Mission
The Wrangell Mountains Center is a private non-profit institute dedicated to environmental education, research, and arts in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.
Our Vision
The Wrangell Mountains Center strives to facilitate understanding, appreciation, and stewardship of the lands and communities of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park amp; Preserve. We enjoy seeing people personally transformed through their experience with this extraordinary place. Our programs provide students, local citizens, scholars, and travelers with an increased understanding of complex natural processes, a changed view of the human place in the natural environment, and new skills for taking effective action on their own local issues.
In the process of helping people come to know the Wrangell Mountains, we are building a strong local, national, and international constituency for the protection of wildlands and the enhancement of mountain cultures in Alaska and beyond.
Guiding Principles
The board and staff of the Wrangell Mountains Center evaluate past, present, and future institute activities in light of the following guiding principles:
  • We value strong communities: in all our activities we strive to maintain a supportive and cooperative living, working, and learning environment.
  • We support diverse modes of perception and expression in our exploration of the relationships between people and place: an interdisciplinary approach that embraces the analytical, artistic, scientific, and spiritual.
  • We strive to protect the uniquely wild qualities of this landscape: wilderness is valuable both for its own sake and for the powerful direct experience it offers us.
  • We believe in experiential education: we facilitate a learning process of inquiry and discovery through direct contact with the outside environment.
  • We are intimate with the Wrangells: we wish to attract and retain a committed, locally-experienced staff.
  • We find that attention cultivates compassion: awareness of our natural and social environment is important, and communities thrive when people live with engaged senses.
History & Need
The founding members of the Wrangell Mountains Center began living and teaching in the Wrangells over twenty years ago. Since that time, a once little-known landscape of towering mountains and quiet communities has been discovered by an expanding public.
Today, as the only private education and research-oriented institution in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, with a staff, curriculum, and facility that predates the designation of the park, the Wrangell Mountains Center is uniquely able to forge links among local communities, park lands, and the general public.
Our role is crucial because gateway communities such as McCarthy, Kennicott, and Nabesna comprise the primary "Park Experience" for many visitors. Recognizing that the Park Service has a relatively low budget, small staff, and limited ability to operate on private lands, the Wrangell Mountains Center helps with the critical task of introducing and interpreting the Wrangells, and additionally provides a forum for research and discussion of the area's natural history, aesthetic values, conservation, and community development.
As public recognition and visitation to the region grows, we are building our institutional capacity and developing new programs to address the changes in the region.
Location
Cultural
Located within walking distance of the Kennicott Glacier, the Wrangell Mountains Center's activities are based in the small community of McCarthy, on private land, within the boundaries of the nation's largest National Park. Known as North America's Mountain Kingdom, the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve encompasses 13.2 million acres including nine of the sixteen tallest peaks, an active volcano, and many of the continents largest glaciers and rivers. Together with adjacent parks in Canada and Alaska, Wrangell-St. Elias represents one of the world's largest contiguous tracts of protected wildlands -- more than 25 million acres -- and is currently recognized as United Nations World Heritage Area. As tourism to the region increases, McCarthy and the adjacent Kennecott National Historic Landmark are emerging as visitor destinations of international significance, while continuing to serve as precious homelands to local people and favorite destinations for Alaska residents.
Natural
The environs surrounding McCarthy provide an outstanding natural laboratory for student and seasoned researchers alike. In particular, the local landscape invites inquiry into primary successional processes, alpine and forest ecology, spruce bark beetle dynamics, glacial outburst floods, bedrock geology, glaciology, and any number of geologic or geomorphologic processes. Including ecosystems that stretch from cirque to sea, the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve is also home to healthy herds of Dall sheep, mountain goat, moose, grizzly bear, black bear, wolverine, wolf--a complete array of resident sub-arctic mammals as well as migrating birds and salmon.
Facilities
The Wrangell Mountains Center is headquartered in the "Old Hardware Store," a historic building which originally served as a general store for the boomtown of McCarthy during the copper mining period of the early-20th century. Abandoned in 1938, the structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places after former board member Sally Gibert initiated ongoing stabilization and restoration efforts in 1976. What was once a store, family living quarters, and rooming house is now an active solar-powered educational center, with a library, seminar room, program office, equipment storage for rafting and mountaineering expeditions, workshop, office/studio space for visiting scholars and artists, a cooperatively-run kitchen, flower, vegetable gardens, and a small green house. By joining a learning community at the Hardware Store, participants from all backgrounds have the opportunity to experience a self-contained and largely sustainable living system.
Working cooperatively with the National Park Service, Prince William Sound Community College, and locally owned businesses, the Wrangell Mountains Center enjoys access to various other facilities including a rooming house, recreation hall, theater, and full-service lodge equipped for conventions. We also have the capacity to establish temporary backcountry camps with complete kitchen, enclosed meeting space, and wood heat source. River-based learning and research can be contracted through reputable local guiding companies.
