Discovery naturalists & Southeast Alaska LGBTQ+ Alliance (SEAGLA)
Margaret Custer at Southeast Alaska Land Trust recently asked the senior Discovery dudes—Steve Merli, Bob Armstrong and me—if we’d like to lead a nature hike for SEALT and SEAGLA at the conservancy’s Very Beary Berry Wetlands. We were honored to partner with these two awesome organizations. Bob now lives close to what I call VeryBeary, and continually finds stuff in this 70-acre marshy bottomland that nobody else has noticed. Kristi Allen and David Waters live at the north end of VeryBeary and were instrumental in helping SEALT acquire it. Link above is to the Land Trust’s newsletter describing that landmark achievement.
Cover of my scoping document and journal for the SEALT-SEAGLA-Discovery adventure.
Hikers fanned out through the iris meadows alongside Strawberry Creek. Photo by Bob Armstrong.
On June 26th, 3 days before our scheduled group hike, Cathy Pohl, Koren Bosworth & I met with Land Trust staff to scout VeryBeary for a 30-person off-trail adventure. Although an abandoned gravel road—precursor to Glacier Highway—transects the parcel lengthwise, there are no official trails. For us at Discovery, that’s all the better! Getting off trail is good for focus. And what a privilege to do it with a bunch of sharp observers, in one of the wildlife hotspots of Áak’w Aaní.
On scouting days I’m freer to take ground and drone photos than when leading hikes. My 20-page journal dives into questions like recent Little Ice Age history. VeryBeary sits in the low pass between Eeyák’w and Asx̱’ée (Amalga & Eagle River) that Kathy Hocker and I named ‘Risen Valleys’ back in 2003, when tracking wildlife for the Land Trust. The entire valley flooded on high tides, back when the land was depressed about 10 feet by weight of expanded glaciers.
But if that’s true, then how come we can’t reach bottom of these bogs with our 4-foot peat probe?! Hmmmm. . .
There’s a lot more cartographic, historical and scatological hmmmms where that came from, in this 11mb pdf 
