But what if you were a child growing up in the city in a low-income family, with no access to the great outdoors beyond the sidewalks of your neighborhood?

How would you find nature and learn to love it?

If you lived in the District of Columbia, you could join a trip with Inner City Outings. A program of the Sierra Club, Inner City Outings provides wilderness adventures to people who wouldn't otherwise have them.

Begining in 1971 in San Francisco, over 50 Club chapters throughout the nation carry the program.

Outings can be structured for a variety of people, including low-income youth of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, hearing or visually impaired individuals and the physically disabled. Programs now operate in the District serving low-income, at-risk youth ages 6 to 12 with Beacon House, Highland Addition, Wheeler Creek, and Community of Hope. A new program serves physically challenged teens.

From hiking and camping, to river cleanups and environmental education, Inner City Outings takes children on a variety of outings in the Washington, DC area.

All these adventures help kids better understand the natural world around them and how they can make a difference, while providing an opportunity for volunteers to share their values and compassion, and positively impact the life of a child.

One Satisfied Customer By Deonte, Age 12

I like the Sierra Club trips, because they take us to a lot of fun places. A while ago they took us to Discovery Creek Children's Museum to see a lot of different animals. The volunteers are very nice and plan all of our trips like the Natural History Museum and the Arboretum where we learned about all different types of trees.

Volunteers and kids meet on Saturday mornings, often making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and getting organized. Group sizes vary depending on the number of volunteers and kids and the size of the community organization, but they can range from 10 to 25 children, with a volunteer-to-child ratio of 1-to-1 or 1-to-2. Once the carpools are set, the groups head out for destinations that many of the children have never visited or perhaps even heard of.

The groups take on everything from hiking to canoeing to horseback riding. On rainy days and in the coldest months, trips move inside to places with an environmental bent. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, with its IMAX theater, makes a popular inside trip, and the National Botanical Gardens, the National Zoo, and an indoor ice-skating rink have been on this winter's agenda.

Each trip carries surprises and new challenges for the children-and often the volunteers.

On one camping trip to George Washington National Forest in Virginia, leaders took the kids on a night hike through the woods. The occasional screams from children afraid of the dark-or afraid of other children who were jumping out to scare them-were to be expected. The surprise came when everyone in the group lay down on their backs in a clearing to look at the sky. When the last flashlight went out, the kids grew silent, amazed at the masses of stars normally outshined by city lights.

Another outing took the kids underground, to Skyline Caverns in Front Royal, Va. For many of the children, it was their first time inside a cave. While stalactites, stalagmites, and white urchin-like formations covered the cave, it was the subterranean streams and pools that fascinated the children.

Water is a draw in the summer, too, as the basis of trips for wading and finding fossils at Calvert Cliffs, Md.; canoeing on Lake Accotink in Fairfax, Va.; and jumping off platforms and rope swings into flooded Beaver Dam quarry near Baltimore.

During these activity-filled trips, small discoveries are made and victories achieved. A girl who has dragged herself unwillingly up a mountain forgets how tired she is once she sees the view from the top. A boy who says he's not interested in horseback riding and instead grabs for tadpoles in a nearby pond overcomes his fear late in the day and sits high on a horse, grinning. A girl hides behind a tree, hushing those around her, waiting for the woodpecker she's spotted to start its rhythmic drilling.

These moments make the trips rewarding-for the kids and the adults. Learn more about ICO in the Washington DC area...