CIRI venture backs out of Kenai Hydro — Company refocusing on several other energy projects

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Wind Energy Alaska, partly owned by Cook Inlet Region Inc., a Southcentral Alaska Native-owned corporation, has announced it is pulling its support from Kenai Hydro, a joint venture with Homer Electric Association to investigate the feasibility of installing hydroelectric projects on streams in the Kenai Mountains near Moose Pass.

“What we’ve determined is, looking at this project, it’s not the best use of our time right now, because we have a number of things going on,” said Jim Jager, director of corporate communications for CIRI, also speaking on behalf of Wind Energy Alaska. “… We have quite a few different projects in the hopper right now, and given what we’ve been learning about the Kenai Hydro projects, and given everything else, we’ve determined that Kenai Hydro doesn’t make sense for CIRI or Wind Energy Alaska to be participating in.

“We’re handing the project over to Homer Electric, and Homer Electric will decide whatever it decides in terms of pursuing the project. But we’re just saying it’s not the right project for CIRI or for Wind Energy Alaska at this time.”

Joe Gallagher, HEA spokesman, said in an e-mail Monday that “HEA believes that the project(s) could be feasible.”

“Kenai Hydro has not made a decision to terminate the licensing process. The next step is a public meeting, tentatively scheduled for early November,” Gallagher wrote.

CIRI is a 50-50 partner in Wind Energy Alaska with enXco Inc., which seeks to develop renewable energy projects. Wind Energy Alaska joined with Homer Electric Association to form Kenai Hydro LLC. Kenai Hydro was granted preliminary permits by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in October 2008 to study the feasibility of installing small-scale hydro projects on four waterways in the Moose Pass area — Crescent Lake, Ptarmigan Lake, Grant Lake and Falls Creek.

On Aug. 6, Kenai Hydro submitted a Pre-Application Document and Notice of Intent for a combined project involving Grant Lake and Falls Creek, which would generate an estimated 4.5 megawatts of electricity.

On Sept. 25, Kenai Hydro submitted notice to FERC that it wished to relinquish its preliminary permits on Ptarmigan Lake and Crescent Lake, saying that, after initial investigation and meeting with stakeholders, the projects appeared to be unfeasible.

Work still is progressing on the Grant Lake/Falls Creek project, with a joint meeting between involved agencies, organizations and the public tentatively scheduled for Nov. 12 in Kenai, where Kenai Hydro will review and discuss study plans and summarize the project description and potentially affected resources outlined in the Pre-Application Document. The meeting initiates a 60-day comment period on the study plans and information from the Pre-Application Document, according to Long View Associates, a Kenai Hydro contractor. Project scoping meetings also are tentatively being scheduled for the range of Dec. 8 to 10 in Kenai.

Jager said the decision for Wind Energy Alaska to withdraw support from Kenai Hydro was not made suddenly.

“It’s not something that they’re (Kenai Hydro’s other partners) just finding out about. We have talked with them (Homer Electric) as recently as this morning. We’ve also talked with them or sent letters and had communications leading up to this. And I don’t know what the formal date is, I’m not sure that’s important so much as they’ve been apprised of our position that we’re giving them the project and letting them make their decision,” Jager said Monday.

Warm memories — Quilt tells of Funny ways homesteaders got around

By Jenny Neyman

This quilt block, part of the Alaska statehood anniversary quilt project, shows how early Funny River homesteaders used a homemade cable car to cross the Kenai River.

Redoubt Reporter

The Funny River block in the statehood anniversary quilt project represents a scene Patsy Bird remembers well, but not with the comfy coziness a rendering in colorful material and thread would suggest.

The block depicts Bird and her family crossing the Kenai River in their homemade cable car, standing on a 6-foot, open-air platform that was hauled back and forth above the frigid, fast-moving waters of the Kenai by hand-strung cables and a motor from a meat grinder. In the quilt, their fabric replicas look serene and hearty. In reality, the trip was anything but serene for Bird.

