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By: Wyatt Skopov-Normane, University of Vermont
Despite the harsh nature of the environments we traversed – high winds, low moisture, frozen soils, among others – I was captivated by the diverse spread of plants and flowers. There were many plants that I learned to identify, but a few stand out as my favorite encounters.
By: Michael Minnick, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
How do animals like grizzlies and moose disappear so easily into the landscape? It felt as though most of the animals were moving through the landscape like ghosts, leaving only hints of their existence for us to see. I think it was this thought that made me realize something: this land and its ecosystems have been here for so much longer than I could truly comprehend.
By: Mariam Adegoke, Colby College
Welcome to Mariam’s Top 5 list of Beetles found in Taku, British Columbia, Canada on the 2025 Round River trip. In this list, I will be ranking 5 of the beetles I’ve found on this trip based on shape, color, and location they were found in. Stay tuned to see which beetle gets placed at #1!
By: Lauren Schagel, Lake Superior State University.
I loosely held the base of their tail, supported them with my other hand under their belly, and got to tell them they will be alright. I got to see each salmon swim out to Kuthai Lake, continuing their long journey back home.
By: Katie Anthony, University of Vermont
When first arriving in Atlin for the summer, I was skeptical about how much wildlife I would actually get to see. Maybe a moose or two? A grizzly if lucky? Never could I have imagined the number of animals I would get to see during the first three weeks here, let alone in the span of a single day.
By: Karyssa Hiller, University of Vermont
Avoiding bears is truly an art. We constantly talked, whistled, or sang to avoid surprising a bear and startling it.
By: Ruby Borden, Carleton College
At the end of the day, we each took a piece of the glacier home with us, some of us as dust in our boots and others as pounds of rocks we carried in our packs…
Sebastian Szweda, Westminster College, gives a point-of-view look at a day spent summiting mountains in the Taku watershed for the global GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) project.
he Llewellyn Glacier is retreating which provides an opportunity to view depositional glacial features such as recessional moraines, and to observe patterns of vegetative succession in newly ice-free areas. Perhaps future Round River students will one day have the good fortune of conducting a rain-free vegetation survey at the Llewellyn terminus, but we made the most of our rainy days, and were content to fondly recount this trip’s adventures from the comfort of Phil’s couch.
While the unrelenting daylight of Atlin doesn’t lend much to traditional nighttime pleasures, we’ve had the privilege of finally witnessing the beautiful British Colombia sunsets during Nighthawk surveys in the past two weeks.
The GLORIA project is a global project that maps out plant species on different summit altitudes. Sentinel mountain is the tallest mountain used for research in the GLORIA project. The data gathered from this four-day backpacking trip will be used to track and monitor species at different elevations which include Nival, high alpine, low alpine, and tree line.
By Andrew Corcilius of Northland College Thank you for letting us visit the glacier and giving us the opportunity to see Grizzly and Moose tracks along the shoreline of the glacial lake as I very well will never have that…
The group fans out and I find myself drawn to murmurs and shouts of more scat peppered throughout this flat and open terrain. Dr. Watine visits each person and I notice a smile curling on her lips. She marches proudly to the front of the group and clears her throat “This might very well be a wolf rendezvous site…” An explosion of whispers erupts between us but is quickly silenced by Dr. Watine “…and therefore I will be performing a wolf call in an attempt to bring some in.”
The process is simple; find the temperature loggers, which are small devices buried underneath rocks that track temperature data over a year and download the data onto a computer for research. Probably sounds easy to anyone who hasn’t looked for a temperature logger before. But the catch is, one of them is always nearly impossible to find. It’s like a game of hide and seek with your friends, but one of them goes into the yard and digs a hole in the ground to hide.
The plants begin to consume your mind, you walk with your eyes constantly scanning the ground for the tracks of who may have been here before you. There’s this feeling when you began to understand an ecosystem. It is almost as is you start to move through these spaces as if you are one with it, rather than above it.
Conservation is one language. To speak it is to approach the natural landscape through a valuable scientific lens. But we cannot account for the words our language misses. The cultural and historical connections, the footers at the end of the page. This highlights the importance of incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, such as Nyman’s, into conservation efforts. The more knowledge that can be compiled, the more likely we will be to truly conserve these landscapes in their entirety, not just in the language we understand.
by Madeline Waterman of the University of Vermont When our group first arrived around 2 a.m. at the Whitehorse Airport, everyone was bleary-eyed, hesitant to make conversation, and more than a little anxious about the onslaught of mosquitoes we were…