Mission Statement

We, Chris Behnke and Corinna Cook, are pleased to devote the summer months of 2009 to a themed kayak exploration of Southeast Alaska. We plan to paddle roughly one thousand miles from Misty Fjords to Glacier Bay and to compile a photo project treating the subject of land and resource conservation in the Tongass National Forest.

The United States Forest Service (USFS) manages most of the Tongass National Forest. One hundred years of extraction-based federal management has resulted in a scarred landscape and a dependence on federal subsidies among Southeast Alaska communities. Private corporations have also contributed to the incrimental destruction of our temperate coastal rainforest. Through ANCSA, the Alaska Native corporations were given control of large blocks of the Tongass in the form of land allotments. A number of these corporations in Southeast have methodically clearcut much of their land with little or no regard to sustainable timber practices. With the end of the fifty-year contracts which have dominated USFS policy in the 1990s, the ensuing collapse of the regional pulp mill economy, and the Native corporations' widespread practice of sending its timber to be processed overseas, Southeast Alaskan towns have struggled to remain economically viable communities. Southeast Alaska’s population is shrinking, and questions of our future in this place are critical.

As members of and participants in a market-driven society, as creatures of a coastal forested ecosystem, and simply as homegrown Alaskans overflowing with love for our northern world, we intend to experience and document our temperate rainforest's logging scars firsthand. We wish to understand and expose the effects of corporate natural resource control. We will explore the edges os forests that are going to be cut, forests that have been cut, sites of potential hydrological power development, sites of potential mineral development, and areas that, for the time being, remain unhurt and unthreatened by the burgeoning development around us.

11 June 2009

Revilla Circumnav. Continued





Sunsets sinking in empty, cloudless skies the previous weeks renewed our appreciation for clouds and the orb's nighttime adieu to the sky.



Post-nap: Christopher and his devil's club halo.


Corinna and the beloved New Zealand Macpac tent.




An eerie visit to the privately-owned Bell Island Hot Springs: this place was so recently abandoned that although buildings and boats are in shambles, books remain on the shelves and clothes hang in the guest house closets. The pipe system has fallen to pieces, so the hot springs no longer even feed into the pool.




Christopher passing the teardrop islands of Naha Bay.
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Beginning Revillagigedo

We open with sunlight in Ketchikan (soon diminishing to rain) and an itch to leave town. We here point southeast.




Christopher and New Eddystone Rock set the stage for Misty Fjords.

Walker Bay and severe clear.


Christopher, Corinna, and our Revilla circumnavigation mascot, Captain S. Foster.

Ralph, our retired atomic physicist and provider of all things seafoody, hands Scott a camera. Soon thereafter Ralph hands off three lively dungeoness crabs which scramble about in the hulls of our boats until supper.
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