“It worked. But I don’t like heights. I wasn’t very crazy about the cable car,” she said. “I liked the barge better than the cable car. The barge was down on the water.”

A call went out for Alaska quilters to design and create quilt blocks representing their communities, with those blocks being sewn into quilts to be displayed as part of the celebration of Alaska’s 50th anniversary of statehood. The quilts are on display this month at the Soldotna Senior Citizens Center.

In Funny River, the call was answered by the Thread Benders quilting group, which decided to work off of a photo showing how the area’s original homesteaders crossed the river before Funny River Road was put in. The photo is of Glen and Bertha Moore, Pat Bird’s parents, but the quilt block design shows Pat and her husband, Elmer, and a baby riding the cable car. Bird’s family built the cable car in 1960.

The Moores moved to Alaska in 1951 with the intention of homesteading on the Kenai Peninsula, but a fire destroyed all their belongings shortly after they got to Anchorage.

“It took them another seven years to get enough together to go ahead and come down,” Bird said.

By then it was 1958. Bird had finished high school in Anchorage and married Elmer. She and Elmer, her parents and her two brothers — the younger one with his wife — all filed on homesteads in the Funny River area. They had an idea of what the land looked like, having frequently fished from Jack and Ruby Bradford’s homestead off Scout Lake Loop Road in Sterling, which is across the river from what ended up being their Funny River homesteads. But the land was not easily accessible.

At first, boats or a barge got them to and from their homesteads.

“We used an 8-foot boat to cross the river. Sometimes when we went there was slush in the river and you just had to push through the slush and get across,” Bird said. “And the barge, I liked the barge. It was easier for the women, as far as I was concerned. But you had to know how you ran it, too. Depending on how you tied the ropes, the current carried it across the river.”

Elmer Bird said they built the barge by banding together oil drums and guided it by a cable strung across the river.

“You’d angle it against the river and let the current push it across, and when you got ready to go back you angled it the other way and the current carried it back. We took everything across that barge — people, supplies, livestock, buildings. I can tell you, cows didn’t like to ride on it,” Elmer said.

Bless you — Churches taking precautions to prevent spread of flu

By Jenny Neyman

Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Kathleen Evenson applies hand sanitizer on her way into Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Catholic Church in Soldotna on Sunday. Catholic churches are following recommendations from the Anchorage archdiocese to prevent the spread of swine flu.

Redoubt Reporter

One of the reasons people attend church is for the sense of community that comes from sharing faith and celebrating religious traditions and ceremonies with others. But during cold and flu season, a trip to church could result in sharing something that’s not so desirable.

With the H1N1 virus, known as swine flu, making the rounds in Alaska, Catholic churches on the Kenai Peninsula are taking precautions to make sure the flu isn’t spread along with spirituality.

Parishes are following a policy issued by the Archdiocese of Anchorage that calls for limiting contact during liturgical services, said Father Joe Dowling, one of four Oblate missionary priests stationed in Soldotna. The priests minister to Our Lady of the Angles Catholic Church in Kenai, Our Lady of Perpetual Hope in Soldotna, St. John the Baptist in Homer and St. Peter the Apostle Mission in Ninilchik.

The archdiocese first issued suggestions for modifying liturgical service proceedings last spring, when worries of the possible pandemic nature of H1N1 came to the forefront of attention. They were reissued this fall when the flu’s presence was confirmed in Alaska.

“They were recommended for a short period of time when the swine flu first kind of reared its head back in the spring, and then when it seemed to not be such a threat anymore it was suspended. Then it was reinstated, it would have been around time school started,” Fr. Dowling said.

Typically during Mass, parishioners make a gesture of peace to each other, in the form of a handshake or hug. With concerns of spreading the flu virus, the archdiocese has recommended suspending that practice for the time being.

“Instead, do something else,” Fr. Dowling said. “An alternative sign of peace might be a simple bow to the person next to you to offer peace and goodwill, as opposed to shaking hands.”

Stitched in time — Quilts show state’s history of creativity

By Jenny Neyman

“Old Kenai,” designed by Gwen Woodard, of Kenai.

