Traveler’s Journal
About the presentation:
When: 7 p.m., Thursday, March 3
Where: Sequim High School library, 601 N. Sequim Ave.
Cost: Suggested $5 donation (adults); 18 and younger, free
Presenters: Elston Hill
Presentation: “Wrangel Island: The coldest and remotest Russian wilderness”
by Elston Hill
For the Sequim Gazette
John Muir was the first visitor to describe Wrangel Island to the world. In 1881, he called it, “This grand wilderness in its untouched freshness,” this “severely solitary” land in the “topmost, frost-killed end of creation.”
A recent article in National Geographic called Wrangel Island “one of the world’s least frequented, most restricted nature reserves — a place that requires several government permits to visit and can be reached only by helicopter during winter or by icebreaker during summer.”
For several years, visitors have come to Wrangel Island by ship to make a few brief shore excursions. My wife Jackie and I were fortunate to be two of five members of the first-ever 28-day tour in 2014 which included for the first time an 11-day land tour across the island. Our group of five consisted of a German friend, a French couple and the two of us.
This trip was not repeated as anticipated in 2015 due to conflicts with Russia about the cost and permits and may not be repeated in future years.
The journey to Wrangel Island is a testament to just how isolated it is. To get there, we flew to Nome, Alaska. From Nome we took a charter flight to the Port City of Anadyr in eastern Russia. (Eastern Russia is much different than Western Russia. Landing in Anadyr we felt like we had traveled back in time to the old Soviet Union.)
The voyage to Wrangel Island from Anadyr along the east coast of the Russian mainland was eventful with stops along the way at amazing wildlife areas, old whaling stations and a village of indigenous people — the most northeastern village in Russia. This was the first summer voyage of a Russian ice-reinforced research ship, the Professor Khromov, operated by a New Zealand Company, Heritage Expeditions. We were fortunate to be guided on the 11-day land portion of the trip by Alexander Gruzdev, the reserve’s director.
Our other Russian guides also were marvelous. On the ship, we had the pleasure of getting to know Nakita, the global expert on polar bears. We returned to Anadyr on the second voyage of this ship.
Wrangel Island was declared a zapovednik — a federally managed nature sanctuary — in 1976, and it remains one of Russia’s coldest, remotest pieces of protected wilderness. The 2,900-square-mile island lying astride the 180th meridian is often referred to as the Galápagos of the far north.
Wrangel boasts an astonishing abundance of life. The island is the world’s largest denning ground for polar bears — as many as 400 mothers have been known to land here in winter to raise their young.
Wrangel also supports the largest population of Pacific walruses and the only snow goose nesting colony in Asia. These snow geese are the snow geese that migrate to the Skagit Valley each winter.
We had frequent and close encounters with snowy owls, muskoxen, arctic foxes, lemmings and various seabirds. Wrangel Island is the last location on the planet where wooly mammoths roamed some 5,000 years ago and their tusks frequently are seen lying around on the landscape.
Fortunately, Wrangel Island is so far north that mosquitoes are almost non-existent.
Like John Muir, Jackie and I felt very privileged to visit one of the least visited and most remote wilderness locations on the planet.
About the presenters
Jackie and Elston met in 1987 hiking with the Sierra Club on an evening hike in the Santa Monica Mountains. They continued to do that hike several times a week for the next 14 years.
Even though Jackie came from Pennsylvania, the state that ranks No. 1 for natives not leaving the state, she had a nursing career in Maryland, Florida and California. In California she taught several years at UCLA, and during the 1970s Cold War era, she led nursing tours to both China and Russia.
Elston was born in China and grew up in China, Japan and Brazil. Travel comes naturally for him and he feels very at home when traveling in Latin America. Following two careers teaching history at the university level and then in corporate taxes, he and Jackie retired to the Northwest in 2001. Since that time they have traveled extensively visiting all seven continents at least twice. In particular, they enjoy going to remote unpopulated places and to cooler climates.
Elston and Jackie are amused when people tell them that they do not travel because “people hate” Americans. Not once in their travels have they met anyone who said they dislike Americans or have they ever felt unsafe. And in just the past two years they visited Colombia, Zimbabwe and North Korea. Jackie and Elston believe that travel and cultural encounters are the best way to break down barriers between nations.
About the presentations
Traveler’s Journal is a presentation of the Peninsula Trails Coalition. All of the money raised is used to buy project supplies and food for volunteers working on Olympic Discovery Trail projects.
Shows start at 7 p.m. in the Sequim High School Library at 601 N. Sequim Ave.
Suggested donation is $5 for adults; those 18 years old and younger are free.
One selected photo enlargement will be given away each week as a door prize. Creative Framing is donating the matting and shrink wrapping of the door prize.
For more information, call Dave Shreffler at 683-1734.
