It’s been a go lately. Roadless and travel management plans and new mines and bad roads and all sorts of wanton, destructive behavior from an administration continuing to wage an all out assault on our public lands.
You might have noticed that we’ve been a little quieter than usual around here lately.
Part of that is because we’ve been on the front lines, and we’re headed back. We returned from the Gates of the Arctic last week on a trip to document and do our part to stop the Ambler Road Industrial Complex from destroying one of our most pristine national parks and the Native communities around it. We met with the folks on the ground, heard from tribal representatives, learned a lot, and forged important friendships.
One of the moments that really stuck with me from the trip was on a short hike one of the mornings. Jim and I decided to hike to the top of a promontory behind our camp. The rain was misting lightly as we walked through the taiga. The smell of spruce thick in the air. As we reached the top the vantage was better than we thought. A panorama of the rain system moving across the lake toward our camp was awe-inspiring. And unexpectedly we could see for miles in the other direction away from our camp as well. The quiet was surreal. The kind where you can hear your own blood vessels. Rarely do you get views so grand and so uninterrupted by man. What we were looking at was the corridor. The Ambler corridor. That people are working very hard to end this beauty and quiet. And folks like us must work harder.
Part of that is because the debrief from Ambler is running straight into prep for the next fight.
In five days we’re headed back to Alaska, this time to another place near and dear to our hearts – the Tongass National Forest – in an effort to do our part to save America’s greatest old growth forest which is under active threat of imminent logging and destruction via the Twin Mountain II timber sale and more like it to come.
And that’s just a small part of the goings on here.
We’ve been writing and photographing and filming and creating and fighting the good fight. A lot of it behind the scenes on projects and initiatives we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks and months.
In the coming days we’ll be doing a full rollout of a powerful roadless map and comment engine we built in partnership with the Sierra Club.
We’re having great conversations across the public lands world and building more major tools here to take the fight to them and to make sure this administration doesn’t get away with their most dastardly attempts to strip us of our natural inheritance.
We’ll be posting from the field as we can. Service in Southeast Alaska is thin, so expect it in bursts and expect the rest when we’re back.
If you have any recommendations for us please don’t hesitate to drop a comment here and let us know!
Until next time,
Will
More Than Just Parks runs on readers. No trillionaires, no corporate sponsors, nobody upstream of us with an opinion about what we publish. When we tell you we’ve been in Gates of the Arctic and we’re leaving for the Tongass in five days, subscriptions are what put us there. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade, it’s about the cost of a bundle of firewood a month.
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