The Search for Mt Tillman

We printed several of the 100+ year old Alaska maps I bought on CD. They're a lot of fun to look at and will be hanging in the 20 foot gertee if I ever get it built! I noticed several of the maps include a 16,600 feet Mount Tillman alongside Mt Drum, Mt. Sanford, Mt Wrangell and Mt. Blackburn.

Anyone who's followed my posts over the past few years has seen pictures of the last four mountains because they're right in my backyard. I didn't have internet down here in Chitina tp do any research until tonight, so I've been asking every geologist and environmentalist coming through here (this is a major destination for the sustainability-stewardship crowd) if they've ever heard of Mt Tillman. The answers have been as fun as my own speculations about what happened to the fifth volcano on the maps in 1898.

Author Walter Borneman tells us in Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land that it was Lieutenant Allen who made the map with Mt. Tillman on it.

Wikipedia has a bit about it on it's page about Samuel Tillman:

In 1885, when Henry Tureman Allen was exploring the Copper River in the new U.S. territory of Alaska, he named a discovered peak after Tillman, his academy professor, but the discovery proved to be one major error in the survey, Allen mistaking either Mount Wrangell^[25] or Mount Sanford^[26] for the non-existent Mount Tillman.

The maps I have that include Mt Tillaman were produced by the US Army under General Ambercombie and other credible (and copyrighted sources) as late as 1898.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory says Tillman is a synonym for Mt Wrangell.

National Geographic tells a much more extensive story about Mt Tillman written in 1902. Apparently Mr Robert Dunn of New York settled the question once and for all in 1900.

One government employee I spoke with automatically discounted the existence of Mt Tillman on any maps and acted as if it was impossible that there was ever a map with a 5th mountain on it. He barely glanced at the copies I showed him and went off on a litany of all the places I could find good maps that would show me what's really there. Most locals have guessed that since it was a volcano it probably blew up (like Mt St. Helens) and others think it was moved somewhere else. A few people suggested HAARP had something to do with the disappearance.

I'm thinking of naming my video of the summer The Search for Mt Tillman. It's going to be mostly a nature film. I've got some good footage of one local moose swimming in Town Lake with her 2 babies. It's a little scary when the moose come tromping through my front yard like a herd of horses, but the tourists love it.

Hoping to get big gertee up by this next weekend. Had to wait on more strong rope because Chitina winds are some of the worst in Alaska. I'd hate to have to watch a bunch of environmentalists drinking espressos go flying away on a big wind gust...inside one of my gertees looking like a hot air balloon. And what a surprise to learn I love lattes and breves and plain old espresso. Some German tourists told me I make the best coffee in Alaska... the locals say my coffee tastes like shit. Guess who I'm catering to. :)

Watching a bunch of videos sent my way, and will take notes on a few fo them and give my reviews later. I'm learning a LOT of new things and confirming a lot of old assumptions. But obviously I don't have a lot of time to blog lately. Hope everyone is having a good summer and isn't missing my posts to awful much. It's a good thing I don't have regular access and place to whine about how hard I'm working, eh?

Hunting in the Wrangells and thereabouts

Fishwheel at the Wrangell Park compound.
There are several new buildings... nicely manicured
lawns and a hiking trail to "observe" the Park from afar...

Federal "office" looks like a hunting lodge.

Display of hides at the Park office

This is a topo map at the Park office.
Where the hell is Kenny Lake?
When I asked why Kenny Lake wasn't on the map
to show people where they ARE, their answer was:
"This is about the mountains, not Kenny Lake."

Tim at the counter of the Wrangell Park office.
Why is the "entrance" to the Park 20 miles north
of the entrance to the park (in Copper Center)
and not on the actual road that leads into the park?
If you come up the Richardson from Valdez you
have to drive 20 miles PAST Kenny Lake
(the entrance road is the Edgerton Highway)
to "learn" about the park and then drive 20 miles
back to actually enter the park?

What can you possibly "need to know" about the park?
Here's a clue how communitarianism is introduced.

"Through the collective recognition of the community of nations..."
Sorry parkies, but there's NO SUCH THING!

Real display of hides at Camp Redington

Me posing as if I have a clue

How Alaskan tourists are to be manipulated into feeling

I backed off on the whole Copper River Country Mapping Project as soon as I realized I could get sucked into that legal rat race and still never end up with a map. So I made my own (as many readers already saw) and printed a copy and put it on display at the local store for feedback. The feedback is "When can we start selling them?" heh. So I made enough off the Iditarod auctions to ORDER prints and now I'm on a roll again. But my inbox is filling up with emails from the Mapping group who sure have a lot to say about this project and a lot of time to devote to it too. Their map is planned to come out in 2010. One of the members did offer to help me get local businesses to put up the money for the printing but I haven't responded to any of them, been too busy making the money I needed to pay for the first printing run.

