The following people are the core faculty of WMFS, who work alongside staff and volunteers at the Wrangell Mountains Center, and a plethora of guest instructors and lecturers from the Copper River Basin community.

Faculty

McCarthy rests beside a receding glacier, and as the climate of northern regions continues to warm rapidly, the wider Copper River Basin faces growing erosion, thawing permafrost, increasing wildfires, and vegetation community shifts that are implicated in the changing ranges and numbers of animals like caribou that have long been crucial to culture, landscape structure, and customary and traditional resource use. In this landscape change has always been the rule, as can be learned from listening to these places and the people who call them home.  Ecological, geophysical, glacial, and social processes have been interplaying here at incredible timescales, forming a system much greater and more complex than the sum of its parts.  I focus on the roles that creatures like caribou and alpine plants play in broader stories of change in landscape structure/process. Climate, people, policy, vegetation, and other animals are all bound together in stories of ecosystem change. The Wrangells are a fascinating region to experience and learn from, and I’m excited to do so alongside our students this summer.

Before I began my research and role in WMFS, I had worked as a volunteer and as staff at the Wrangell Mountains Center, helping to run art, science, and natural history programs while keeping the Old Hardware Store’s off-grid facilities operating. 

In summer, at my home in a meadow on Porphyry Mountain near Kennecott, I hear ice collapsing, though recently it is quieter, because the glacier filling the valley floor below has melted so much. The meadow was formed by forest fire spreading up from the railroad tracks, when the copper mines were operating a century ago. After, grasses and flowers made sod, preventing tree reestablishment. Above the meadow, birch and spruce roots intertwine, appearing to share nutrients via mycorrhizal networks. I wonder, do they? How can I know? My career has centered on teaching college students in these mountains. My Berkeley environmental planning masters thesis was about management options for Wrangell-St. Elias. My PhD dissertation included a footnoted novel about this place. I lobbied a decade for congressional protection of Alaska wildlands. I train in the peacemaking martial art of Aikido and have practiced meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh. I avidly devour Wrangells geoscience academic papers. Now I am most interested in relationships between complexity theory, science and religion. And how to live well in a world transforming with climate change. What may my experience offer young people facing this challenge? Actually, more this: What does this place, my home, have to offer? How can I be a guide to that?

For summer 2025, I’m excited about our emphasis on material and energy flows. I’m reminded of Indra’s Net, the Vedic image of interconnectedness, in the Wrangells, the way it expresses at multiple time and space scales, the similarity of braided stream channels incised today in periglacial sand – I can cover them with my hand – with the huge braided Chitina River, incised into two hundred million years of Wrangellia bedrock overlain with multi-millenia of river, lake and ice-borne sediments. When students understand this – and they do! – I’ve seen their lives change forever.

I’ve been spending time in the McCarthy area since 2009 and believe in the power of this place to transform people. I often wonder how living in such a dynamic landscape full of melting glaciers and moving rivers affects the community here. I live in a cabin on the Nizina River and work as a science illustrator, artist, and educator. I love the way art can connect people with their surroundings and how different ways of communicating can explain elements of science. One of the best ways to learn is to draw something, and sketching is also a tool for curiosity and reflection. I enjoy working with place-based and hands-on environmental education and have worked with the Wrangell Mountains Center field studies programs as well as the Juneau Icefield Research Program and Inspiring Girls* Expeditions, and am a teaching artist with the Alaska Artist in Schools program. My academic focuses are on field sketching and science communication. 

I’ve also worked as a guide, leading backpacking trips and glacier day hikes in the Wrangell-St. Elias. I love the opportunity to go on multi-week backcountry trips. I’m also on the board of local Emergency Medical Services and a volunteer with the Wrangell St Elias Search and Rescue team. I’ve has exhibited my work at the Alaska State Museum, Bunnell Street Arts Center, and at other galleries around Alaska, and have received multiple awards and grants to pursue my art and teaching. I’m currently writing a book about field sketching for Timber Press.

Aaron Chesler, PhD

​I am fascinated by major climatic changes within Earth’s history, where major events caused hemispheric and global variability.  Some of these climatic time periods occur during the recent post-industrial warming, the deglaciation of North America (12,000 – 18,000 years ago), and the last glacial period (10,000 – 120,000 years ago).  Particularly, I find the complex relationships between the cryosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere fascinating as these affect carbon cycling.  To assess these relationships, I have employed a variety of methods including dust-particle analysis, trace element biogeochemistry, methane gas measurements, and glacial geomorphological field mapping.  I have completed field work in Canada, Iceland, New York State (Adirondacks), and Alaska (Juneau Icefield). I am excited to join the Wrangell Mountains Field Studies program and support students exploring the glacial and periglacial environments. Overall, I am really excited about glaciers and getting others really excited about them too! I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado College, but I have also taught on the Juneau Icefield Research Program and guided commercially for the Franz Josef Guides in New Zealand.