Get a ‘moo’ve on rodeo season — Annual cattle drive turns heads on K-Beach Road

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Cowboys and cowgirls on horseback drive cattle down College Road on Sunday, during their trek from Diamond M Ranch to the Soldotna Rodeo Grounds.

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Some amount of unusual is to be expected these days along Kalifornsky Beach Road between Kenai and Soldotna — the orange signs, cones and flagging of the ongoing road resurfacing project, the bright yellow trash bags awaiting pickup from the annual spring cleanup week, and the sudden proliferation of walkers, runners and bike riders along the paved pedestrian Unity Trail, now that it’s finally free of snow and mud.

But on Sunday there was an oddity that still caused heads to turn, speeds to slow and notice to be taken:

Cows.

As in mooing, grazing, milk-producing, beef-steak-generating bovines flanked by cowboys and cowgirls mounted on horseback, being herded along the road like a scene from “Bonanza,” only with motor vehicles, rather than tumbleweeds, passing by.

Even this unusual scene is becoming a traditional one for those who happen to be on K-Beach during the annual Soldotna Equestrian Association cattle drive, held since 2011 to kick off the rodeo season.

Mike Ashwell accompanies a cow and her weeks-old calf across an intersection along Kalifornsky Beach Road on Saturday during the Soldotna Equestrian Association’s annual cattle drive held to kick off rodeo season.

“It’s kind of fun because there’s lots of people that stop and take pictures and honk, and there’s a lot of people that are interested in watching it along K-Beach because it’s not something you see every day. In fact, you only see it once a year. It’s a fun event for the riders, and I hope it’s a fun event for the community that gets to see it. And it hopefully raises some awareness for what SEA is and does, and for our rodeo,” said Mike Ashwell, vice president of SEA.

There are five rodeo events held on the Kenai Peninsula during the spring and summer, three at the Soldotna Rodeo Grounds behind the ball fields by the Soldotna Sports Center, and two in Ninilchik, with the first rodeo set to begin at 2 p.m. this Saturday and Sunday in Soldotna. The kickoff has felt like it’s come sooner than usual this year, because winter has taken longer than usual to melt into spring.

“This spring has been such a problem for everybody, and for us, as well. We’re two to three weeks behind on arena projects,” Ashwell said, as workers hurry to hook up water and electricity, complete dirt work and get the riding arena in shape for practices and events. “There’s all sorts of things — getting the arena prepared and cleaned up and in the condition we want it to be so that everybody can get in there and be safe while riding and doing their events. Ordinarily right now we would just be prepping for rodeo, so we’re a little behind the eight ball because of the weather.”

Despite the last-minute hurry to finish spring chores, SEA is set to swing into its usual busy schedule — with bucking on Mondays, roping on Tuesdays, barrel racing and pole bending on Wednesdays, team penning on Thursdays, and jackpot events on Fridays before the weekend rodeos, as well as other organizations holding events, including a pony club and dog herding practice. Information and schedules can be found at www.soldotnaequestrianassociation.com.

Bomb hoax raises alarm of threat response — Homer police to coordinate with school over report of bomb

By Carey Restino

Homer Tribune

A recent incident at Homer High School raises some questions and some eyebrows when a crudely made fake bomb prompted school officials to evacuate the school, but no call was made to 911.

Homer High students hardly had time to get comfortable Thursday morning before they were evacuated from the building after school administrators found what they thought might be a bomb.

According to Homer Police Chief Mark Robl, a teacher first saw the device in the stairwell around 8:15 a.m. and thought it might be a discarded science project, so pushed it out of the way. The “suspicious device” was made from an unmarked coffee can with an eraser taped to the outside of it and a couple of wires sticking out of the can’s plastic top.

A press release issued by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District said that Principal Allan Gee saw a “suspicious device” in a stairwell at the school and responded by evacuating around 370 students and staff.

“I found a suspicious device, and while realizing it was a week of senior pranks, took this seriously, and secured the area following the (Kenai Peninsula Borough School District) Emergency Action Procedure,” Gee is quoted in the release.

A call was made between 8:35 and 8:50 a.m., Robl said, by the principal’s secretary to Homer Police Sgt. Lary Kuhns saying there was a senior prank issue that required police response, but that the principal wanted to keep the response “low key.”

“There was no sense of urgency conveyed in that phone call,” Robl said.

