A ride to remember

My visit to Cameron Parish, where nature yields both incredible beauty and stunning challenges, was as uplifting as it was sobering. I won’t forget it.

Nature will have its say

The serenity of the scene belied a sobering truth: the beach is eroding at roughly 40 feet inward each year. Every bit of beach the queens walked on in their visit—and everything you see in this photo—will be under water by the time the Fur & Wildlife Festival returns in January 2010.

Gifts of the sea

The refuge ends at the Gulf of Mexico at a lovely beach of coarse, pale sand. Except it isn’t sand at all, but the tiny remnants of countless wave-worn shells. The queens enjoyed picking among the abundant in tact shells, some as big as grapefruit.

Not so fast

Trying to squeeze through a narrow cut-out in dense marsh,

Refuge Manager Perry (left), the Cotton Queen Brandy Matulich

(far right), and the Fur & Wildlife Pageant director Vicki Little

(near right), found themselves stuck and listing to one side—

not a problem except for being miles from true terra firma

with a lively alligator population calling the marsh home. But

with Scooter adding his muscle and talking Vicki through

driving while he and Guthrie gave a good heave, the airboat

and its passengers ended up free in the end.

Faster than a speeding bullet

While visitors are welcome to certain parts of the refuge in
specific months, able to do crabbing and crawfish trapping,
only the staff have full access to the 26-mile coastline via
airboats, which are powered by enormous airplane engines.
The Fur Queen arranged for her guests to zip through the
marshland at thrill-ride speed aboard airboats like this one,
which she shares with the Frog Queen.

Guardians of the kingdom

The Fur & Wildlife Queen is a rare queen who represents not just an industry or town but an ecosystem. The refuge that is part of her domain is protected, preserved, and studied by a

team of biologists, including Philip Trosclair—better known as Scooter—who grew up nearby, interned here as a teen, got his degree, and returned for his adult career. At left, he shows an alligator skull found in the mud. The institutional memory rests in the experience of Refuge Manager Guthrie Perry, who has worked here for decades, and written books based on his research. Here, Perry introduces the visiting queens to the refuge, describing the challenges it currently faces.

Smile pretty

The Fur queen’s next stop led her peers to the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, 76,000 acres of marshland. Home to ducks, geese, spoonbill, egrets, deer, armadillo, muskrat, nutria, and mink, among other species, the refuge is perhaps best known for its alligators. But at the visitor’s center, your first greeter is this madly grinning coyote, which was bagged in the refuge. Chelsea tries to match his smile with some killer whites of her own.