When the UAF Museum of the North began talking about their Renovation Project in 2018, one part of the plan captured the Board’s immediate attention. The Museum had a bowhead whale skeleton in storage that had been collected decades ago but now they were planning to put that skeleton on a set of pylons and display it as if it were leaping over several exhibits on the floor. The Bill Stroecker Foundation immediately began talking to the Museum administration about how to help support the Whale Exhibit.
We seemed to run into a road block when it was explained that the whale might have to wait 10 or 15 years since it would not be mounted for public viewing until the entire Renovation Project was underway and it appeared that it would be quite some time before this would take place. After this was learned, someone on the Board simply asked if the whale exhibit could be separated from the Renovation Project and mounted somewhere else such as suspended from the ceiling in the Museum’s atrium? After a short meeting with the engineers, Morgan Dulian, from the UAF Dept. Of Development, discovered that indeed the whale exhibit could be separated immediately and the suspended exhibit became a project unto itself as we see it today!
The BSF Board was deeply interested in this whale skeleton (balaena mysticetus) because of its background story and its potential as an educational tool. The whale was originally taken near the northern most point of land in the United States known for over a hundred years as Point Barrow but is now called Utqiagvik. Local hunters, led by Captains Arnold Brower, Sr. And Sam Talaak, during a traditional fall hunt, took the whale in 1963. The Indigenous Peoples in this region have hunted and taken bowhead whales, just like one in the exhibit, for many thousands of years and the whale has become a central cultural and dietary feature of their life in the Arctic.
A few years later in the mid-1960s, a marine mammal research scientist, by the name of Floyd Durham, L.A. County, Museum of Natural History, discovered the whale skeleton and realized its potential as a museum exhibit, if he could save it somehow, and get it to a museum. He made arrangements with the Alaska Air National Guard to transport the entire skeleton to the UAF Museum in two shipments in 1965 and 1969. The bones went immediately into a protected storage environment where they would wait for 51 years before they were prepared for exhibition in the unique ceiling suspension exhibit located in the atrium of the Museum of the North.
What a captivating story! Truly an Alaskan story and one that deserves to be preserved in a unique museum exhibit. In 2018 the BSF enabled the Museum to begin the process which was planned for two years of construction with a planned completion date of May 30, 2021. The engineers went to work on planning the necessary architectural modifications necessary to suspend a 2400 pound skeleton from a building’s ceiling in earthquake country. Aren Gunderson, Mammal Collection Manager, and his team began the very extensive process required to remove all the oil from the bones and a well-respected expert in the assembly of articulated whale skeletons, who resided in Haines, Alaska, was recruited to move to Fairbanks, temporarily for a year, to put the skeleton together. The very few missing or damaged bones were repaired or replaced by 3-D printers that made exact duplicate bones.
The result of the labors of all these experts, specialists, engineers, scientists and designers is the most unique Bowhead Whale Skeleton Exhibit in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the design of the large open space in the Atrium and the circular staircase, that goes around the whale, as it accesses the floors above it, the 42-foot whale skeleton can be viewed from below, from above and along its sides to give a completely global view of the exhibit. This exhibit is truly the Crown Jewel of one of the largest and finest marine mammal research collections to be found anywhere on the planet.
The Bill Stroecker Foundation would like to take the opportunity to extend a special note of thanks to Morgan Dulian, Dir. of Development-UAF, who was chiefly responsible for insuring that this project was unique in one additional aspect and that was the achievement of a completely successful project that was completed on schedule and at the estimated cost! Morgan played a key part in numerous, critically important junctures, as the project proceeded and her vitally important presence insured the success of this project.
The Trustees of the Bill Stroecker Foundation are immensely gratified with the final result of the Whale Exhibit Project and it is our firm belief that this exhibit will play an important part in the Museum of the North’s mission to provide an educational gateway for its patrons, of all ages and cultures, to the amazing place we all call Alaska.
