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Every fact on these pages is secretly a math problem. How many salmon actually make it home? How much rain lands on the football field? How many of you would it take to outweigh an elk? Grab a slider and find out — no worksheet required.
These are real Montesano numbers. Drag each slider to change what you put in, and watch the answer change — that’s the whole idea behind estimation, ratios, and unit conversion. Try to guess first, then check yourself.
Bingham Creek Hatchery releases about 450,000 young coho into the Satsop each year. Only a small fraction survive the trip out to the ocean and all the way back. Drag the survival rate:
The MJSHS football field is about 57,600 square feet. Drag how many inches of rain fall on it in a year (we usually get around 80):
A big bull Roosevelt elk weighs about 900 pounds. About how much do you weigh?
A Satsop cooling tower stands about 480 feet tall. A school bus is about 40 feet long. Drag the bus length and stack them up:
In December 2007, Interstate 5 sat under about 14 feet of floodwater. How tall are you?
Each challenge works at a lot of levels — younger students can just explore the sliders and talk about “bigger” and “smaller,” while older ones can work the arithmetic out by hand and check it here. They cover multiplication, division, ratios, and unit conversion, all wrapped in a place kids already know.
The numbers come from the other pages in this collection, where you’ll find the sources behind them — explore the whole backyard →
Follow a salmon from a gravel nest in the Satsop or Wynoochee all the way to the ocean and back.
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of shorebirds refuel on our mudflats on their way to the Arctic.
The Chehalis is one of Washington’s biggest flood corridors — here’s why, and what we do about it.
A fault offshore, a giant wave in the year 1700, and why we practice for the next one.
The Satsop cooling towers on the skyline — a true story of energy, engineering, and economics.
A logging mill pond right above town became one of Washington’s early state parks.
How a temperate rainforest works — and how it feeds the cold, clean streams salmon need.
North America’s largest elk, in herds around our valley and the Olympic Mountains.
Satsop, Wynoochee, Chehalis — our rivers carry Indigenous names and a deep salmon culture.