Redoubt Reporter

History is celebrated in many forms — photos, stories, artifacts and song. At the Soldotna Senior Citizens Center this month, Alaska’s history is venerated through fabric and thread.

The Alaska statehood anniversary quilt exhibition is on display at the senior center through Oct. 29. As part of the 50th anniversary of statehood this year, quilters around Alaska were asked to design and create 24-by-30-inch quilt blocks showing some scene, design or image representative of statehood. Those blocks were then sewed into 8-by-10-foot panels, which are currently touring the state.

Most quilters chose to honor their communities, including those from the Kenai Peninsula. That’s part of the reason why the senior center signed up early to host the display.

“The peninsula is well-represented in these quilts. We thought it would be advantageous to have them on display so the peninsula could see them,” said Jan Fena, senior center director.

Of the Kenai blocks, Patsy Clifford re-created the city’s logo, showing the Russian Orthodox Church and a Cook Inlet oil platform. Another is a more figurative representation, with Kenai written across the block, with beluga whales, Mount Redoubt, a Russian Orthodox onion dome and other images placed in the text. The green background is bisected by the mouth of the Kenai River, with a fishing boat plying the waters, a caribou wandering on the flats and a raven perched near the Dena’ina language greeting of “Yaghali Du?” Quilter Gwen Woodard said she designed the block with old Kenai in mind.

Art Seen: Regular displays are uncommonly good

By Zirrus VanDevere, for the Redoubt Reporter

Paul Tornow’s scrap metal moose stands sentry outside the Kenai River campus.

I recently jumped the gun and showed up to look at an exhibit not yet on the walls of the Gary L. Freeburg Gallery at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus.

On the way in, I had finally remembered to get a shot of one of my favorite objects on the Kenai Peninsula, a huge moose sculpture built from scrap metal that Paul Tornow had installed on the lawn while he was still a student there. Preparing to leave and wandering through the halls, I walked by work familiar to me, and always appreciated. It dawned on me that art is everywhere on the campus, and the quality is quite surprising, especially for a community campus in the middle of “nowhere,” as Soldotna may seem to college kids at times.

Celia Anderson, director of the art department at Kenai Peninsula College, has been working hard to organize, chronicle and build up the permanent art collection, including efforts to label each of the works with plaques describing the historical information available on it. She had a wealth of information about the project:

Falling through — Warm fall puts chill on hunting season

By Jenny Neyman

Photo courtesy of Patrice Kohl, Redoubt Reporter. As much as hunters wanted to see bull moose when hunting season opened this year, warm weather delayed their typical behavior patterns until later in the fall, making hunting season more challenging this year.

Redoubt Reporter

Without seeing many of the waterfowl, moose and game birds Steve Meyer was hoping to find this hunting season, his thoughts turned to other creatures to describe how the season went.

“It was weird as a three-headed cat. It really was,” said Meyer, a longtime hunter on the Kenai Peninsula.

Meyer thinks the unusually warm fall weather the peninsula has had this year is to blame for the off hunting season, causing animal migrations and activity patters to be delayed.

“It was warm. This is the first year I can remember in, must have been 38 years, that we didn’t have a single hard frost in September,” Meyer said. “It’s just been a strange year. I guess an El Nino’s been going on somewhere.”

Sam Albanese, meteorologist with the National Weather Service forecast office in Anchorage, said it is an El Nino year, although the effects of an El Nino are negligible to the point of being debatable in northern latitudes. Instead, the current warm stretch Southcentral has been experiencing is due to a series of typhoons that brought warm, tropical air north to Alaska.

“When you look at the air mass that’s come in, it’s been a very warm air mass. This is definitely warm-for-October-type temperatures,” Albanese said on Friday. “Basically, by now, we should normally have a low temperature of about 30 degrees. Well, last night it only got down to 40. The night before, 47. The night before that, 46, where the normal low is 31.”

