Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 16:58:28 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Paul O'Brien Subject: Second attempt re ANWR - Part 1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I forgot that you can't forward anything to MDOsprey, so I'll copy it. But since it exceeds 250 lines, I'll do it in two parts. This comes from Bill Evans via Bob Augustine. Paul O'Brien Rockville, Mont. Co., MD pobrien776@aol.com from NY Birds on Birding onthenet Subject: ANWR From: "Bill Evans" Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 01:33:13 -0400 FYI below; definitely worth a skim if you're interested in the fate of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 00:31:17 EDT From: GreatGrayO@aol.com Subject- ANWR I just got this narrative written by Mark Herndon. Mark is an oilman from Oklahoma who has worked with us for many years on our storm intercept projects as a volunteer. He just spent a month trekking ANWR... read what he has to say. Pass it on to your friends if you are so inclined. Erik Rasmussen Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies NSSL/OU Hi everyone, For those of you who don't know, I returned yesterday from a month alone in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in far northeastern Alaska. I'm really beat. I lost 25 lbs and basically feel like I have been beaten up. It was a really tough trip. I want to share a little bit about the place with you while it is still fresh in my mind; things that I feel are very important. I want to grab you by the lapels and tell you a few things that are true, because I have seen them. ANWR is probably the biggest chunk of absolute wilderness left in this country. I've also been in part of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Noatak National Preserve, two other large protected areas in the Brooks Range. ANWR is huge compared to those places; it's a place where you could walk your whole life and never see it all. Contrary to what you may have heard about the place in the media, it is not a vast wasteland. It is like heaven on earth, and hasn't been touched by man. There is not a single building, not a single trail, in an area that I've heard is about comparable to South Carolina. It's 19 million acres and there ain't no visitor center. Very few people go there. It is difficult and committing to get there. Since I have been there, and with the current political situation about ANWR's coastal plain, I emphatically want to tell you what it is like. And feel free to tell your friends. First, I paddled the Canning River, on the west side of the Refuge. I started up high in the glaciated Brooks Range and hiked for a few days. Craggy mountains and a two day snowstorm on the fourth of July. It looks wilder than the wildest part of Colorado without the trees. That part of the refuge is far north of treeline. As I floated down I saw gyrfalcons, peregrines and golden eagles. I saw musk ox and had a long, close encounter with a grizzly bear. Everywhere were tracks of caribou, muskox, grizzly, wolf and wolverine. I hiked up side valleys that were miles wide and absolutely flat tundra covered with lupines and arctic poppies. A close examination of the tundra reveals hundreds of tiny flowers and lichens. Everywhere were old caribou antlers and skulls poking up through the tundra. Wolf killed caribou skeletons also dot the tundra, often skulls with huge antlers attached. I saw more muskox, and managed to walk pretty close to some of them, before they got a little agitated. As I floated out of the mountains to the coastal plain I began to see caribou in earnest. More than you could ever count. It was like being in a herd in Africa. This is also where I came out of the wilderness part of the refuge and the river became the boundary between state land on the left (where oil exploration goes on) and ANWR on the right bank. On the state land I began to see many abandoned fuel drums and huge tracks on the tundra where cat trains shoot seismic in the winter. The tracks don't go away any time soon. I saw abandoned drums on the tundra constantly after a while over on the state land. As I crossed the coastal plain I saw many smaller caribou herds and began to see lots of birds; geese, ducks, tundra swans, and many strange types of birds that I have no idea what they were, probably migrating up from Hawaii or Chile to nest. All this time, I saw more and more garbage on the left bank. Most of the animals were on the right bank. In this day and age, I would think that BP-Amoco, Exxon, and Phillips would go clean all that crap up. I made my way to the delta of the river where it empties into the Beaufort Sea, and in a 2:00am lull in the wind paddled a roundabout 10 miles across the four mile lagoon to an island that is about 6 miles long. There were many small icebergs about thirty feet across. I saw old sod huts that the eskimos used to live in on the island, and found that the entire north side of the island was still fast against the sea ice which continues to somewhere in Russia, I guess. I walked out on it for a ways, and it is really rough. One day I watched ringed seals (polar bears staple food) sunning on the ice through binoculars. I saw a huge set of polar bear tracks around the lagoon side of the island, but they were pretty old. The island was just a few miles outside of the ANWR boundary, and Exxon had drilled a dry hole on it in the past two years. It was one of the filthiest locations I have ever seen in my 15 years working in the oil industry. I was really surprised, because Exxon drillsites in the lower 48 are usually the cleanest of them all. I was not impressed with what I saw of the oil industry in Alaska. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================