So tonight I opened an exchange with another member who "clarified the goals" in the most convoluted gobboldy goop synopsis I think I ever read (and I've read a lot of govt crap). I had one of my neighbors read it and it made zero sense to him either. Then the same guy just sent this out, and it sure rings a bell with all the stuff I learned in "Sinister Forces" by Peter Levenda about mind control and the whole OSS/NAZI/CIA experiments on people's memories. Does it seem odd to anyone else that this is the objective of a map designed to entice tourists out here?

Hello All,

I thought I would gather a little information to help you all understand what is intended by the objectives when it comes to words such as intellectual and emotional and meanings. Below is a few snippets of info. I use in teaching others about interpretation. I hope this helps to clarify what I intended. I'll be happy to discuss these concepts with you all.

Making connections
Both of the recent NPS and NAI definitions include the idea that interpretation facilitates connections between the interests of the visitors and the meanings of the artifacts, collections or natural resources of a site. It is these personal connections and powerful meanings that visitors will remember long after their site visit, more so than the tactics involved in a battle, or the names of wetland species. Truly meaningful interpretation relates what is being interpreted to the hearts and minds of the audience and answers the question “Why should I care?” Connections involve moments of intellectual and emotional revelation, perception, insight, or discovery. Opportunities for visitors to meaningfully connect to a site occur when an interpreter successfully links a site’s tangible resources to the intangible meanings those resources tend to represent.

Sites have been put into public trust because they are viewed as having enough meaning, enough significance, to our society to be preserved. It is the meanings and significance of the site that drive its preservation and inspire visitors to visit and to care. Interpretation highlights those
meanings so they are not lost or forgotten. Often, we take for granted the beliefs and values that drive our actions and choices. For example, while many Americans value the ability to travel or speak freely, few ponder the meaning of freedom on a daily basis. “Interpretation facilitates the
process by which meanings move from being taken for granted to being actively engaged” (Goldman, et al., 2001, p. 24). This active engagement may result in more memorable experiences as visitors find new meanings in the resources they enjoy.

To be broadly relevant, an interpretive product must provide opportunities for both emotional and intellectual connections to the meanings of the resource. Some of the links should be intentionally developed to provide opportunities for emotional connections and some for intellectual connections. An interpreter needs to plan specific opportunities that are intended to inspire or provoke feelings like awe, wonder, sympathy, curiosity, amazement, regret, grief, and anger. Other specific opportunities should provoke insight, understanding of context, discovery,
and reveal relationships.

Todd Stoeberl
Visitor Center Manager
Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger
P.O. Box 439
106.8 Richardson Hwy
Copper Center, AK 99573
9078227251
9078225237 (Fax)

What an amazing map this will be, eh?

And don't you just wonder why we need a position called "Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger?" It also always seemed strange to me that the new Visitor's Center to Wrangell St. Elias National Park is 59 miles away from the entrance to the park. If you're coming north from Valdez on the Richardson Hwy you have to drive PAST the park road entrance and go 24 more miles (58 RT) to get to the Park Visitor's Center. It should be on the Edgerton Hwy or in Chitina. But these same govt agencies call this a "wilderness corridor" and Chitina "a living ghost town."

Speaking of Chitina, Catherine may be interested in selling the Emporium. It's a historic building in downtown Chitina right next to Spirit Mountain Artworks and the fully refurbished Gilpatrick's Hotel Chitina. It has the original steam engine that heated the town in the 1930s. During the copper boom Chitina was the largest town in Alaska. The Emporium needs about $250,000 in structural repairs and she decided she doesn't want to take the project any further. Her and her husband John bought it decades ago, and John has since passed on. I offered to write the ad and put it online somewhere, wherever it is you put ads like that.. ebay?

There are NO taxes in Chitina, there's no property taxes in this entire region. Haven't verified this yet, but we may be the last place in the United States that has no municipal or county govt. We're not a Scenic Byway, the locals stopped that. We're not a Buffer Zone. There are no land use regulations, other than the state and federal gaming and mining laws. We don''t need a permit to build anything. Alaska has no state income tax either. I've been able to live better here on nothing than anywhere else I've ever lived. Now if I could just be free to get some sheep and goats I'd start a little farm... but animals are the next way to gain access to our property and regulate us. Every time I read an off the grid blog I'm sad to know they will still have regulators at their doors. Just because we don't want to be part of the plan doesn't mean we get to "opt" out of the new requirements for global citizenship. We need to stop them before they gather enough strength of law to kick our doors in... but nobody knows how to do that, especially me.

