“We went to Alaska for adventure… Then we witnessed the glaciers melting… And came back with a story instead.”
Unfortunately, we all know that Global Warming is a real disaster and that the Earth is heating up, but to be able to witness such drastic changes in our lifetime means that we definitely need to do something about it. Rick Brown lives in the Alaskan area called Seward, and has been guiding in the mountains there since the nineties. Rick has seen a lot of changes in his time of living there and goes on to tell us this sad story of his home town, and his concerns of the snowy landscape for the future. Although the Alaskan snow may be melting away slowly, there is still a beautiful culture and scenery to explore.
Speech excerpt from the Glacier Exit video:
“My name is Rick Brown, owner of Adventure 60 North – The Adventure Center in Seward, Alaska. I’ve been guiding here since the early nineties, I’ve lived here permanently since 2003~ and have been guiding in the glaciers all that time.”
“Normally, I think that the park will tell you that we retreat about 150 feet per year, right now we’re looking about 10-15 feet per day.”
“We’re seeing the big crevasses that used to be blue up on top of the Compression Zones now down in the toed (Terminus) glacier just falling over. Something that would normally take 100’s of years we’re seeing probably in a matter of a year or two – We’re just watching the transformation happen in front of our eyes right now.”
“As you drive into our park you’ll see the signs that mark different points where the glacier had traveled during the 1800’s all the way back to the early 1900’s. Things that used to take hundreds of years is actually now only taking months… We’re seeing a change in the wildlife, we have villages that are being relocated, we get storms up here that if they were happening down in the lower 48 we’d name them something. Our ten year floods are happening every other year now. You can drive through our town and look at what’s going on, and if you can’t see what’s happening then I think that you must be blind.”
“Normally we’d run in a Snow-cat out here.”
“Normally I would need a plough here at my office, and [now] we need a lawnmower.”
“I hope that people that come to Alaska to visit us, they take time to, try to understand what it is they’re seeing. This place will not stay the same it’s gonna be different but i just hope that we just learned how to take care of it. You know, I have 4 daughters and a bunch of grand-kids, as I sit here and talk about this I wonder what they will see if they come back, after I’m gone. That’s my concern for the future, wondering how that this climate thing is gonna work out for them.”
End Quote:
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not man the less, but nature more. – Lord Byron
