KMGH News Anchor Mitch Jelniker and Will Styler, Award Winner

Cherry Creek High School senior Will Styler has been to the real Amazon, and he has created a virtual Amazon in his own backyard in the heart of Greenwood Village. He shares his passion for the Amazon and the rain forest with 3rd graders from Greenwood Village Elementary School. The students are working on a semester of material about the Amazon Ecosystem, and learn history, folklore, science, and of course, about the Amazona Victoria lily.

The Victoria Lily is extremely rare outside of South America, but Will and his family have two large ponds full of them. His fascination with the Victoria Lily and the Amazon first came from his devoted 3rd grade teacher, Peggy Filarowicz.

Amazonian Factoids

• The Amazon, the world's largest river in terms of volume, is almost 4,000 miles long, or 6,400 kilometers. Its source is high in the Peruvian Andes, and it runs to the northeastern coast of Brazil.
• The river Amazon has a drainage area of 7,050,000 km2 (2,722,000 square miles), if the Tocantins River is included in its basin.
• The Amazon River carries the greatest amount of water of all the world's rivers. The discharge of the Amazon is 199,880,000 liters (52,600,000 gallons) per second. One day's discharge from the Amazon is enough to supply New York City (population 13 million people) with freshwater for over 5 years! The Amazon maintains one-fifth (1/5) of the world's freshwater river flow.

Channel 7's Online Report about Will's Award

Victoria's Friends - A gallery of Sharon Meriash's photos of the Styler Gardens