Sarah Drummond

Sarah Drummond is an ardent all-around naturalist who grew up in the Colorado Rockies with an entomologist dad and a teacher mom who encouraged her love for the natural world. She received a B.A. in biology and art from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she had the opportunity to work with seabirds such as herring gulls and Leach’s storm petrels, and to hone her interpretation skills by designing exhibits in the local natural history museum. After graduating, Sarah embarked on a Watson Fellowship, a grant awarded to graduates from 50 colleges each year for a self-designed project overseas. Sarah’s project, “Inquiring Eyes: Artists and Exploration,” delved into the role played by artists who traveled with expeditions of discovery in an era before photography, and the impacts and uses of their work. As a visual artist herself, she continued the tradition of the explorer/artist and created her own artwork on site. This project developed into her master’s thesis at Prescott College, where she earned an M.A. in Environmental History.

Sarah’s first exposure to Alaska came at the age of fifteen, when she had the good fortune to be taken along on a small boat with a family friend. She was mesmerized by the vast watery wilderness and the wildlife. In 2007 she began working as a naturalist aboard a charter boat operating in Glacier Bay National Park, later branching out to other small boats running in Alaska’s Inside Passage and the Pacific Coast. Alaska’s “ABC” Islands and adjacent mainland gradually became her backyard, and she is overjoyed to return there year after year and is committed to preserving the region.

Sarah has also guided in Patagonia (where she spent three months living with a quarter million Magellanic penguins) and the North Atlantic from Scotland to the Canadian Maritimes (where she found herself in the middle of a global accordion festival). Her experiences in the field inspire her work as a professional artist and illustrator. If you see her sketching on deck, feel free to look over her should or join in! When she’s not traveling, Sarah lives and creates with her partner in southwest Colorado.