Roam School Family

There are 64 permits available per day to get to The Wave. During peak season, 300 people compete for them. We won! …and then we realized we had an 8-year-old who had never hiked 6.5 miles in his life, a 90º & sunny weather forecast, no trail and no shade. This episode explains the geology of The Wave: Jurassic sand dunes, 200 million years old, turned to stone but caught mid-motion. We're gui...

Redwood trees have roots only ten feet deep. For a tree that grows as tall as the statue of liberty, that should be a problem…This episode is about why it isn't. We explain how redwoods manufacture the fog that feeds them, what a banana slug actually does for a forest, and what the Yurok people understood about these trees long before anyone else was paying attention. And we tell the story of four...

This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signa...

Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks. This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent...