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.
Ketchikan To Meyers Chuck
Southeast Exposure's big red barn from which kayak tours are guided. We had the luck to be welcomed to Ketchikan by the folks running this operation. Their hospitality kept us safely out of trouble while preparing food and gear for the next leg of the trip.
Two boats, two damp and chilly paddlers, and one blue tarp beneath which to celebrate a joyful crossing of Behm Canal.
A most fantastic food hang on the Cleveland Peninsula by Mr. Behnke. The sand on this beach bore the marks of plate-sized bear tracks criss-crossed with a floral pattern of deer prints.
The last sky we slept under before discovering Meyers Chuck, a bit of an eerie fairytale envisioned, built, and inhabited by a handful of backcountry homemakers.
Southeast Exposure's big red barn from which kayak tours are guided. We had the luck to be welcomed to Ketchikan by the folks running this operation. Their hospitality kept us safely out of trouble while preparing food and gear for the next leg of the trip. 
Two boats, two damp and chilly paddlers, and one blue tarp beneath which to celebrate a joyful crossing of Behm Canal. 
A most fantastic food hang on the Cleveland Peninsula by Mr. Behnke. The sand on this beach bore the marks of plate-sized bear tracks criss-crossed with a floral pattern of deer prints. 
The last sky we slept under before discovering Meyers Chuck, a bit of an eerie fairytale envisioned, built, and inhabited by a handful of backcountry homemakers.
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