Two Sisters Bakery started our day: cinnamon roll, chocolate bread, three berry danish. Um-m-m, good. And, we’re off to the Alaska Islands and Oceans VC. Beautiful glass entry and a cool dory in the entry. The entry is free but donations are accepted. Actually, most of us will never visit the territory that this Center manages: the Aleutian Islands and islands all the way up to the Arctic Ocean or what is called the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, 5,000,000 federally-protected acres of islands and islets, rocks and cliffs and the wildlife that lives on them. That’s quite a mouthful and the Center is not only a museum and VC but also a manager of all this.
We first watched an excellent film about the Tiglax, the research boat which travels throughout the islands with researchers. Gave us an idea about what the Center does. Lots of other exhibits throughout the building. The first is a small room which has been transformed into a bird rookery with rocks all around, films of bird circling to land, surround sounds of birds calling. You feel as if you are actually in the rookery. This is not the best picture but it’s the best I could get. There were 3 screens which showed birds flying around the rookery and landing on the rocks in front of you. Here you can rocks with birds perched on them.
You round the corner and face a cabin with a trapper in the doorway speaking to you. He tells you his mother was Aleut and his father was a Russian. He chats about fur trapping and prices and then heads back into his cabin.
There are native artifacts emphasizing their relationship to nature.
There are WWII artifacts since some fierce battles were fought here.
There’s a large section about ecology and how humans can help the Center with its mission. One of the main things that we all can do is not to litter, whether on land or on sea, it causes problems when critters eat what we toss. We’ve learned through all our visits to our National and State parks that when humans leave food out for bears and other critters, they become accustomed to it and frequent areas where humans are. Not a good idea. Here we learned that there are other things that critters eat that hurts them. Here is what was recovered from the digestive tract of a dead albatross.
There was also a lot of information about what the scientists from the Center do, how they do it and where. They cover a very large remote area and it’s all islands which make accessibility extremely more difficult.
They have a ‘mother ship’ which is their central support for their missions. However, for their missions, the scientists and researchers use small inflatable boats to get them to the islands for their studies.
And this description of what life is like for these researchers on these remote islands.
There’s a bit about the oil spill in Alaska from the Exxon Valdez and how large that oil spill got to be and the territory it affected.
There were lots of hands on activities for anyone to try and lots of examples of their scientific equipment and computers that we could see.
Excellent VC and we learned a lot about their mission and about the islands in the Aleutians.
Here’s a quote that sums up the mission of the Center from one of my favorite Presidents.
We then walked out to the beach from the Center’s back patio and enjoyed walking along it. Then it was back to the RV to relax before we headed to Seward tomorrow.
Hey, there’s a moose in our neighbor’s rig.
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