Also flora and fauna ID, have a lot of fun identifying the different kinds of mangroves, and these hands on experiences allow us to share a lot of information about what these plants are doing for us, how they benefit society, how they're coastal protectors, but in a hands on way that's really engaging and create these memorable experiences.

[motor rumbles] -Yeah Will!

-Alec draws on his experiences back home in New England, where connecting kids to nature is the mission of Elevate Youth.

-Yeah one of my-- One of my favorite parts about this, this program here is we've got two young men who were part of the program last year, our, our week last year, and they're back for year two.

Last year they'd really never touched a fly rod.

And this year they are some of our best casters.

And anglers apart of this group.

And I think the overall, [muffled chatter] theme here and something that we're trying to address and in this program, same with Elevate Youth, is is really getting kids connected to nature.

-It's really important that the next generation is able to build this connection with our waters and our flats ecosystem, ♪♪ and one of the best ways to start building that connection is by actually getting out into these ecosystems, as well as interacting with guides.

So these guides they've fished their whole lives, they have a lot of knowledge to share.

And so making sure that we can facilitate that knowledge transmission down to the next generation.

♪♪ -Fish for Change has student programs in multiple countries.

Besides bringing students from diverse backgrounds together, the goal is to include local groups in conservation work.

-At this point in time and our our society, certainly in the States, really in the world as we are in the Bahamas right now, is a lot of young people have have lost connection to to the natural world.

Even in the Bahamas, as an ocean nation, there's a majority of kids here on this island, don't spend really any time on the water.

-So during the summertime, we facilitate a flat stay at several different camps around the country.

♪♪ [branches rustling] ♪♪ [thudding] ♪♪ So partnering with local NGOs like Bahamas National Trust and Brief, we’re able to connect with their students.

They bring in students and kind of consolidate them into one area so it's a really effective way to reach a large group of students.

then bring this information back to their teachers and schools, and we can have the opportunity to further engage with those students during the academic year.

[inaudible] ♪♪ Seeing the progression of these two young men over, you know, over last year and then keeping in touch with them, working with the school here and getting more programs or opportunities for local kids to engage in being outdoors and experiencing some of this just beautiful, beautiful places of the world.

♪♪ -Alright, the fish I’m cooking right now is a, The fish cooking right now is a strawberry grouper, I caught him like, 15 miles off CocoCay with Barry, I have it on the grill right now.

♪♪ Yeah, all of us is cooking off.

There's some boys who are cooking, triggerfish and yellowtail.

♪♪ -The biggest things that we can do as as an older generation is, is pass on that love for the outdoors that maybe we have or that we had growing up right?

I think folks that are that are outdoorsy people, ♪♪ environmentalist advocates, they're only that because they had the opportunity to experience the outdoors.

♪♪ [water splashing] ♪♪ And obviously without that opportunity, without a mentor, without a program, without somebody pushing you to go explore, why would you care about something that you you've never really been a part of?

So that's what we're we're trying to do here, is create the next generation of young environmental stewards and I'd say it's going pretty well so far.

♪♪ -Well, we've come again to that part of the program that I like least.

But we always have to-- We always get there somehow, the time to say goodbye, and so I shall.

Bye bye.

I'm Willem Lange, and I hope to see you again on Windows to the Wild.

♪♪ Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by, the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust, the John D. McGonagle Foundation, the Bailey Charitable Foundation, Road Scholar, and viewers like you.

Thank you!

-Make a gift to the wild and support the Willem Lange Endowment Fund, established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS.

To learn how you can keep environmental, nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at (603) 868-4467.

Thank you.

♪♪ ♪♪