What Do Your Guides do in the Winter?

It has been my good fortune to attract and retain an incredible cadre of professional guides. This year a number of them are going to graduate school. Aya Reiss is living in Vancouver, BC and, as the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, is doing graduate work in stream ecology. Steve Lewis got engaged (about time, dude!) to another of our guides, Sarah Bergman. Steve and Sarah are both enrolled at the U of W where Steve is getting a Masters in environmental policy and Sara is in her second year of med. school.

Farther a field, David Thomlinson just got a job working as an architect in Portland as well as building his second guitar from the ground up. Dave McGraw wrote, edited and produced his first ‘killer’ CD “Northwest/ Southwest” and is living in Arizona working on reintroducing the California Condor back into the Grand Canyon. Kerry Heerman lives on a lake and got a job teaching middle school in the Bellingham School District. And of course, Peter Horne takes the cake for being the farthest a field for his research in the Antarctic dealing with penguins.

The question I get asked the most as the owner of Outdoor Odysseys?

More, even than, where are the whales? That’s easy. I always get asked, “what do I do the other months out of the year when I’m not managing Outdoor Odysseys?”

After my summer season of working seven days a week winds down, the fall and winter are definitely a time for me to slooow down and get reacquainted with my wife who is a nurse practitioner at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. I snuggle up with our cat Barney and go for romps with our dog, Celeste. I also love to read and cook. With our rainy, dark Northwest winters there is always plenty of time for that.

In terms of outdoor stuff I love to ski – both telly and skate ski. This winter I’m headed for Canada for a couple of trips as well as a high Sierra traverse in April. And of course, as a small business owner, there is always stuff to do over the winter. Marketing and staff hiring are my two primary considerations.

Resident Orcas Listed As Endangered

In November 2005 the NOAA Fisheries made the announcement that the Southern Resident Orcas had been placed on the federal endangered species list. Now, the Fisheries Service by law must designate “critical habitat” for the orcas as well as complete a recovery plan that defines the risk to the whales and what steps need to be taken to protect them.

What does all this mean for these beautiful creatures that are such an integral part of the San Juan Islands and the Pacific Northwest? The whales are definitely “on the brink” in terms of their long-term viability. One of the major concerns has been the diminishment of their primary food source - salmon. The salmon have declined due to over-fishing, loss of fresh and salt-water habitat, dam building and poor logging practices. Coupled with the loss of their primary food source has been a build up of deadly toxins such as PCB’s, which harm the whale’s reproductive capabilities.

That’s the bad news…the positive aspect of the listing by the feds is that it will bring about more concentrated efforts to help protect the whales than if the whales had just been listed as threatened.