Leadership
Wrangell Mountains Center activities are managed by Jessica Speed, Executive Director. Jessica has a B.S. in Geography, experience in natural resource education and management and owns a home in Kennicott. Having lived and worked on both sides of the Alaska/Yukon Territory border, Jessica brings an interest in the land, its people and biological communities un- obscured by politcal boundaries.
The Center is governed by a nine-member Board of Directors. We welcome prospective board members with an intimate knowledge of Alaska and the Wrangell Mountains.
  • Howard Mozen is a special education teacher, outdoor educator, mountain guide, and former owner of the commercial rafting company Copper Oar. Educated at the University of California Santa Cruz, Howard taught programs for the Wrangell Mountains Center for nine years. He owns a homebuilt yurt and beautiful log cabin just meters from the Kennicott Glacier.
  • Michael Loso (President) is an Assistant Proffessor of Geology and Earth Sciences at Alaska Pacific University. He holds a PhD. from the University of California Santa Cruz, MS from the University of Vermont's Field Naturalist program, and plays banjo in the local McCarthy bluegrass ensemble. Nearing the completion of constructing his home in Kennicott, this is Mike's 18th year in the Wrangells.
  • Megan Richotte has worked for Wrangell -St. Elias National Park and Preserve as the Kennecott District Interpreter since 2002. She as been a key player in the partnership between the WMC and the National Park Service, and continues to be an important asset. Megan spends her summers in Kennecott and winters at her home in Gulkana.
  • Barry Hecht first traveled to the McCarthy area in 1972 to do research for a document that introduced the Wrangells to Congress, and led to the establishment of the Park and Preserve. With Ben Shaine, Barry started the Wrangell Mountains Center's student program in 1982, and taught portions of the program for much of the next 10 years. Barry now lives in California.
  • Vicki Snitzler is a career employee of the National Park Service who currently serves as the Park Planner and EEO Counselor for Wrangell-St. Elias NP & P. Born in New York City, she now spends winters in Glennallen, AK and summers in the Kennecott National Historic Landmark. She holds an MS in Environmental Science and has lived in Alaska since 1997.
  • Maria Shell has been a commited participant in the Wrangell Mountains Writers workshop for seven years. She joined the WMC advisory board two years ago while an adjunct faculty member at the Prince William Sound Community College. Maria is an avid quilter, and now lives with her family in Anchorage.
  • Lila Vogt (Treasurer) is a writer, historian and Anchorage-based accountant with a long history in the Copper River Basin. Born in Alaska and a lifelong bibliophile, Lila also serves on the boards of the Alaska Center for Book and the Alaska Poetry League. She has a daughter in college and is raising her teenage son in Spenard, AK.
  • Thea Agnew is a born and raised Alaskan. Thea has been a part of the McCarthy community since the early 1990's, where she constructed her own home and served three terms as president of the local area council. Thea holds a Masters Degree in History and is the founding partner of an Anchorage based consulting firm, where she specializes in community planning.
  • Lilly Goodman first came to McCarthy in 1991 when she worked as a local mountain guide, and made the Wrangells her year-round home. She was a Wildlands Studies faculty member in 2002, and the program director for the educator workshop for 2005 through 2007. She has over 16 years experience in experiential, outdoor science education and outreach.
Staff
  • Jim Berkey, MS Program Staff, has over ten years experience leading summer field classes in the Wrangells. His Masters in Environmental Studies (University of Montana) blended together studies in applied ecology with exploring the importance of placed-based experiential natural history education.
  • Benjamin Shaine, PhD Wildlands Studies Program Director , is the author of countless policy papers as well as a published novel about the McCarthy area. Ben Shaine, has led student groups through the Wrangells for twenty years. He handled Wrangells issues for the environmental lobby during the congressional debate on the Alaska Lands Act, co-founded the Wrangell Mountains Center, and teaches regularly in the Center's undergraduate programs. His novel, Alaska Dragon, is set in the Wrangell Mountains. Ben holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from the Union Graduate School.
  • Nancy Cook, MFA, Program Staff, a resident of McCarthy's south-side, currently directs and facilitates the Wrangell Mountains Writing Workshop, which she has directed since 1997. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and teaches writing in Astoria, Oregon. Her recent essays appear in the River Teeth Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, the Mountain Gazette, and the Seal Press anthology Going Alone.
  • Claire Emery, MS, Program Staff, is a professional artist, scientific illustrator and educator. Among her published works are graphics in the Wrangell Mountains Centers guide to the natural and cultural history of the McCarthy area.
  • Lilly Goodman, MS, Program Staff, directs and facilitates the Alaska Natural History Interpretatin and Environmental Education Workshop. She has been a mountaineering instructor, backpacking guide, and NPS interpreter in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Lilly is also on the WMC Board of Directors.
  • David Mitchell, MS, Program Staff, teaches ecology and field techniques for the Alaska Wildlands Studies Program. He studied applied ecology at Yale University.
Please consult individual program descriptions for a complete lists of guest lecturers, visiting writers and other revolving staff members.