Youth Expedition 2009: Prince William Sound

This June, the first annual Youth Expedition of the Chugach Children’s Forest set out to explore Prince William Sound 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

For seven days, 11 Alaska teens traveled by foot, kayak, and research vessel across the western Sound. Their mission: Explore and document the spectacular natural world of this cherished landscape. It was a journey of adventure and excitement, research and discovery. And for many of them, it was the first time they had set foot in the wilds of their own backyard.

“Youth Expeditions are designed to take young Alaskans outside and introduce them to a whole world of possibilities,” explains Ann Mayo-Kiely, Alaska Geographic’s program director. “From outdoor recreation to appreciation of what’s in their own backyard, from new educational experiences to greater understanding of peers from different backgrounds, they experience it all while exploring a beautiful place.”

The students began their journey at Black Bear Campground in Portage Valley, where they spent two days and nights learning about the Chugach National Forest from U.S. Forest Service staff, studying Leave-no-Trace principles and other wilderness ethics, and developing individual media projects that they would complete over the course of the expedition.

From there the expedition headed to Whittier, where they set sail into Prince William Sound aboard the Babkin and Alexandra, two small research vessels operated by Babkin Charters. For five days, the expedition traveled to diverse sites throughout the western Sound, including an active fish hatchery, the old Latouche town site on Latouche Island, the historic Nellie Juan cannery site, and iceberg-laden waters near tidewater glaciers.

While visiting the cannery site, expedition member Noah Magen and several fellow students set off to explore one of the site’s most remarkable features. “We hiked up a super steep mountain covered in devil’s club,” Magen recounts. Up top was a huge freshwater lake dammed by the cannery in the early 1900s to provide hydroelectric power. “It was like a blast from the past,” he muses. “It was remarkable that this old cannery was more eco-friendly than many modern-day facilities.”

To help the students interpret discoveries like this, the expedition was joined by biologists, forest professionals, and other experts on the Sound, who provided detailed information on the area’s human history, abundant wildlife, and intricate ecosystems. “What I found incredibly eye-opening was the stark contrast between this seemingly pristine place and the lingering impact of the oil spill,” notes Mayo-Kiely. For the students—all of whom were born after the oil spill—this reality was illustrated on a beach just outside Sleepy Bay, where the group went looking for residual evidence of the spill.

“Sure enough, just below the surface rocks and deep down below them, oil still contaminates this environment,” writes Jenny Rankin, a Cordova 11th-grader who penned an article about the expedition for her local paper, The Cordova Times. “I had always heard about the oil that remained, and I just accepted that. However, when it’s you in the field collecting the oil that remains 20 years later, it really gives you a different perspective. I know that once I got that thick, black, reeking substance on my hands, it showed me how real this whole catastrophe was.”

Over the course of the journey, students developed their individual media projects, which ranged from collecting interviews of local residents to writing poetry to creating a documentary slide show and film of the expedition. Several of their completed projects have been posted to YouTube.

The eleven students on the expedition hailed from high schools throughout southcentral Alaska—including Anchorage, Cordova, Whittier, and Chenega—and ranged in age from 14-16 years. Some had grown up in the Sound surrounded by fishing and subsistence activities, while others had barely set foot beyond the city limits. “One of the best parts of the trip was the way these students came together and had so much fun as a group,” Mayo-Kiely notes. Magen agrees. “By the end of the trip, it was a pretty tight-knit group. Eight days on the Sound really brought us together.” 

As many as three Youth Expeditions are in the works for 2010. “One of our major goals is to get Alaska teens more involved in understanding, and helping to address, climate change,” Mayo-Kiely explains. “Next year our plans are to have a unifying theme of climate change across all the expeditions.”

The expedition was made possible through the support of Alaska Geographic, the Chugach National Forest, the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, and National Geographic, with donations from REI and Chenega Corporation.