Volunteer Spotlight: Dan Lesh
The summer of 2002 I was a student intern with SEAWEAD in Icy Straits. As I soon learned, SEAWEAD is about biting off and chewing a lot. Some excerpts from my journal give examples of the effect this research had on me.
While doing reconnaissance for potential bear study sites:
"The outer coast landscape is much like the inside passage but the whole place has a very ancient and spiritual look to it as well with a feeling of great power hanging in the air. The balance of sea and land, potential and kinetic energy has never seemed so well fit anywhere else I've been. Kayaking in this land was a turning point in my life. A sudden trust in myself gripped me where it had somehow been held back before. "
While doing a Landmark Tree Stand in Black Bay Gorge River area:
"This precious old growth habitat was truly a different world for me even though I' thought I'd spent a good deal of time in the pristine forests of southeast. A two hour hike up to this ridge and down put us in one of the wildest and most amazing rivers i can imgaine. There was great old growth growing right up to the river and the river itself went from being a hundred feet wide and very shallow to twenty feet across with beautiful twenty foot deep pools. There was so much smooth gravel every where in the river it looked like a painting. Bob and I ended up spending all day trying to find the best stand in an unconcious and impossible effort to do this place justice."
Reflecting on the Brown Bear study in Mud Bay:
"The scat survey was the highlight though and taught me a lot about how to determine the contens of bear scat and what a bear bed looks like. The mind and activities of the bears began to be less mysterious to me."
One doesn't easily forget such experiences and though I left again after that summer for college in Iowa, I found myself back in the area for the next spring and summer. The bear study had grown into Cheryl's master's project and I was fortunate enough to be her paid research assistant and spend another summer observing brown bears, living remotely, and trying to figure out the meaning of our work, lives, and SEAWEAD. My own personal development has been so intertwined with my experiences with SEAWEAD that I'm not sure what to think. It seems that SEAWEAD is striving to provide a sane voice of experience and natural knowledge- a voice from the wilderness spoken through grant applications, web publications, and symposiums. Bob Christenson has done much to place SEAWEAD and its mission solidly in Southeast Alaska and hold it responsible to the land and to time, the ultimate judges of a society. The research undertaken provides us with an education to begin a markedly absent public discussion about the future of these places and these animals. The internship program is equally a experience apart from all others. It is a chance to work among the greatness of Southeast Alaska and begin to realize that what leads us to understand our surroundings leads us to understand ourselves.