Texas

Camp Life: Texas to Walla Walla

It's been a wild ride for Semester in the West's 2016 program. This fall we covered over 11,000 miles, traveling further north (Twisp, Washington), south (Big Bend National Park, Texas) and east (Pine Ridge, South Dakota) than any previous program. The last few months have flown by and now we find ourselves back where we started at the cozy lodges of the Johnston Wilderness Campus. As the Tech Manager, it gave me particular pleasure during Thanksgiving to meet so many of you who have been following along on our trip virtually. As a thank you and a personal sendoff, I hope you enjoy this final camp life series of 2016. Tune back in come 2018 for more photos, speakers and stories produced by a whole new crop of Whitman's brightest minds. 

Sincerely,

Collin Smith
Technical Manager 2016

Camp Life: Utah to Texas

Meet Our Speakers: Bonnie McKinney

Standing in the shade of the porch in a pair of beautifully worn cowboy boots, Bonnie McKinney introduces herself quickly. She runs though the professional paths she has followed until she arrived here, at the Adams Ranch in Southern Texas, as the Wildlife Coordinator.  McKinney’s work takes place on a large piece of land owned by The El Carmen Land and Conservation Company.  This private conservation area sits strategically between the Texas Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, Big Bend National Park and a CEMEX conservation project in the Sierra Del Carmen Mountains of Mexico. In this important transnational wildlife corridor, it is McKinney’s job to document animals, protect habitats and facilitate projects done on this land. Bonnie McKinney was the right woman to hire for this job. She had worked on CEMEX’s conservation project in Mexico for the 14 years prior and before that was employed by Texas Parks and Wildlife.  Work in the outdoors is what has come most naturally to McKinney who grew up hunting and fishing in Virginia. She says of herself, “I was outside my whole life. I was in the creek catching minnows and my mom was always trying to get me inside the house to learn to cook, and that never happened.” McKinney has made a career out of what she loves most and is helping to protect the deeply unique environment of these desert borderlands in doing so. 

By Grace Butler

Meet Our Speakers: Billy Pat McKinney

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Billy Pat McKinney grew up in both the United States and Mexico, flitting across a border marked only by the Rio Grande. McKinney told us that—as a boy—nature lovers were the butt of his jokes. Clearly people change because in 1969, hoping “to make a quick buck” he found a job as a field biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Reminiscing, he told the westies it’s the things you stumble upon that make you happiest. McKinney made live captures to study animals and quickly mastered his job. He’s a “do it yourself” guy, living to defy the maxim, “conservation without money is just conversation.” He currently works for CEMEX, a global cement company operating in over 50 countries. The company owns the Adams Ranch, a large parcel of land in the Big Bend area and dedicates it to conservation with the goal of corporate responsibility. Cemex employs a team, under the direction of McKinney, to oversee the conservation area. Among their responsibilities are re-wilding and reviving wildlife populations. They strategically place supplemental feed for quail and water guzzlers (which harvest and store rainwater) for mule deer, big horn sheep, and birds. To further aid wildlife, McKinney suggests giving certain animals game status. Though it sounds counterintuitive, this gives species protection until their population bolsters to a viable size. He enjoys his vocation: protecting wildlife. “I fell in love with this work, and the romance continues.”

By Griffin Cronk

 

Meet Our Speakers: Josiah Austin

“We have to manage conservation,” Josiah Austin tells the westies over a bowl of cereal. His 30,000-acre Adams Ranch in Big Bend, Texas is surrounded on three sides by conservation areas–National Park on one side, Wildlife Management on another, and a privately-held international corporate conservation area to the southeast, straddling the US-Mexico border. Austin began buying up Texas ranch properties in 1982 with the intention of restoring landscape and habitat. “When we first started doing watershed restoration, we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we learned quickly.” He and his wife moved over a thousand miles from their home in Manhattan to a double-wide on El Coronado Ranch in Texas. “I don’t think my wife had any clue what a double-wide even was,” Austin smiled. Josiah is tall and thin, and even when he’s wearing Crocs he appears authoritative. He dropped out of high school, talked his way into college, and graduated from the University of Denver with a degree in finance. After a career in the stock market, he went west to pursue his passion for open spaces. “I guess my love for open space started on my family’s farm in Maryland,” he explained, “on New Hampshire Avenue.” At the Adams Ranch Headquarters in Big Bend, it seems Austin’s got all the open space he could ever want. 

Floating Down the Border

Going where no Semester in the West has gone before, the 2016 Westies took a trip down the Río Grande through Big Bend National Park. As we forded whitewater and rockslides, the boundary between Mexico and the USA dissolved into one incredible river canyon, the Santa Elena. We spent two nights on the river, sleeping out under the dark West Texas skies. Here are a few photos from the excursion for you to enjoy!

Better Know and Educator: Paul Arbetan

As an ecologist, Paul Arbetan reads landscapes like others might read a graph: processing the information his eyes show him and analyzing the patterns of terrain and vegetation. On a hike in the rocky hills surrounding Santa Fe, New Mexico, Paul stops the Westies trailing behind him and points to a patch of earth seemingly indistinguishable from its neighbors. Upon closer examination you can see the faint remains of hoofprints in the bare soil, and he explains, “Blowout; overly grazed spot. Look at the way the grasses are. What happened to all this soil?” Observations and questions like these are a main component of the two-week-long field biology course that Paul teaches to Semester in the West. This segment takes the group on a tour through the beautiful, rugged, and diverse desert ecosystems of New Mexico with the foundational goal of giving Westies “a sense of why things are the way they are across a landscape.” 
Paul’s connection to the program began when he was attending Lawrence College in his home state of Wisconsin where he became good friends with a politics student named Phil Brick. After four years of spending their weekends whitewater kayaking down the rivers of the Midwest, the two went off to pursue different careers. Phil eventually became a professor at Whitman College while Paul studied evolutionary ecology and population genetics. Today, Paul works as a consulting biologist. With clients such as the Department of Military Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management, his projects include everything from creating plans to remove invasive species to researching the biological impact of army training exercises. Paul’s motivation to do this kind of work stems from his passion for ecology and the natural world, or as he put it simply, “I like seeing country…[I] like understanding country. [I] like seeing the relationships across a landscape."