BY RACHEL DOVEY
For Alaska?s Anan Wildlife Observatory, Suzanne Jackson designs around the attraction: bears.
FROM THE JUNE 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE. 
Suzanne Jackson spent nearly 30 years as a landscape architect at the Aspen, Colorado, office of Design Workshop, channeling her passion for backcountry hiking into habitat restoration and open space preservation. But it was when Jackson reconnected with her former colleague Barth Hamberg that things began to get, well, wild. Hamberg manages the landscape architecture program for Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, the largest national forest in the nation. In 2014, he offered Jackson a two-year post.
Jackson was charged with creating a master plan for the Anan Wildlife Observatory, which is located on a remote peninsula in Tongass?s Wrangell district and accessible only by boat or floatplane. It?s a steeply sloping temperate rain forest of spruce, hemlock, and huckleberries, and the pools and waterfalls of Anan Creek support one of the region?s largest pink salmon runs. That means a lot of hungry predators gathering to feast: black bears, grizzlies (called brown bears locally), eagles, and otters, to name just a few. That biodiversity has been a tourism magnet for decades, and helps support the economies of two small towns in the area: Wrangell and Ketchikan. But access and safety both are issues, because many visitors aren?t particularly nimble. Jackson?s job was to employ her design backgroun...