WWC Braves the Cold for Work Day 2024

Echo Staff | April 4, 2024

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Warren Wilson College (WWC) celebrated its traditional Work Day on Thursday, an event spanning over a century. Despite morning snow flurries and adjustments to projects due to unexpected cold weather, the WWC community demonstrated resilience.

“We're really excited to get this many people down here and get the community working and getting more involved,” Jocie Funderburk said, a crew leader at the garden. 

Funderburk, overseeing a crew for weeding and broad-forking the beds, emphasized the importance of the project for planting seeds in "you-pick" beds, allowing community members to harvest their produce. 

Nearby, individuals painted signs for directing traffic and labeling plants in the garden

“We need to make a lot of signage,” Ian Ibarra said, a leader on the sign-making project. “[it’s important to] make sure that people are being respectful of the space, and make sure that people are staying out of the pollinator garden and the CSA garden, which are on either side of the you-pick garden.”

Jocie Funderburk uses a broadfork to prepare the soil.

Andrew Axelrod, Ani Jaffe, and Towner Schunk work on garden restoration.

Grace Payton holds a root

Students get their hands dirty while weeding

At another location, a large group of students prepared land for a long-term project between the Community-Oriented Regeneration Efforts (CORE) building, the farm, and the garden.

“We are building the foundation for a medicine wheel garden,” Haylee Ziegler — one of the leaders in the initiative — said. “Eventually, there's going to be a big garden full of native plants that will be a very sacred space where people can come to pray and meditate and get away from the rest of the school. So we're working with our crew [land stewards] to come up with native, Cherokee-specific plants that are significant to the Cherokee people to plant here.”

Although the project will likely take months to complete, the group remained focused and eager to complete a large portion of the preparation.

“Today, we are doing wetland restoration so that they can drain your proper water material, so that was protected from the wind and also stops invasives from growing,” Ziegler said. “Then, we're laying down cardboard, doing compost and creating rich soil for the plants to be nourished” 

Ziegler and Jetta Ghosthorse, WWC sophomores, are the leaders of the Indigenous Student Association (ISA). This project is rooted in the intention of honoring the land and promoting cross-cultural education for WWC community members. 

“I feel, as a Native American, I had to kind of teach myself and unlearn certain things about Western ideologies that took away from my cultural identity, and this project is so important for our community here, as we are land stewards, and we work so closely with the land,” Ghosthorse said. “We need to honor the generations of ancestors that came before and harvested on this land for upwards to 10,000 years ago. I recognize that they're here with us as we're doing this work. We're doing this to honor them, but also create spaces for different ways of knowing and seeing the world.”

On the river trail, another group was tasked with cleaning up the area. Eli Mills, assistant Outdoor Leadership (ODL) crew supervisor, discovered an assortment of clothing items left on the trail. 

“I found a full outfit. A pair of sweatpants, underwear, and a shirt, all separate from each other,” Mills said. “I don't think they belong to any one person. But maybe they did. A pair of loppers that work. Like, what?”

Similar to many other Work Day initiatives, this cleanup was a part of last year's work and is an ongoing effort. 

“This is a continuation of a project that we did last year in which we had both land and water-based but with the temperature change this week, we decided not to be in boats,” Mills said. “There's a group of thirty of us that started over at the bamboo forest and split to go in either direction, up and downstream.”

Neko Heinrich crosses the river to pick up a big piece of plastic.

Jay Miller and his kids pick up styrofoam.

Sofia Kislik with a piece of plastic.

For many, it was not merely about completing tasks but about fostering a deeper connection to the land and to one another. From tending to garden beds to constructing a medicine wheel garden and cleaning up the river trail, every task undertaken was imbued with care and intentionality. Despite the adversities posed by the weather, the WWC community embraced the opportunity to work together towards a common goal, fostering a sense of unity and camaraderie in the process.

Photo credits to Sarah Puterbaugh