NEBC Meeting News

Abstract

October 1998. Dr. Lisa A. Standley, the Club's Vice President, spoke on the topic "Beyond the Brooks Range—Flora and Fauna of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Among Dr. Standley's many activities, we learned, is participating in Sierra Club out ings. Twice in recent years, she has enjoyed ten-day backpacking trips to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alas ka. Both trips were in mid-June, and started with a flight into Fairbanks and transfer to a smaller plane that flew through passes in the Brooks Range to the Romanzof Mountains and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea, a couple of hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The area hiked was between two rivers, the Jago and the Aichilik, which flow northward from the mountains, crossing the coastal plain to the sea. The Refuge is contiguous with Indian lands and National Parks, which add to the wilderness landscape. It is home to the caribou's Porcupine Herd calving grounds and their migration routes to the mountains. Fortunately for us, Lisa was armed with a good camera and the ability to use it well. We were treated to excellent images of the region's plant life, interspersed with those of the often present and possibly curious caribou. Also, landscape shots illustrated some of the Ref uge's varied habitats and unadulterated beauty. The hiking area ranged in elevation from near sea-level to around 5000 ft. Most of the landscape is devoid of tall trees, although some of the narrower valleys supported white and black spruce in sheltered areas. Low willows were the more typical woody vegetation. The narrow valleys generally run east-west while larger river valleys run north-south. Precipitation is surprisingly low there, with only about 10 inches per year, Standley said. The few glaciers seen while crossing the Brooks Range were relatively small and not growing, evidently remnants of earlier times with higher rates of precipitation. The slide images gave a good sampling of the dominant plant families in the Refuge and the Arctic region, in general. The Cyperaceae, a family Standley knows especially well because of her research on the genus Carex, is one of them. Sedges were well represented and tipsy tussocks of cottongrass were frequently underfoot. More frustrating for Lisa than the tipsy tussocks, per haps, was that nearly all the sedges present in June were flowering rather than fruiting, making identification very challenging. An