Kuhns told the school secretary he would respond in the next 10 to 15 minutes, Robl said.

Branch out into gardening — 4-H sale, native tree program see growth

Photos by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. John N. Trent of Anchorage carries a freshly dug spruce tree to his car, while fire prevention officer Paul Pellegrini assists him with other saplings, during a new Go Wild Roadside Tree Seedling Dig in Sterling on Saturday.

By Joseph Robertia

Redoubt Reporter

With the mercury hanging at just about 32 degrees and light flakes of snow falling from gray sky, it may not have felt like spring over the weekend, but that didn’t stop green-thumbed Alaskans from preparing for the “warm” weather season.

By 10 a.m. Saturday, an hour before the event began, people were already lining up for the annual Kenai Peninsula 4-H tree sale at Soldotna Creek Park. More than 20 tree species were offered this year, from the thick-growing Colorado blue spruce to the Amur maple, which consistently has some of the deepest red fall leaf colors, to the American mountain ash with orange-red berries that are a favorite among Bohemian waxwings and other bird species.

“We try to offer good-quality trees that people will have success with,” said Lydia Clayton, a 4-H agriculture/horticulture agent. “We choose landscape trees that can survive our cold temperatures, work with our long and short photo periods, are pest and somewhat moose resistant, and are trees that are beautiful.”

The trees, hundreds of them — and nearly all gone within the first hour — were brought in from a nursery in Montana, which Clayton said was selected due to it being in a relatively northern latitude with long winters, so that the trees will come already adapted to cold climates.

“They come in bare-rooted, so people can see that it has no root issues and that it is healthy and everything is growing in the right direction,” she said.

Common Ground: Third eye duck blind

Photo courtesy of Christine Cunningham. Duck-hunting success comes from patient peace and quiet. Just don’t crow too loudly about it.

By Christine Cunningham, for the Redoubt Reporter

Conversations in the duck blind are the most profound conversations a person can have in life. If the topic is not pertinent or amusing, it doesn’t get talked about in the duck blind. Sound is too precious. If it has to be said in a whisper, it’s got to be relevant or hilarious.

Nothing else rises to the level of communication. If ducks are coming in or over, all idle chatter must cease. It doesn’t matter if you were about to present the punch line to the funniest joke you’d heard all year. It doesn’t matter if you were about to reveal a secret that could cure the ails of all mankind. If ducks are coming in and you’re in a duck blind, the ducks have to take precedence.

For a while, when duck hunting was new to me, it was impossible for me to know that the appearance of ducks in the sky, the sound of ducks on a pond nearby, or even the random thought of ducks that might arise was cause for instant pause. The ducks “have the floor,” is what my fifth-grade teacher would say. Whoever is running the show is the one that gets to talk.

So, if you’re hunting ducks, they have your attention. You’re supposed to be scanning the sky. You’re supposed to be listening. You’re supposed to be using your duck call. And if a duck wants to join the conversation, that’s the best kind of talk.

But I didn’t know this when I started. It seemed like, if the story was good enough, it wouldn’t matter if a few flocks of ducks failed to land on the pond. I was wrong. Those could be the only ducks that fly by all day. In my case, they were.

When the measure of my conversational ability is how well I can stop talking at the mere suggestion of ducks, I had a long way to go. I had to learn to talk in shorter sentences. I had to learn to pick up where the story left off after a 45-minute duck interruption. This not only helped me in the duck blind, it could possibly help me in life.

Science of the Seasons: Keep a hawk eye out for avian acrobatics

By Dr. David Wartinbee, for the Redoubt Reporter

A few weeks back, when the Redpolls were emptying our bird feeders every day, we had a special visitor. Out of the corner of my eye a large dark bird swept low over the ground and headed to an area below one of the feeders.

The feasting Redpolls seemed to scatter in every possible direction and just as fast, the predator was gone. I wondered what had just cruised by and suspected it might have been a goshawk. We have seen goshawks attempt to take small birds at the feeders in the past but this hawk was more dark brown than the characteristic blue-gray back and light-colored chest of adult goshawks.

I started looking out every window of the house in hopes that it might have landed nearby. Sure enough, there was the predator, perched in a tree staring at the bird feeder and the dozens of Redpolls that were back on the ground. It was a goshawk-sized bird with a dark brown back and a speckled front. The eyes were bright yellow and not the ruby red I expected of an adult goshawk. After a quick check in my bird book, I was certain that this was a juvenile goshawk.

