Corpus Christi to Alaska 2006

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We're new bloggernauts - playing around a bit here. Think we might communicate via travelblog from Thailand. I'm uploading pics of our 10 week roadtrip from south Texas to southeast Alaska during summer 2006 for starters. We backpacked across the gamut of Rocky Mountain national parks. Highlights included a 40 mile backcountry hike in Banff, and getting dropped by floatplane off Admiralty Island to kayak into Pack Creek brown bear observatory.

So, I'll sign off with an excerpt from natural history writer Dave Quammen's "Monster of God" (hopefully, the relevance is apparent) . . .

"Six billion humans currently weigh upon the planet. According to the most authoritative projection now available (from the United Nations Population Division), five billion more may be added within 150 years. With every additional child comes additional pressure on the productivity of the landscape, turning forests into crop fields and rivers into gutters. Under pressure of this kind, alpha predators face elimination. Already they’re being marginalized, diminished in number, deprived of habitat, leached of genetic vigor, constricted with insufficient refugia, extirpated here, extirpated there. One aspect of that trend is that they’re becoming disconnected from Homo sapiens and we’re becoming disconnected from them. Throughout our history as a species - tens of millennia, hundreds of millennia, going on two million years - we have tolerated the dangerous, problematic presence of big predators, finding roles for them within our emotional universe. But now our own numerousness, our puissance, and our solipsism have brought us to a point where tolerance is unnecessary and danger of that sort is unacceptable. The foreseeable outcome is that in the year 2150, when human population peaks at around eleven billion, alpha predators will have ceased to exist - except behind chain-link fencing, high-strength glass, and steel bars. After that time, as memory recedes and the zoo populations become ever more genetically attenuated, ever more conveniently docile, ever more distantly derivative from the real thing, people will find it hard to conceive that those animals were once proud, dangerous, unpredictable, widespread, and kingly, prowling free among the same forests, rivers, estuaries, and oceans used by humanity. Adults, except a few recalcitrant souls, will take their absence for granted. Children will be startled and excited to learn, if anyone tells them, that once there were lions at large in the very world.”

"Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have always shared the landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping . . . Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
~David Quammen, Natural History writer, from “Monster of God”

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Photos

Pack Creek Sign
Notice the bitemarks? Perhaps they needed a bit of fiber?