Oct. 8 is when the temperature really started edging unseasonably upward, but even at the beginning of the month temperatures were a little higher than normal. And in September, the average temperature for Anchorage was 48.9 degrees, 0.7 degrees higher than the norm.

“It’s fluctuated a bit but when you look at the whole picture of it, the average temperature we’ve been running with, yeah, we’re above normal. Since about the fourth of October it’s been pretty warm,” he said.

Warm, and fairly wet over Oct. 8 and 9, too. Precipitation closing in on 2 inches, coupled with the draining of the Snow River glacier-dammed lake, pushed the Kenai River water level to flood advisory status. Seward got drenched in that time period, but even that’s nothing compared to Kodiak, which got an entire normal month of October’s rainfall — 8.36 inches — just from Oct. 6 to 9. And that doesn’t mean they get a reprieve, either.

“Oh no, no, no. It doesn’t work that way. That just means they get to clean more mud up,” Albanese said.

Science of the Seasons: ‘Tis the freezing season again — Ice cover forms at different rates on different lakes

By Dr. David Wartinbee, for the Redoubt Reporter

Photo courtesy of David Wartinbee. Ice chunks pack together at the downwind (western) end of Tustumena Lake a few winters ago. The lake seemed to have frozen over but a big storm blew hard enough to break up the ice and send it all to the one end of the lake.

We’ve all noticed it — the air temperatures are dropping. After such a prolonged summer and fall this year, it really is time for colder weather. A few earlier frosts have caused most plants to start to wither, and it won’t be long before every part of the Kenai Peninsula has a hard frost that kills the remaining annual plants.

Those seasonally colder air temperatures and frequent breezes will start the lake waters cooling and mixing with subsurface waters. In the fall, we can expect most lakes to cool fairly uniformly. Eventually, almost all of the lake water is very close to 4 degrees Celcius. In junior high science class, we learned that one milliliter of water loses 1 degree C with each calorie of heat loss. Then, what is called “heat of fusion” comes into play, since each milliliter of zero-degree water must lose another 80 calories in order to go from the liquid state to a frozen state.

In order for a lake to start forming ice, we usually need a cold, clear and calm night. The top layer of water that is exposed to the colder air changes to ice as it gives up heat calories. Any agitation by wind will cause the surface water to mix with underlying water and regain the lost calories, thus reversing the ice formation. After a layer of ice has successfully formed, the internal lake agitation normally ceases and ice formation can proceed more rapidly.

Interestingly, large lakes like Tustumena Lake or Hidden Lake take a long time to freeze over because of two different reasons. First, there is a huge volume of water to cool down, and that takes time. Then, even when a layer of ice has formed, high winds can break up the ice, cause recirculation of water, and markedly slow ice formation.

In the mind of the beginner — Learning hunting takes help, getting hooked is up to you

By Christine Cunningham, for the Redoubt Reporter

The hunting tradition is one that is usually passed on from one generation to the next or from one hunter to the next. Much like the Zen tradition, learning from a master is preferable to reading text or attending lectures. The firsthand apprenticeship required is one that takes years, developing the aspirant from a spectator to someone capable of that meditative focus that allows a vole to perch unnoticed on a shoe. (The hunting version of a tree falling in the forest without a sound?)

As much as Gordon MacQuarrie, the great outdoors writer of his era, had Hizoner (read as “His Honor,” President of the Old Duck Hunters Association Inc., and MacQuarrie’s hunting partner) or Robert Ruark had his grandfather in “The Old Man and the Boy,” every beginner grows from time spent with someone who has a deeper knowledge of the field.

In my case, I went out on my first duck-hunting trip with a friend and without a plan to shoot the borrowed 12-gauge I carried. It was raining and the Kasilof flats were salty and thick with marsh muck. I crawled through spiderwebs toward some widgeon my friend pointed out, using the shotgun to clear my path. I’d never been so miserable.

Life, at that level, was as foreign to me as anything I had ever experienced. The raw sludge of the swamp filled with spiderwebs and shrews was a kind of hell that I wondered if I had the grit to bear. Each throw of the shotgun ahead of me was a decision to not stand up and leave.

