(part of the Augustine Island series)
This is Augustine Island, aka Augustine Volcano.
It is located in and dominates Kamishak Bay, which sits across the mouth of Cook Inlet from Kachemak Bay, and which roughly defines the beginning of the Alaska Peninsula to its south and west. At just over 4,100 feet in elevation, Augustine (nerdy bits at GeoHack) is the smallest of the string of volcanoes you can see from the Sterling Highway on the Kenai Peninsula (people remember the sequence as DAIRS, from south to north: Douglas, Augustine, Iliamna, Redoubt, Spurr), but unlike the other peaks this one rises right off the water (the summit is less than three miles distant from our landing site) and it is plenty impressive in person.
It is certainly remote Alaska, despite being “just” seventy miles distant; the boat ride took us about seven hours at roughly ten knots’ speed. The island is uninhabited, and the volcano is still considered active (last eruption 2006); really, very few people ever get over there. (It’s not cheap to get there at all, and with no big game populations or fishable rivers–the biggest thing that lives there is red fox–it doesn’t even get the attention of the still-more-remote mainland that surrounds it.)
Which is why it’s at least a bit surprising that you can find so much trash there. So much, in fact, that the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies (CACS) was awarded its third grant (previously in 2016 and 2018, IIRC) to take a boat and volunteer crew over there to see how much they could pick up and get off the island in a three-day effort.
This year’s trip was supposed to happen early last summer, but late funding pushed scheduling to very late in the season when weather (for the boat ride) is iffy, and ultimately it pushed to this summer–where it was pushed even again, this time just for a couple of weeks, due to forecast high winds and rough seas for the boat ride. (Having been in Alaska now for nearly fifteen years, I already have a healthy respect for pushing travel due to conditions, but given the boat ride we did have on the way back from Augustine this year, I have positively re-affirmed my commitment to not arguing with my boat captain (or plane pilot) when (s)he says we should wait for better conditions. Uh-huh, amen, true dat, and boy howdy!)
Unfortunately, the May reschedule, which we knew might happen at the last minute, placed Cathy specifically in a position where she couldn’t go. (Okay, technically she could have got other people to cover her summer Tsunami Softball coaching commitments for three days, but for her it was never really a question: the combination of so many new and young girls–and a few, key, brand-new assistants and volunteers–comprising a team she is trying to take increased ownership in building, at a critical point in the early season, and with her having just pushed to reschedule an important pre-tournament scrimmage to what then became the middle day of the rescheduled Augustine trip…well, bucket list or no, she knew she had to see the things through that she had fought to make happen. This is one of the things I admire and love the most about Cathy, and I don’t think I am leaning on my own bias to state that I think this is one of the reasons others love her so easily too: this woman is a by-example, real leader, and an inspiration to up one’s own game every day.) She’d have loved this trip, and would have been a great asset to the project, but in the end she stayed (and predictably rocked it with the scrimmage), and I went to Augustine with 14yo Sabre, 11yo Dee, and 8yo Murray.
My family has been involved with CACS since we first arrived in Homer in 2009, and we have always enjoyed the volunteer and program work we’ve participated in. Most reliable for us have been the kid- and family-centric nature education programs, and the annual season-opening and season-closing events at the Wynn Nature Center and Peterson Bay Field Station. I myself sat on the CACS BoD for a couple of years, and still remain happily committed to what I see as the most important mission CACS can bring into the world: continually inspiring good (and voluntary) custodianship of the world around us by simply educating people enough that they fall in love with it. You take care of the things you love, right?
So the notion of a trash pickup mission to Augustine appealed to us, not just because it’s a frickin’ island volcano in an absolutely stunning setting in remote Alaska–a bucket list item if ever there was one–but also because it’s a chance for us to give back, both to the natural world we love and also to CACS which has been so good to us. Hell yeah!
