| Middle
Schoolers Explore
Arctic Wildlife Refuge
The Associated Press
Posted July 23, 2003
 Fairbanks
students get a chance to study the region on its own terms,
teachers say.
GALBRAITH LAKE -- Willie Via used a break during
his first hike into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to
watch a distant group of Dall sheep gracefully traversing
a mountainside.
"I was always kind of interested in seeing the area,"
the Randy Smith Middle School student said while perched on
a plateau just inside the refuge's boundary. "It's on
the national news and stuff because of the oil debate."
Students who were willing to sacrifice a portion of their
summer vacation received a rare chance this month to spend
several days in the region, exploring the Arctic and visiting
with scientists who have studied it.
Fairbanks teachers Jim Lokken and Marty Foster recently received
a $22,000 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to
take students on a trip to the ANWR area.
The funding for the trip followed an equal-sized grant from
the Toyota USA Foundation for Lokken and Foster, a math teacher
at Randy Smith, to develop a Web-based curriculum for the
Arctic.
Lokken and Foster said their goal for the trip was to provide
students with a personal experience in the Arctic, a chance
to examine the region on their own terms without getting lost
in the polarized rhetoric of the drill-versus-conserve debate.
Activities focused on largely informal exploration of the
area with little book work outside of students recording their
general observations in a journal.
"The Arctic Refuge has never really had a personal voice,"
said Cathy Curby, the refuge's wildlife interpretative specialist
for Fish and Wildlife and one of the organizers of the trip.
"The development side has had its voice and the environmental
side has had its conservation voice. But there's never been
kind of that middle voice that says, 'This is what's really
happening on the ground level and you're both exaggerating.'
"
Lokken, a wiry, athletic science teacher, admits that he
prefers the exploration model of education over any technical
assignments or paperwork.
"I'm more of a let's-go-climb-every-mountain type,"
he said.
The first mountain on the agenda came on the morning after
the students and 20 adults who attended the excursion set
up camp at Galbraith Lake, near an old trans-Alaska oil pipeline
construction airstrip sandwiched between ANWR and the Gates
of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in the Brooks Range.
On the morning of the hike, the group traveled to a pipeline
access point near where the ANWR boundary is closest to the
road. Lokken led them under the pipeline, into the refuge
and up a tundra-covered hill.
Taking a lunch break atop a plateau before ascending a steep,
rock-covered mountain, the students passed around a set of
image-stabilizing binoculars in hopes of seeing Dall sheep,
which Lokken assured them were a regular sight in this area
of the refuge.
Although the students noticed a well-established trail leading
up the mountain, they saw nothing until Lokken spotted about
a dozen sheep near the base of the mountain.
A short while later, most of the students hiked up the mountain
directly past the sheep.
The hike also included exploring a cave that led about 20
feet back, a search for fossils in the once oceanic area and
a spirited effort at throwing a few rocks off the summit of
the mountain for perspective.
Like on most of the trip, there was no semblance of a formal
lesson on this hike.
Lokken, who has become familiar with the area through trapping
arctic ground squirrels for research at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks, said his main goal for the trip was for
students to take away their own appreciation of the refuge.
"A lot of these students, they have never been up here
before," said Curby, the refuge's wildlife interpretative
specialist.
"They know what Interior Alaska looks like and they
probably know what Anchorage looks like, but this is a chance
for them to see a little more of their own back yard."
The Associated Press
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