When I was signaled to stop, I stopped. My friend pointed to the widgeon on the pond. The rain and the misery were absent from my thinking and the sound of my shots was background noise as I watched the widgeon fly away unharmed. I didn’t bring home any ducks that day, but I was hooked.

Almanac: Prescription for longevity — After revolving-door doctors, peninsula lands physicians with staying power

Editor’s note: This week, we conclude a two-part story about the early history of physicians on the central Kenai Peninsula. In part one, we looked mainly at the doctors who practiced in the Kenai-Soldotna area during the 1950s and early 1960s. Part two, which begins just after the departure of Kenai’s only physician, Dr. Allen W. Barr, features mainly the doctors who worked in the area between the early 1960s and the early 1970s.

By Clark Fair

Photo courtesy of Gloria Wisecarver. Dr. Struthers’ nurse, Gloria Crandall (center), chats during a social function in Kenai in the mid-1960s.

Redoubt Reporter

Into the breach left by Dr. Allen Barr’s departure stepped Dr. Robert Alden Struthers, a surgeon fresh from his own practice and regular rounds at a hospital in Portland, Ore. He arrived with his nurse, Gloria Crandall (a single mom who later remarried and became Gloria Wisecarver).

Struthers was the father of Emmy Award-winning television actress Sally Struthers (Gloria Bunker Stivic on “All in the Family” in the 1970s). He replied to an advertisement calling for a doctor in Kenai. According to Wisecarver, Struthers flew to Kenai for an interview, at which point he was told that there were plans under way to build a hospital in Kenai at the present location of the Benco Building, and that he could become the head doctor at that new facility.

“I just remember him coming back one Monday morning and saying, ‘Ah! I have the greatest deal!’” said Wisecarver. “And I was going to be the chief nurse. Well, I didn’t really have anything keeping me in Portland, Oregon. I could bring my kids with me, so that was no problem. So I might just as well strike out and see the world.”

In Kenai, Struthers and Wisecarver were installed in the Professional Building, off Willow Street. Their office was in a back corner, next to a beauty salon and a land-survey office.

“We had beds where people could stay, and we had an examining room with the doctor’s desk in there,” remembered Wisecarver. “And we had to go out a door to get to the X-ray, and it was primitive, to say the least. For us coming from Oregon, it was primitive, believe me.”

Just as Drs. Paul Isaak and Elmer Gaede had done in Soldotna, Dr. Struthers did in Kenai. In the days when a basic office visit might cost about $8, he handled everything that he had the facilities and equipment to handle, including setting bones, delivering babies and doing minor surgeries.

“I can remember, I took my son over to Seward because Dr. Struthers took out his tonsils (there), and then he assisted Dr. Isaak on a gall bladder, and then we all came home again,” said Wisecarver, noting that they would all be back at their “regular” jobs the following day.

“People Outside cannot believe what they (the doctors) went through,” she said, and she added that she marveled at how many lives they were able to save, given the conditions at the time. “I talked to somebody who broke his back and had to ride in the back of a station wagon all the way to Seward. It was just amazing.

“I always thought the Lord looked down on us here.”

Building a following — Central peninsula continues to grow interest, reputation in natural bodybuilding

By Jenny Neyman

Photo courtesy of Amy Tovoli. Darin Hagen and Amy Vinson, of the central Kenai Peninsula, won Mr. and Ms. Anchorage titles in the 21st annual Natural Pro-Am Anchorage Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness Championships on Oct. 3.

Redoubt Reporter

Call it Speedo aversion therapy.

If you know you’re going to be center stage wearing next to nothing, gleaming in the bright stage lights in front of judges and an audience, suddenly that candy bar doesn’t look so appealing anymore.

“In bodybuilding, you’re accountable for everything. When you’re up there in a Speedo, basically every Reese’s cup you eat or every meal you eat out will show up, so you have to be very careful,” said Darin Hagen, of Soldotna, who won the title of Mr. Anchorage at the 21st annual Natural Pro-Am Anchorage Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness Championships on Oct. 3.

