Drew Higgins is a student at Carleton College (class of 2016). She was on the Round River Taku Watershed Conservation Program in summer 2014.
I never thought I would return to Atlin after my Round River experience there in the summer of 2014. It’s a beautiful, special place, but there are simply not many opportunities to visit a town of four hundred people in northern British Columbia. Yet this past summer I did find myself returning, and this time, not with eight Round River students, but with thirty-two Juneau Icefield Research Program students.
The Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP) is a glaciology research and field training program for high school, undergraduate and graduate students. Over the course of two months in the summer, students traverse eighty-miles across the Juneau Icefield, starting in Juneau, Alaska in late June and ending in Atlin, British Columbia in mid-August. Along the way, we practice mountaineering skills, receive lectures from glaciologists and earth-system scientist, and undertake group research projects.
On my Round River program, we studied marmot behavior, mountain goat, stone sheep and caribou populations, as well as alpine vegetation changes. We met and spoke with the native people of Atlin, the Taku River Tlingit, and heard about their experiences and connection with their land. We hiked mountains, walked along rivers and fished for salmon. We even saw a few grizzly bears fishing for salmon too.
On JIRP, I skied almost every day on snow. I dug countless three-to-five meter snow pits to measure snow accumulation for JIRP’s seventy-year-old record of the icefield’s changing mass. I rappelled into crevasses.
There were no people on the glacier besides us JIRPers, and there was certainly no wildlife, beside a few lost-looking Arctic terns. In these ways, my JIRP experience was entirely dissimilar from my Round River one. But Round River and JIRP do have one key commonality—and it is not just that they both end in Atlin.
Each program specializes in the education of young scientists through in-the-field, experiential learning. For example, during my Round River program I learned about caribou management while seeing caribou with my own eyes in the field. On JIRP I learned about where crevasses are most likely to form due to high friction and stress, and then identified them out on the glacier.
The subject matter differed, but the teaching methodology of both programs was alike, and I feel quite privileged to have had both experiences–and especially privileged to have had the opportunity to return to Atlin for a second time.