And from the conservation perspective, I see the biggest value of a mission like this–even moreso in hindsight–as being only partially in the physical removal of multiple tons of trash from the island itself. I can’t imagine that the expense and logistics of sending fifteen-odd people across the Inlet to do hand-removal for essentially two days, could be truly considered cost-efficient; probably of far more value would be the knowledge and understanding of what we, severally and as a group, learned by going there and doing it.
You know, the education.
The final numbers aren’t in as of this writing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we did better than two tons of trash picked up, over what couldn’t have been maybe five total miles of shoreline. What’s crazy is how much we couldn’t get, either for lack of time, or the right tools, or heavy equipment to get underneath the driftwood jams. (And that’s just the stuff we know is there because we saw it. There is probably far more buried beyond sight.) Apparently, we already knew that this face of the island is prone to capture seaborne trash due to its geography and the currents (CACS has previously made studies of the long-distance migration of seaborne debris, e.g. from the 2011 Japanese tsunami), and importantly it is also reasonably friendly to shuttling people and trash to and from a boat-at-anchor.
There were about twelve of us primarily concerned with the physical pickup, with a boat crew of four, and three documentarians (a photographer and two drone pilots) who also did what physical pickup they could. Personally, I struggled a bit with feeling like I should have been able to account for more trash myself than I managed, but I do realize that I was also in Dad mode, needing to support three young kids as well as myself.
Not that they were overly needy, either–not at all! None of the four of us started off with a honed backcountry mojo already established for the season, but I was nonetheless highly impressed at how well they adapted in real time and fell right into whatever mode or role that was needed at the moment, whether that was in the camp, the kitchen, the backcountry loo, the pickup itself, or the adjacent logistics of beach offload planning and staging. And the skiffing to and from the Discovery was a completely new thing for all of us. My three were by far the youngest members of the whole group (next would have been the three post-secondary-school Americorps contingent), and they all acquitted themselves admirably. (Nearly everyone on the boat, at one point or another, had something pretty glowing and specific to say about my kids, and I cannot express how fortunate that makes me feel.) Sabre spent almost all her pickup time with the group working the southern end of the site, clearly pulling her weight right along with the other adults, whereas Dee and Murray and I were with the group on the northern end of the site. Dee would oscillate between working independently or with other people, and then working with Murray and me; I was impressed at her ease and comfort in going back and forth naturally and happily. And Murray: well, like his sisters he regularly punches well above what you’d expect for his age; I would not have thought that an eight year old boy could remain focused and productive for the long periods that he did. Clearly this sort of environment is a comfort zone for him but daang, boy, that was impressive.
I can’t speak to the details of how Sabre did, not being able to witness them, but I found both Murray and Dee to be amazing pickers. They had an easy facility in and among the driftwood jams that I did not, and the three of us sometimes fell into a pattern where they would pick, finding stuff left and right, and it was all I could do to get close to where they were, hold the bag out, and let them fill it.
Henry Reiske, the CACS phenom of a program leader and the head of this operation, already knows all three of my kids (Dee most of all, with Sabre having somewhat preceded him and Murray just getting started), and I don’t think he was just being gracious when he commented on how well Dee and Murray were doing by going more deeply into the thick stuff, whereas most of the adults were more focused on covering ground and finding the bigger and more obvious items. He saw the value not just in going for the “smaller” things in the driftwood jumbles (and they weren’t all smaller) but in learning and noting what kinds of things managed to get trapped there, versus in more obvious places elsewhere on the beach. This was one of the big observations that got me thinking about the best overall value of such an excursion.
Our boat was the 73-foot Discovery out of Homer; principally a touring vessel, it nonetheless easily carried the nineteen of us, our gear, and (back home) a couple of tons of beach trash.
Amusingly, not having a permanent means of carrying its own skiff, the Discovery was rigged to tow a metal-bottomed, pontoon-sided skiff behind it the whole way. (I’d have been curious to see how this looked on our return journey, but I was too busy trying to keep my own lunch down and also be some sort of comfort for queasy kids.) The crew were wonderful, both accessible and full of stories, and balanced comfortably between confident and cautious. It was impressive to watch the skiff driver/loader team work, in getting the trash off the beach pickup points and back onto the Discovery, and both of them seemed to make it a point to befriend Murray. (“Wassup, my brother?”)
