Notes From An Ecologist: Heading Into Dangerous Territory | The Falmouth Enterprise
Every day for the last month I鈥檝e been working along the Dalton Highway, the 495-mile, two-lane gravel road that connects Fairbanks, Alaska, to the oil fields on the Arctic Ocean coast at Prudhoe Bay. I鈥檝e also been looking into some of the wildest lands in the United States.
Last Friday, my colleague and I found a gyrfalcon sitting on a cliff that sits just inside the westernmost boundary of a National Wildlife Refuge. Each night I eat supper in the endless light of Arctic summer looking south from the dining room of the Toolik Field Station鈥攚here many researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woodwell Climate Research Center have worked over the past five decades鈥攊nto the peaks of the Brooks Range in the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
I came in early spring to set up instruments in small streams both north and south of the Brooks Range. But spring has been very late. Streams in the north were frozen solid until just a few days ago. But for the past few days it鈥檚 been 60 degrees, and fast-melting snow has rivers running high.
Notes From An Ecologist: Heading Into Dangerous Territory | Falmouth Enterprise