Alaska

Hi all. Im currently in Alaska as the title suggests. We have been staying at a religious retreat known as the Shrine of Saint Therese, an interesting locale with lots of log cabins and a long peninsula ending in a pine sheltered shrine and ocean observation point. Sea lions and whales have been spotted both from the observation point and from our front porch. It was rather warm for Alaska in January over the past few days but yesterday our group finally got a taste of the winter weather up here. I was glad I got to experience the usual climate, but only about as glad as one can be whilst being pelted in the face by sideways snow and hail. The object of our stop here was to observe the boreal forest biome and get a sense of the point of our trip in a somewhat familiar place. Soon we head North to Anchorage and after a day or two there we'll be heading south to Maui, Hawaii. Im sure all of my group will welcome the change in weather.
I guess now would be a good time for a brief exlpanation of exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. There are three classes that our group will be getting credit for on this trip. One is a biology course entitled Biomes of the World, the other two are writing and literature classes. The writing class focuses on the art of travel writing beyond a simple chronological litany of events, and the literature class focuses on German Science in Literature. For the biomes class each student will be devising a personal study plan comprised of a few things each wants to observe in all biomes visited and then parallels, if any exist, will be drawn between the observations from all of the biomes to enhance understanding both of the individual biomes and of the world at large so each of us might return home able to speak on the subject of biome types, effects of climate change, and anything else the student may have been particularly motivated to observe.
Concerning the travel writing class, the purpose is to allow us to convey our experience in such a way as to garner the attention and interest of those we would convey it to. As far as the literature class goes, the journey as a whole is styled after the scientific and natural history explorations of Darwin and Von Humboldt. The readings on such topics allow us to get a sense of what it is that we are doing, learning through travel. Really going to the place one wants to understand and immersing ones self in it is a learning strategy that may have fallen somewhat by the way side of late and this journey is really a revival of that for each of the students.
As soon as I get internet access again I'll be posting my personal study plan and any observations I may have made by then as well as photos I've taken to date. Mom, Im sorry for any spelling, grammatical, or punctuation errors, but my time on the computers at the University of Alaska is limited.