The Colby Echo

Issue date: 4/15/09 Section: Features

Media Credit: courtesy of blair braverman

If you ever find yourself complaining about Maine winters, you should talk to Blair Braverman '11 to gain some perspective. She has been buried alive in a snow cave, survived temperatures as cold as -75° F and suffered numerous cases of frostbite. "I think the tissue in my cheeks is dead," she said. "I try not to think about it."

Before coming to the College, Braverman, a Davis, California native, spent a gap year in the Laplands province of northern Norway. She lived in a town with a population of 37, where the most common occupation was reindeer herding, and worked as a handler, helping the herders with their sled dogs and eventually learning how to conduct her own sled.

Braverman had previously lived in Norway for a year when she was ten and her father, a professor at the University of Oregon, was on sabbatical. She returned to Norway again at age 13, when she spent a year as an exchange student.

During her gap year she traveled throughout the Arctic by sled. "I spent most of the winter sleeping in igloos," she said, and had to take turns being on polar bear watch throughout the night to ensure that no bears attacked her group while they were sleeping.

For the past two summers, Braverman has worked as a dogsled guide in Alaska, where she lived in a tent on a glacier and people flew in on helicopters to go out on tours. She was so cut off from the outside world that she had to select her classes for her first year at the College by having her dad read the course catalog to her via satellite radio.

Here at the College, Braverman is an environmental studies policy major with a minor in creative writing. Originally, she had planned to pursue an independent major in Arctic studies, but said, "my parents vetoed it," for practicality's sake. She has, however, managed to integrate her knowledge of the Arctic and dog sledding into many environmental studies research projects, and this past January wrote an essay entitled "The Iditarod Trail as a Model for Conservation Finance" that won her an all-expenses paid trip to Valdivia, Chile to attend the "Conservation Capital in the Americas" conference. "People thought it was really crazy that I was a dogsledder down there," she said. "They were like 'no, it isn't possible.'" Braverman said she was "at least 15, if not 40, years younger than everyone [at the conference]," and that she didn't even know what conservation finance was before she wrote the essay. "I had to Google it," she admitted, laughing.

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