During stage 1 we will kayak 1,400 miles from Seattle, Washington to Skagway, Alaska. The Pacific Northwest is home to a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial animals. We will be studying whales and other marine mammals, kelp forests, salmon, and many other species.
The Pacific Northwest is home to a variety of large land mammals including Grizzly Bears, and Black Bears. Above and below the surface we are sure to find plenty of things to learn about. Many of these large mammals need large undeveloped spaces to thrive and the roadless sections of British Columbia and Alaska provide the perfect habitat.
From Skagway, Alaska we will hike over the Chilkoot Pass in the footsteps of thousands of gold seekers who struggled across the pass to reach the Klondike. Many of artifacts remain from those early days, and we will follow their path all the way to Dawson City along the mighty Yukon River.
From Bennet Lake on the eastern side of the Chilkoot Pass we will canoe through a chain of lakes that form the headwaters of the Yukon River past White Horse and down the swift flowing Yukon River to Dawson City. 
From Dawson we will hike 100 miles through the mountains to the headwaters of the Blackstone River. The Blackstone flows into the Peel River, which flows in the McKenzie River, which will lead us to the Arctic Ocean. The rivers flowing through these rugged mountains as some of the most pristine wild rivers in North America, with hundreds of miles of flowing waterways between towns or roads.
After over 2,600 miles of paddling and hiking we hope to reach the Arctic Ocean before freeze up. We will spend the month of October,2010 training our dogs, and learning about native life in the Arctic. In November we will head south along the McKenzie River by dog team, crossing 1,800 miles of frozen wilderness. There are many remote native communities along our way and we are sure to learn a lot from the people we encounter.
When the ice melts in the Spring of 2011 we will transition from dogsled to canoe and paddle 2,300 miles along the historic travel and trade route pioneered by Alexander McKenzie, Samuel Hearne, and other Canadian Explorers in the 1700's. We will finish this stage of our journey in the fall of 2011 by completing the 8 1/2 mile Grand Portage which will lead us to the rock shore of Lake Superior.
After spending the winter giving presentations and making final preparations we will begin 4,800 mile kayak journey from Grand Portage, Minnesota to Key West, Florida. The first 2,200 miles will take us through the Great Lakes and out the Saint Lawrence Seaway. 
During the final stage of our journey we will kayak the length of the Atlantic Coast from the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Key West, Florida. We will be following the seasonal whale migration from the Bay of Fundy in Maine to the warm clear waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way we will visit cities large and small, and study a variety of ecosystems and environmental topics. We also plan to take side trips into the cyprus swamps and Everglades National Park looking for Alligators, birds, and other critters.
Expedition Blog Geology of the Western North American Coastline
Geology of the Western North American Coastline
Tuesday, 15 June 2010 00:00 Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 November 2010 03:36
We are paddling along the western edge of the North American continent, where land meets water. For this week's Notes from the Trail, we asked Ellen Root, our geology expert, to provide us with an explanation of the geology of this region. Here is what she told us:
You may already know that sea level on Earth changes over time. This depends on temperatures on the whole Earth as well as the amount of ice that is frozen in glaciers and the polar ice caps. At different times in Earth’s history we could have been traveling through what is now land far from the ocean’s edge or among islands that presently lie deep beneath the surface of the water. Today we want to talk about another aspect of the coastline we see each day. We want to look at the rocks that form the support structure for the plants, animals, people, and buildings we have encountered as we paddle along the Canadian coast. Many people think of rocks as solid and immovable, but every day they are moving, very slowly, on a scale so large it can be difficult to comprehend. The science that explains this process is called Plate Tectonics.
The Earth’s crust is made of rigid rock that floats on a ductile layer of rock called the mantle. (Ductile in this case means rock that has not fully melted, but because of pressure from overlying rock and heat from the Earth’s center it can bend and flow like a liquid). The mantle surrounds the Earth’s core, which has a liquid outer layer and a solid inner layer. The Earth’s crust, or lithosphere, is broken into separate sections, or plates. Check out the map below of the Earth’s currently recognized tectonic plates.
Image Source: Wiki media Commons (This image is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the USGS.)
Different plates are more dense (you can think of them as heavier) or less dense (lighter) depending on what they are made of. Plates that are beneath the oceans are generally more dense than plates that contain the rocks our continents are made of. These lithospheric plates can be very large. All of North America and then some sits on one single plate!
Plates move on top of the mantle so slowly that we can’t feel them: this motion is called tectonic motion and the plates are called tectonic plates. When a more dense oceanic tectonic plate collides with a less dense continental plate, what do you think happens? Subduction! The oceanic plate is pushed beneath the continental plate, and if it travels far enough down through the Earth’s layers it can melt and eventually become recycled into new rock that forms at or near the Earth’s surface.
This diagram shows an oceanic plate subducting beneath a continental plate.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, Released into public domain by author(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b7/Oceanic-continental_convergence_Fig21oceancont.svg)
Just like the land we see on continents, the ocean floor has topography, high spots and low spots. The earth’s oceans even have underwater mountain ranges and deep trenches. Imagine the Hawaiian islands, which were formed by volcanoes and are made of rock that reaches all the way to the ocean floor. If this part of the seafloor was about to be subducted, do you think it would be easy or difficult for it to be pushed beneath the continental crust? Geologists have found places all over the world where pieces of subducting oceanic crust have been scraped off of their plates and become part of an overriding continental plate. This process is called accretion.
So what does all this have to do with the area we are traveling through? Well, the entire western coast of Canada and the United States is composed of chunks of rock that came from other places and got stuck on to the North American tectonic plate. Geologists call these chunks suspect terrains. Look at the map below; the grey area inland is older continental crust, while the white area along the coast is divided into 41 different suspect terrains! Many of them came from tectonic plates that long ago were pushed beneath the North American continent. Not only were these suspect terrains stuck on to our continental plate as other plates subducted beneath it, but since they have become part of the plate, some of them have been broken into pieces and moved long distances by geologic faults. Pieces of the Wrangellia terrain (marked in black on the map) are found as far as 2500 kilometers (about 1500 miles) away from each other.
Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature 288, 329-33, copyright 1980.
The forces that move tectonic plates and change continents and oceans work so slowly that it can be hard to imagine that tectonic plates even exist, let alone move around. In fact the idea was not widely accepted by geologists until 1976. The science of plate tectonics is only 34 years old! Whether the rocks that we see along the western coast came from a bump on the ocean floor or an ancient volcano, we know that they became part of the North American continent when parts of subducting oceanic plate accreted (or stuck on) to the continental plate. These suspect terrains make up the shoreline we see every day as we paddle along the Canadian coast.
Want to learn more? Ask your teacher to help you find more information on the geology of the Pacific Northwest, or the geology of the area you live in.
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