Update 2:39am: One of my readers did a little googling tonight and found more abou our local mapmaking Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger. He wrote lessons based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights in NY and North Dakota before he came here to enlighten us.

Description of the Competency
National Park Service interpretation directly supports the preservation mission. Interpretation is driven by a philosophy that charges interpreters to help audiences care about park resources so they might support the care for park resources. http://www.nps.gov/interp/backup/idp/fulfill.htm

Todd was assigned here just this year:

Theodore Roosevelt National Park North
Unit Scenic Byway
•
Todd Stoeberl accepted a new position
with the National Park service in Alaska.
His new position also coincidentally resides
near a scenic byway. 2008 Annual Report

According to Linkedin, Stoeberl is a 20 year govt employee who's the Supervisory Park Ranger at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Anchorage, Alaska Area.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/todd/stoeberl . Wonder why he doesn't name the park in his email signature. So this all leads back to the Wrangell Institute for Science and Environment:

"Wrangell Institute for Science and Environment is a grassroots organization dedicated to teaching science and environmental education. It is our dream to bring a sense of wonder, excitement, and stewardship of nature so people can carry those special moments with them throughout their life. With this solid foundation, citizens will be able to make informed and enlightened decisions. Our strength lies in with collaboration many groups and organizations to provide a quality education experience in science and natural history." http://www.wise-edu.org/index.htm

Primitivwerks opens today!

Primitivwerks lounge/reading area.

Primitivwerks is officially open! We have a lot more to do around here yet but we can open the museum, showers and camp spots today. I don't expect any business since we haven't done any advertising, but now I have a daily routine and an office to work out of. I can get back to writing for the ACL while I'm "working." No matter what happens here now I'm confident I can complete our writing obligations by the end of the summer. My angst over the manifesto and Jack's book can finally be abated. Thank you both for your extreme paitence.

Had a great talk with Darren Weeks last night. He's doing a new radio show on Republic Broadcasting and was hoping I'd be a regular guest. The timing won't work for me though, it's live from 8am to 11am eastern time, making it 4am here. He wants to do a show with both me and Nancy Levant, who has been totally out of touch since last summer. She disappeared from the scene and hasn't published anything since. Darren says she's working on a rural farm and doesn't have internet access anymore. He also mentioned her name and article links has been removed from the newswithviews homepage. Something's very odd about this and I need to talk to her myself. I promised if she'll go on I'll get up and do that show.

My next article for distribution is going to be about the Irish voters' gut level rejection of the EU Lisbon Treaty. If you're Irish and have an opinion you'd like to share with me about the new European "constitution," I'd love to hear it! I can't wait to tell my buddies Patty and Jill Flanary that their feisty Irish relatives STOPPED the 2nd EU attempt to expand the global government dead in its tracks. (The French and Dutch stopped the first attempt in 2005). Of course that won't mean anything to them since the EU and the emerging synthesis aren't familiar subjects with working class Americans, but they'll be proud anyway.

PrimitivWerks' new office. The dogsled was used in the first Iditarod and was used by Steven Segall in his Alaska movie.

Museum display case of prehistoric wooly mammoth bones,
ivory tusks, king salmon, grizzly, sheep and lynx skulls.

Communitarian Regional Integration via U.S. Parks

I'm doing some quick research trying to find the source for a City data site that claims the employment rates are going to raise 12% here in the next 3 years. There's no industry to speak of here, the farms are mostly all family owned. Where are these new jobs going to come from? My guess is Princess Tours has plans to expand their operations into the Wrangells and build a repeat of what they accomplished in Denali.

McKinley Village is their "new" town outside Healy, Alaska. Only open in the summer, it hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors in giant hotels. Main street on the Parks Highway is like an Alaskan Disneyland facade with cute little retail cabins and raised wooden walkways. The majority of the employees are young Europeans and outsiders who work long hours for low wages, live in compounds owned by Princess and drink like there's no tomorrow. These operations contribute little to the local economy, are gaining more land by the minutes, and the Park's officials control ALL new local development (I met the Park Director's secretary in Cantwell and she filled me in on the way political decisions are made in Denali Park).