Chiseling your body and posing in front of a crowd is a big step beyond just dieting to lose a few pounds, but Hagen said that natural bodybuilding — meaning no steroids or artificial supplements allowed — is a positive way to encourage anyone to get more fit and healthy.

“Even if you’re not into the bodybuilding per se, for yourself, people can be inspired by seeing that and take that into going out and exercising or going out and walking or joining a gym, even. I think that’s one of the cool things about it,” Hagen said. “This is a nice, safe way to get healthy. To put something healthy in your lifestyle that you can continue for the rest of your life and feel good about.”

Also competing from the central peninsula were Aleasha LaFleur, who won the women’s heavyweight division, Pako Whannell, who competed in the figure competition, and Amy Vinson, who won the women’s lightweight division and Ms. Anchorage.

“It was surreal, and one of best experiences of my life,” Vinson said. “I enjoyed every bit of it and would not and could not do it without my husband and family. It was a beautiful experience and a tremendous amount of fun and a lot of hard work. It was a goal I had had since junior high, since I was about 14 years old. I’m in my early 30s now and I figured I better do it, so I did it and it was great.”

Drive toward new sales direction — Magnum Motors revs up for Brown Bears support

By Jenny Neyman

Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Hockey fans at a recent Kenai River Brown Bears game try to throw hockey pucks into the open sunroof of a Saturn Coupe donated by Magnum Motors.

Redoubt Reporter

Though new to the central Kenai Peninsula’s business community, Magnum Motors is revving up to make a big impact, having already jumped in to be a sponsor of the Kenai River Brown Bears Junior A hockey team.

The used car company, open since July on the Sterling Highway in Soldotna, has donated a red, Saturn coupe to be used as the prize for the team’s “chuck-a-puck” fundraising contest. In between the second and third periods of every home game, hockey fans can purchase pucks and attempt to throw them into the open sunroof of the car as it does laps around the rink. One well-thrown puck is selected each game, and one name will be drawn from all those at the end of the season to win the car.

“The car will absolutely be given away. It’s not one of those insurance things or gimmicks or anything like that,” said RJ Johnson, part owner of Magnum Motors. “And it’s a nice car. Bright red. Actually, bright, bright, bright red.”

The Magnum team consists of Johnson, Travis Burnett, Ken Peterson and Lisa Duke. In order to build their business, Johnson said Magnum wants to build a reputation for being straightforward, easy to deal with and good citizens in the community, which is what led them to support the Brown Bears.

“We wanted to be more involved with the community. We wanted to do something different than anybody else had done for them,” Johnson said. “If we don’t help our own community, they’re not going to help us or support us. That’s what it’s all about in the end. If we all work together here in our community, we all support each other and we all win.”

Plugged In: Good, not great, things come in small packages

By Joseph Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

The Micro Four-Thirds system is a joint effort by Olympus and Panasonic to devise a standardized system to build very compact cameras that include both large dSLR sensors, as well as interchangeable lenses.

That’s accomplished by combining a standard 4/3 sensor, about one-half the area of a regular APS-C sensor, and a new range of interchangeable lenses designed to mount on very thin camera bodies that omit bulky mirror and optical viewfinder assemblies. Micro 4/3 camera bodies are so thin that many other types of lenses can be mounted on them using appropriate adapters, including Leica M lenses and regular 4/3 system lenses.

Although many regular 4/3 system cameras are shipping, such as the Olympus E620 and E30 dSLR cameras, there are only four M4/3 cameras currently announced, three from Panasonic and one from Olympus. All current M4/3 systems use decent-quality, 12-megapixel sensors made by Panasonic. The M4/3 standard is directly supported by two major camera manufacturers, and M4/3 camera bodies and lenses are directly interchangeable with each other, resulting in product development momentum that’s likely to make M4/3 systems the dominant type of large-sensor compact cameras.