Northern goshawks, perhaps better known simply as goshawks, are categorized as an accipiter and are found throughout North America, Europe and parts of Asia. They are a year-round predator here in Alaska but are so secretive that they are only occasionally seen. This past winter I encountered several goshawks but in almost every case, they were quickly out of sight and lost in thick woods.

I was usually able to identify them by their size, gray color and characteristic flight pattern of flap, flap, glide. Additionally, they are one of only a very few hawks that are seen here in winter months. These distinctions work in the winter, but in summer sharp-shined hawks frequently use that same flying cadence and Harlen’s hawks are similarly colored to immature goshawks.

Righting online wrongs like beating a dead horse

Hi, my name is Joseph, and I hunt horses with sticks, crossbows and firearms. And if you believe this, I’ve got some prime swampland in Florida to sell you.

Sadly, though, several people do believe it, thanks in part to a photo stolen from my personal blog, http://www.rogueskennel.com, and used out of context on a site proclaiming to be for “Texas Horse Hunts.” Not hunting on horseback, but actually hunting and killing horses.

Despite numerous calls and emails, I still can’t determine if the site is real or some kind of crazy hoax. And it’s left me having to assert and explain something so bizarre I never thought I’d have to utter these words — I have not, do not and would not ever hunt horses.

The photo they found on my site and reposted was taken in Alaska, after my wife and I retrieved a horse that died of natural causes from Sterling residents who had no way to bury it and didn’t want it to attract summer bears.

The part that really smarts is that the most extensive damage to our reputations was not done by the initial website post. Rather, it was from the dozens of outraged animal rights activists on Facebook pages and other social media sites who began spreading the photo with lightning speed.

Terms like intellectual property, copyright infringement and Internet security sound sterile, legalistic and boring. Being a freelance writer and photographer, I’m certainly aware of those issues, but hadn’t put as much thought into them as I should have. I certainly never thought I’d find myself researching these legalities in the context of something so ridiculous.

The disturbing truth is the same could happen to me again, or to anyone with a presence on social medial and the Internet. I do not hunt horses, but because I was being accused of it, I was suddenly keenly interested in hunting for ways to make my online presence more secure.

Grounds for Divorce: Problems runeth over, and over, and over

Hunting, Fishing and Other Grounds of Divorce, by Jacki Michels, for the Redoubt Reporter

“Seriously?”

“You’ve GOT to be kidding!”

I cursed my phone and went through the messages again, and quite out loud and to no one in particular (as I was by myself) I asserted:

“NOT MY PROBLEM!”

I stuck my tongue out at my cell.

“So there!”

Amazing. Nine messages, each concerning husband or kids, and there was even a message for our new puppy.

“What do I look like? A secretary?”

Humph.

I related the story to one of my girlfriends, then another, and yes, four more.

We all had eerily similar conversations that could best be summarized as follows:

“B-u-s-y! Geesh! Time — never enough! Work! Cooking, laundry, dishes, shopping, schedule and WORK!”

As always, we took turns enumerating our litany of responsibilities, duties, conflicts and general chaos. At one point I realized that when I recited my life craziness and then my friends recited their craziness, we were all getting a weird sort of mutual express therapy. As always, as our sessions drew to a close, we’d all croon, “Someday — yes, someday! Very soon — sigh — we shall do yoga! And run? Or hike?”

Sounds divine, we agree. We’ll get together someday soon, we all promise/lie, and hug and go on our merrily busy way.

That was last week, and, oddly, the very same thing kept right on happening — on a daily basis. I had a startling revelation.

My life is something like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” — trapped in a day until he rights a situation — except for me, the movie never ends. And I like to think I look nothing like Bill Murray. And, of course, I’m not a guy. The point is there are days that all sort of blur together. Thing is, life is like that, isn’t it?

Come to think of it, I have a ton of stuff to do, this column is (oops) late, and about a hundred words too short. Never mind, I’m going for a run.

• Grounds for staying married: That one romantic thing he said several overfilled calendars ago, something sweet and cheesy about having our cups overflow.
• Grounds for Divorce No. 7,446: Asking wife to do another errand when she gets a minute … .
• Grounds for divorce No. 7,447: Claiming wife is NEVER 100 words short. EVER.

Whatever.

Jacki Michels is a freelance writer who lives (and loves) in Soldotna.