Cooperative Living Northern Virginia Electric • June 2016 • Kids’ Korner

Did you know that you are a proud owner of millions of acres of land and water? This ginormous amount of real estate includes snow-capped mountains, crystal-clear lakes, seashores, historic structures, battlefields, cultural artifacts in museums and national parks.

What an awesome heritage! As a valid landowner, you should want to go look over your property, enjoy its features and keep an eye on its preservation.

Most of the sites are free to visit, but some require fees that are used to protect the natural and cultural resources and provide pleasant experiences for guests.

However, if you happen to be a current fourth-grader, you and your family can step into these exciting places FREE of charge during the upcoming summer months. This free ride comes compliments of the White House and Federal Land Management agency. They are inviting all fourth-graders to apply for a FREE pass to national parks, national forests, national refuges and more.

If your family doesn’t include a fourth-grader, there are still opportunities for some free visits.

Aug. 25, 2016, is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. This is the agency that you need to thank for watching over all of your holdings. It manages all the national parks, many national monuments, national parkways and numerous historical sites. As part of the centennial celebration, Free Entrance Days have been scheduled throughout this year.

You can even join the NPS “family” as a JUNIOR RANGER! A special activity-based program is available in most parks. Interested youth can complete a series of activities while in the park, discuss their findings with a park ranger and then receive an official Ranger Patch and Certificate. Typically, Junior Rangers are between the ages of 5 and 13, but even your parents or grandparents are welcome to participate! You may want to collect a patch from every site that you visit.

With hundreds of sites in the National Park Service system, choosing where to go and what to do can be both exciting and a bit overwhelming. A good place to start your planning is at this website — findyourpark.com — where you can select the state to visit and the type of adventure you wish to experience.

For the high-heart-rate adventurer, there are rugged rocks and craggy cliffs to climb and thriving ecosystems to hop, jump and splash through.

If you’re a history buff, there are famous places to visit where things happened that should always be remembered. And for the traveler who enjoys a quiet, personal connection with nature, there are meandering trails and places to sleep under the stars.

The more you “open” America’s great gift and discover your priceless inheritance, the more you’ll realize, and appreciate, that you are growing up in a really cool land!

Now is the time to let your parents, or maybe grandparents, know that the NPS centennial is a special moment in history and you don’t want to miss it. Be aware that you really don’t have to go far to participate; no matter where you live in the United States, there is a National Park Service site within two hours of your home.

Join the celebration this summer by heading out into your wild places and prized properties. Explore. Discover. Make lifelong memories. And, most important, pledge to always be a worthy guardian of America’s shared, common ground because its future is always in the next generation’s hands … and that’s you!!

“The land belongs to the future … we come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love and understand it are the people who own it for a little while.” — Willa Cather

Depending on the time of year, there is one national park where the very first rays of sunrise will touch the continental United States. From the second week of October through the first week of March, visitors perched on this park’s highest peak will be the first to see the new day’s sun.

• Name the famous mountain, the highest peak on the Eastern Seaboard, where this event occurs.

Enter online at www.co-opliving.com or send answers with your name, address and phone number to:

Our March-April KIDS’ KORNER Super Sleuth explored the fascinating life cycle of the monarch butterfly. For a chance to win $25, entrants were asked to find an image of this delicate winged insect hiding in the magazine, explain why researchers spent years searching for the Mountain of Butterflies and name the location where this mystery was finally solved. The correct answers were page 12, the search to find the wintering destination for millions of monarch butterflies, and the transvolcanic belt of central Mexico, where the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Preserve was established in 1980 to help protect their habitat. Mary Jane Mooney was our $25 winner. Congratulations, Mary Jane!