Beam Reach: Spring 2005 location

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Spring 2005 location

1-800-839-7495

The San Juan Islands

All Beam Reach undergraduate programs begin with 5 weeks of training at the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island (see map/caption). The Labs are located about a 10 minute row northeast of Friday Harbor, Washington.

The San Juan Archipelago lies in the center of a rain shadow cast by the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula to the southwest. This area gets only 30% of the annual rainfall received by Seattle. Consequently, the climate at Friday Harbor Labs is surprisingly warm and dry (graph).

The sea component of the spring and fall programs usually takes place within the rain shadow depicted on this map.

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San Juan Island is the first major island along the straight line connecting Victoria and Bellingham.

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Inspiration:

"Chronicling the passage of whales has led me to an understanding that we, as a species, now stand at a crossroads. We can face the possibility of our own extinction and work to avert it, or we can follow the more traditional path of earth's organisms and fall blindly over the edge. If there's one trait that characterizees human beings, it's the will to survive. This, I believe, will motivate us to work with the natural world rather than oppose it, which is all we need to do to give the children of earth -- of all species -- the opportunity to thrive."
-- Alexandra Morton in penultimate chapter of "Listening to Whales"