Chugach Mountains, Fall 2000
Et le voici, une histoire: Mr. Dixon is an ultramarathoner, extreme skier and 36 years a whitewater boater. He is a biologist and Teacher of the Gifted who left teaching after 2002-03 academic year. A BP Teacher of the Year for 2001, he was the 1998, 1999 and 2000 recipient of a M.R. Robinson Fund (Scholastic Magazine) grant. This grant funds the North Pacific Project and will bring 1900 Kenai Peninsula students to the world's only far north aquarium to learn about our oceans. He was awarded the 1997 Christa McAuliffe Fellowship to build a www link between Kenai Peninsula Schools and the Alaska SeaLife Center. With these four grants Mr. Dixon will facilitate over 2800 Kenai Peninsula students visiting the center.
Chugach Mountains, Fall 2000
He taught Quest (gifted/talented) at Seward Elementary and two other small schools in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District using computer networking from 1990-2003. He helped develop the Gifted Learner web site. Prior to coming to Seward he taught six years at Shungnak in the northwest Arctic with his wife Deborah. He has degrees/endorsements in seven subject areas, including an Masters in biology from Idaho State University and speaks four world languages (Parlo francese, spanol, Inupiat, vorrei parlare Italiano). Mr. Dixon has taught students from primary through college, including subjects at the university level as wide ranging as skiing, kayaking, vertebrate embryology and Internet applications for educators. Before teaching in public schools he had a 14 year career in resource management as a smokejumper for the USFS, fire management officer for BLM and biologist/fire ecologist for NPS.
'Lava Falls', Rio Colorado, Augusto 1996
Photo by P. Anderson
Mr. Dixon skied alpine events for the University of Utah and Universite de Grenoble and won the alpine ski championship at Whitman College in 1967. He has competed in the Iditaski, a 180 mile ski race on Alaska's Iditarod trail ('92). During the summer of 1990 he did a centennial traverse of Idaho. In 1996 he traversed the Wasatch and Uintah Mountains in celebration of Utah's centennial. He has completed the Hope to Homer ultramarathon across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula (6-97) and the Dyea to Dawson (6-98) a 600 mile race celebrating the centennial of the rush to the Klondike. He boated the Kenai River source to sea including a first descent of the North Fork of the Snow River ('99). He was with the first team to traverse the Alaska Range over Denali in 2000 raced the Nebesna to McCarthy Wilderness Classic August 2000. During the summer of 2001 he got high on mountains in seven different ranges of four states and in 2002 he traversed seven mounatin ranges. May 12 to August 12, 2003 he completed a 1362 mile traverse, 'Gates of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific'.
"Climb like you have never fallen. Ski like you have never been injured. Jump as though your parachute has always opened. Kayak like you have never had to swim a rapid. Go early, go light, go high, go far."
“ Rocky Traverse” A Journey across the Rocky Mountains on the Trail of the Corps of Discover. http://www.airleaf.com/synopsis.asp?bookid=2132&order
Denali Pass, Denali Millenium Traverse, June 2000
js2dixon@hotmail.com