There is already a 200 acre Princess Hotel near Copper Center on the Richardson Hwy. I've seen plans that call the roads between here and Denali Park "adventure corridors." While flagging on the Edgerton last summer I heard more than one visitor exclaim shock! at seeing so many people out here because they were told it's a wilderness.

The Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks, Yukon and Alaska: Seeking Sustainability through Biosphere Reserves
D. Scott Slocombe
Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 87-96
doi:10.2307/3673750
This article consists of 10 page(s):

"Abstract

"Biosphere reserve" is a Unesco designation intended to recognize areas with strong natural values and minimal human use. Biosphere reserve designation encourages regional integration of protected areas through the establishment of buffer zones and locally-based management committees. It also promotes use of biosphere reserves for environmental monitoring and research. This concept becomes relevant in terms of regional integration, scientific management, and sustainable development concerns in and around many protected areas. It suggests the need to assess proposed and potential biosphere reserves in the context of regional environmental and cultural change. This paper discusses the prospects and implications of biosphere reserve designation for the Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias National Parks and Preserve region which extends both sides of the Canada-USA boundary in Yukon and Alaska. Here it could contribute to regional integration and coordination of activities for sustainable development and provide scientific information concerning environmental and socioeconomic change. /// "Reserve de la biosphere" est un terme utilise par l'Unesco pour designer des zones d'un grand interet naturel et d'utilisation humaine de longue duree. Cette designation encourage l'integration regionale des zones protegees, qui peut se faire en etablissant des zones tampons et des comites de gestion locaux. Elle encourage egalement l'utilisation des reserves de la biosphere pour la surveillance et l'etude de l'environnement. Ce concept devient pertinent en termes d'integration regionale, de gestion scientifique et de developpement soutenable pour beaucoup de zones protegees. Il suggere le besoin d'evaluer les reserves de la biosphere, proposees et potentielles, dans le cadre du changement environnemental et culturel regional. Cet article examine les perspectives d'avenir et les implications de la designation en tant que "reserve de la biosphere" des Parcs nationaux Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias et de la reserve naturelle qui s'etend des deux cotes de la frontiere entre le Canada et les Etats-Unis dans le Yukon et l'Alaska. Pour cette region, la designation pourrait contribuer a l'integration regionale et a la coordination des activites visant a un developpement soutenable, et a la collecte de donnees scientifiques relatives au changement environnemental et socioeconomique. /// Nach einer Definition der Unesco sind "Biospharenreservate" Gebiete mit nahezu intakter Natur und hohem menschlichen Nutzungswert, den es zu erhalten gilt. Die Erklarung eines Gebietes zum Biospharenreservat bestimmt das Ausmass der regionalen Integration von geschutzten Landschaftsgebieten durch Schaffung von Schutzgurteln unter ortsansassigem Management. Daneben fordern Biospharenreservate die Uberwachung und Erforschung der Umwelt. Regionale Integration, wissenschaftliches Management und langzeitige Entwicklung der vielen Schutzgebiete und ihrer Umgebung sind fur dieses Konzept wichting. Vorgesehene und potentielle Biospharenreservate mussen hinsichtlich ihrer regionalen Umweltveranderungen und der kulturellen Folgen beurteilt werden. Diese Veroffentlichung diskutiert die Aussichten und Folgen fur den Fall, dass die Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias Nationalparks und Schutzgebiete zum Biospharenreservat erklart werden, das sich beidseitig der kanadisch-amerikanischen Grenze im Yukon Territorium und in Alaska erstreckt. Hier konnte es zur regionalen Integration und zur Koordination des langfristigen Naturschutzes beitragen, und konnte ausserdem wissenschaftliche Information uber Umweltveranderungen und sozio-okonomischen Wandel liefern."

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0276-4741(199202)12%3A1%3C87%3ATKENPY%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Now I know this is old news for most outside Americans since they've been stealing land for the parks for a long time down there. But they haven't won all of Alaska yet, there's still a strong local presense that won't just move away so the tourists can see wild animals on the road between here and Denali. And I don't imagine it will matter much to people here that French and German academics have been aware of plans to regionalize us and create buffer zones here since at least 1992.

Notice this is the first International Park, as it crosses the border with Canada and includes Kluane, Yukon Territory. That's actually gorgeous country and I always stopped there whenever I drove the Alcan Highway, so on a personal level I don't mind being lumped in with those hardy folks. But this is what regionalization (NAU) is designed to do, and it's ALL established under the supremacy of communitarian law.

Development in this region will be conducted as all communitarian development is.. by tiny committees "protecting" it. Maybe we need to start our own community development committee so that when the changes come we remain the rulers of our region.