Waconia High School conservation club mixes hunting, fishing and rubbish cleanups to celebrate the outdoors

WACONIA, MINN. – A busload of fifth-graders from Southview Elementary School piled onto the ice of Lake Waconia, scooting, sprinting and walking en masse to an array of fish shanties.

Inside those heated shelters, members of the Waconia High School Conservation Club stood ready with fishing poles, live bait and patience. Their job? Harness the excitement of the kids and help them catch fish.

Thanks to the club and its many boosters, a one-day introduction to ice fishing has become part of the Waconia School District’s fifth-grade curriculum.

“I’ve never not had fun with our club, but this is my favorite event of the year,” said Lincoln Gammell, a senior club member who helped a student keep his panfish lure near the bottom of the lake. “This is where we convince so many kids to join.”

It’s not a hard sell.

Now in its 18th year, the outdoors club at Waconia High School is stronger than ever and poised to tackle its most ambitious project. This spring, the 180-member group of high schoolers will follow the guidance of a professional arborist and two state forestry specialists to revitalize a 13-acre parcel of rundown woods at Bayview Elementary School.

The multiyear, $30,000 restoration and stewardship plan is an extension of the club’s signature volunteerism. Local science teachers Wayne Trapp and Michael Jensen have built the outdoors club from scratch to local prominence by mixing fishing, hunting, camping, fossil hunting and other adventures with a series of annual rubbish cleanups.

It’s a model of recruiting young people to the outdoors that’s still attracting attention from neighboring districts. Two teachers at Delano High School, for example, shadowed Trapp and Jensen during the ice fishing extravaganza on Jan. 24 — which included the placement of a portable sauna in the midst of about 35 fish houses and pop-ups. The Delano teachers, Andy Brown and Josh Hiltner, want to start a similar club.

“This is what we do in Waconia,” Jensen said during a break in the action. “We take every kid fishing.”

The goal from the start has been to hook kids on the outdoors and inspire them to care about nature. “None of this stuff happens unless you take care of your natural resources,” Jensen said.

Trapp said the club started with half a dozen high school students who wanted to do outdoorsy stuff. A parent came forward with a donation of $500. Their first outing was a ditch cleanup along the county road where Waconia High School student Andy Kutzke, 16, of Mayer, died in a car crash on his way home from ice fishing in 2007.

To this day, club members clean the roadside twice a year. Along the way, the group evolved into a full-fledged 501c3 educational nonprofit, with annual trips to one of three high-adventure destinations: Glacier National Park in Montana, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness or the Superior Hiking Trail.

Full-fledged members earn a school letter at Waconia High. The school district pays coaching stipends to Trapp and Jensen and provides storage space for the club’s enclosed trailer, ice fishing equipment, camping gear and other supplies. The group’s annual operating budget of $5,000 to $10,000 is provided by donations shepherded by an active booster club. Donors include the Waconia Lions Club, New Germany and Waconia fire departments, local business owners, parents, alumni and the Williams family of Waconia.

“We rely on our community’s generosity, and money hasn’t been an issue,” said Boosters Club president Patrick Kiel, whose children were club members before graduating.

Kiel looked around Lake Waconia during the fifth-grade ice fishing event to cite examples of abundant community support. In Towne Marina donated all the live bait, Koch Bus Service provided transportation from Waconia’s three elementary schools, a booster club member provided the sauna, a network of local ice anglers provided 20 heated shanties, and Watertown’s school district lent 12 portable shelters.

“We’ll do whatever we can to support this group and these kids,” said Ben Mase, who owns In Towne Marina with his brother, Jimmy. “It’s amazing how many kids from Waconia have never been on a lake of any kind, even though they have a big one in their backyard.”

Mase said it’s extraordinary for the high schoolers in the club to spend one day every March gathering trash from the ice fishing season before it sinks into Lake Waconia. The club also picks up waste following Waconia’s annual Nickle Dickle Day festival and has organized major cleanups of Lake Waconia’s historic Coney Island.

“The way they’ve become part of the community is just a wonderful thing,” Mase said.

He credited Trapp and Jensen for nurturing the club’s growth. There’s an annual pheasant hunt at a local sportsmen’s club, primitive skills training, archery, snow shoeing, dog sledding, maple syrup making, and at least one annual fall camping trip somewhere in Minnesota.

Last year’s high-adventure odyssey took 35 club members canoeing, camping and fishing in the Boundary Waters for a week. They entered through Moose Lake, camping along the way in five separate groups.

“It was a bugger to plan, but it was a fun trip,” Jensen said.

This year, for the first time, the Conservation Club will send some of its members to the University of Wisconsin-River Falls for a day of learning in the school’s Planet and Earth Science Department. Jensen said the invitation followed a chance meeting with program leaders during the club’s 2023 trip to Glacier.

Come spring, club members will anchor the forest renewal project at Bayview Elementary. Professionals will be hired to take down dead, dying and unwanted trees, but the high schoolers and members of the booster club will remove the debris and fallen timber. They’ll also remove buckthorn before planting hundreds of desired trees and native shrubs.

The restoration plan calls for rebuilding a large staircase, replacing a culvert and spreading mulch across the forest’s walking trails. The school-owned forest is in a natural area featuring a large marsh that filters water between Lake Waconia and Burandt Lake. Revitalizing the space will discourage nearby residents who have been dumping lawn debris on the property, according to the restoration plan.

Jensen said the project isn’t a capstone for the conservation club, but it’s another way to make the club more important while keeping it fun.

“These kids just come out by the dozens wanting to make a difference and to be relevant,” he said. “This is something that’s going to last.”