These are areas that have been set aside for, you know, for protection.

Often like the salmon has multiple layers of protection.

You know, it's a designated wild and scenic river

that is housed within Cobuck Valley National Park.

And so it has like two levels of protection that have been afforded to it because

we as humans felt that it was such an important place in terms of its wilderness characteristics.

And so the fact that we, you know, have indirectly impacted it to such a large degree is, yeah, it's super sobering and sad and

yeah, and I think that it should be a wake-up call for all of us that we can have these

impacts on these places that we you know kind of cherish and want to protect

without even setting foot anywhere near the the watershed you know. Our reach is much greater than we could ever have imagined, I think.

That was Patty Sullivan. He's an ecologist and every year he travels to the Brooks Range in Northern Alaska to collect snowpack samples.

The area he visits is remote and often inaccessible. The Salmon River, for example, is a place where Bush Plains rarely land.

They'll land outside of the watershed and then people walk in.

Patty's been going here for 20 years now and in that time, he and Roman Dial, an adventurer and fellow scientist, have formed a

hypothesis about why the area is changing so much. The retreat of sea ice fuels increasing snowfall and nearby

land masses protect seedlings and improves soil nutrient availability. And all of this allows for shrubs to

proliferate and trees to advance into the tundra.

It's called the greening of the Arctic,

and it's changing the land.

It's also changing how people and wildlife use the land.

In 2019, while Patty and Roman

were collecting their data sets, they stumbled upon something concerning and out of place.

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