Geography : Faculty -Allen Sullivan

Allen Sullivan Lind Hall 117D Phone: (509) 963-2181 Email: sulliall@cwu.edu

I was born in Ellensburg in a time before the freeways, when the wood smoke from the sawmill and coal smoke from the campus steam-plant wafted freely across town. I began my formal education as a kindergartener in the mail-sorting room of the old post office in downtown Ellensburg. Following a move to a small town in the Palouse region of eastern Washington, I completed my elementary, junior high, and high-school education. Unemployed and hungry in the summer of 1979, I jumped at the opportunity to move back onto the family farmstead and attend Central Washington University. The very first college class I took (8:00 in the morning) was Introduction to Physical Geography. I swallowed the bait and have been hooked on trying to understand landscapes ever since. Five years later, I graduated with a B.A. in Botany, B.A. in Secondary Science Education, and minors in Environmental Studies and Spanish.

Upon graduation, I taught high-school in a small, predominately Native American town on the Colville Reservation; a job that lasted but one year. After conducting fisheries studies on several Columbia and Snake River dams over the next five years, I was encouraged to return to Central Washington University to get a Masters degree in Resource Management, and the Geography Department hired me to teach courses for them the next year. And then a seed that had been planted and nurtured by a cadre of great mental gardeners (Jim Brooks, Ken Hammond, George Macinko, and John Ressler), took root and I enrolled in the Geography doctoral program at Oregon State University. Since earning my Ph.D. in 2000, I have been steadily employed in the Department of Geography at CWU, instructing a wide-variety of courses. Currently, you can probably find me teaching Introductory Physical Geography, Map Reading and Interpretation, Field Methods, Ecosystem Geography, Hydrology, Contemporary Native American Issues, and Resource Analysis.

My research interests are as varied as the landscapes I traverse and the people I meet. Most currently, I am working on a project that is assessing the feasibility for small, off-stream storage reservoirs to improve late-summer instream flows for fisheries enhancement on a local stream. Also, I have become intrigued by freshwater mussels in the Yakima Basin; their relationship to salmon, use as bio-indicators of stream health, and their population dynamics.

I enjoy long road-trips to un-named streams where I can fly-fish or to the Oregon coast where I can stand on the edge of the world and contemplate being small. I enjoy exploring two-track roads that don't show up on maps with adventurous spirits. I enjoy sitting around campfires, playing Euchre, and enjoying good conversation. I enjoy pitching a tent in the dark and waking up cold to the smell of wood smoke and coffee.

I still live on what's left of the family farm, residing in my grandparents ca. 1920 house that sits a few hundred feet down the road from the house I was raised in and walking the same land as did my great grandparents. I guess it's a geography lesson in how distance is measured . . . some might say I haven't gone very far.