As for the trash, we found all kinds of things. The largest single item was a bright-red marine buoy that I eventually dubbed “Big Bertha”, probably north of 200 pounds, which Discovery’s crew managed to get onto the boat by hand, but which was offloaded in Homer by a crane. (!!) We also found several rectangular lids (maybe four by three feet) to big fishing totes, some filled with sand and (ask me how I know this) very heavy and tedious to cartwheel a quarter mile down a soft-sand beach to the staging point. There were lots of buoys in various sizes up to a couple of feet in diameter, ropes and nets of various thicknesses (many of which had to be cut off of a larger find we couldn’t extract), beer kegs, five-gallon buckets, an empty 55-gallon drum (which Murray rolled from its discovery site a good quarter mile back to the main camp), various boxes, crates, floats, three-foot-diameter landscaping planters, car tires and wheels, giant hunks of Styrofoam (theoretically the cores of other things which had lost their shells), safety and bike helmets, bottles (huge numbers of water and soda bottles), hoses and tubing, unidentifiable metal and plastic doodads, and all kinds of other stuff I can’t recall while writing this. It certainly felt like an impressive accomplishment, while at the same time being sobering in its scope.
I found it interesting that as the trip went on, people would increasingly seek out both my daughters for questions or confirmations of bird identification and language identification. They are both developing respectable reputations as pretty authoritative young birders, and have also begun studying Japanese at home; they’ve both gotten better at distinguishing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters than I am. (We saw each of those languages on various bits of what we found.)
As for food, it is no secret that an expedition of any size must be organized around its meals, and bringing that mojo to a wilderness camp on a remote volcanic island is not a trivial undertaking. CACS supplied a very useful cook-tent for this purpose and we made the most of it as a camp-center. It is said that you never go hungry on a Henry Reiske adventure, and I must agree that he fed us well, both in volume and in variety. Dee and I wound up taking on the task of rendering the vegetarian version of Henry’s Indian-ish turkey-and-sweet-potato hash on the second night (with other volunteers baking a delightful naan in an ad-hoc campfire ring constructed on the beach), and although neither of us is vegetarian ourselves, we seemed to get pretty good reviews of our efforts from those who are. (Dee has the most adventurous palate of my kids, and she does not shy away from the spices! 🙂
The trip back was a bit rough on us landlubbers, as mentioned above, and after rolling into Homer harbor at nearly 8pm, there was still the unloading task to accomplish. Once again, I am humbled at the stamina and gumption of my kids, who really didn’t blink an eye at leaning all the way into this job, starting at their usual bedtime after an exceptionally full day, first of work and then (for at least four of the six boat hours) of staving off nausea. Even Murray, who said he wanted to rest as we went to get started (an idea which I fully supported), was nonetheless right there with us within five minutes, fully carrying his own weight.
The offloading went surprisingly quickly, considering how crammed full of trash the Discovery‘s decks were–many hands indeed make light work–and by 9:45 we were all back at the ramp with the CACS gear and our personal things. Three very full days, from our 7am boat departure on Wednesday 31 May, but of course it seemed to pass by in a flash.
A simply tremendous experience, from the perhaps-unlikely Venn intersection of trash pickup and bucket list. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I hope we get to take Cathy next time.
Our personal story
The above is a trip overview. The picture-annotated story of our own personal adventure on this trip has its own page, located here.
The galleries
There is a gallery page for the full set of pictures for each of Murray, Dee, and Kevin. (Thank you again, Deb Curtis of Homer High School–the kids’ loaner digital cameras are being put to great use!)
Sabre wound up taking only two pictures herself–and those were of bone finds on the beach. I actually have to admire this; clearly she was focused on her task and her group! Those pictures are here.
Also, there is a page for all the media that was graciously shared with us by the project photographer and by other team members. Many thanks for these treasures!
Kevin Wilmeth 