Please fence me in — DNR approves Kasilof beach structure, seeks input on area’s management

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. A truck drives through the grass on the south side of the Kasilof River. There’s a traditionally used trail beaten into the grass, but vehicles are carving out new routes, as well.

Redoubt Reporter

A decision by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources to allow fencing to be installed around sensitive beach grass-covered dunes on the south shore of the mouth of the Kasilof River and to initiate a process to designate the region as a Special Use Area in order to better manage increasingly heavy use is a case of good news, not-as-great-as-hoped news for Brent Johnson, president of the Kasilof Historical Society, the group that applied to install the fence.

But at this point, after more than a year of waiting, wading through red tape and jumping through hoops involved in the permit process, Johnson is happy to take what approval he can get, as long as it means the mouth of the Kasilof, which has seen steadily increasing summer fishing season use and abuse, can finally get some protection.

“The fence decision wasn’t everything I asked for,” Johnson said. “There are some pros and cons to the decision, but I have conferred with Robert Ruffner (executive director of the Kenai Watershed Forum) and we both think this is still very worthwhile to build, and may even be a sensible decision.”

The historical society was allocated $60,000 by the Legislature to construct a fence, which was originally planned to encircle the entire grass dunes area on the south beach of the river, blocking access to trucks, RVs, four-wheelers and other vehicles that rip up fragile beach grass that serves to protect the ecologically important dunes. The fence as originally proposed would mean all traffic would have to drive on the beach sand below the dunes to reach the river mouth, rather than driving on the commonly used trail that’s been cut into the dunes from decades of vehicle traffic.

The DNR Division of Mining, Land and Water, which oversees the area, approved a fence permit in late September, but stipulated that a fence must leave the traditional-use access road open. That means the historical society either needs to come up with more money to encircle the grass below the access trail as well as fence off the rest of the dunes above the trail, find cheaper fencing material to stretch funds to cover both areas, or simply abandon protection of the grass below the trail, facing the water.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources approved a permit application from the Kasilof Historical Society to install a fence to protect fragile beach grass on the sand dunes at the south beach of the mouth of the Kasilof River, but the fence must leave access open to a trail already carved through the grass.

“DNR decided to hold the fence back from the leading edge of the grass and to allow it on the upland side of the trail nearest the beach,” Johnson said. “I wanted to build the fence where it would best protect the habitat. The bottom line is, we can only build the fence where the public will accept it, and where DNR will permit it.”

Not many problems a’bruin — Peninsula sees few bear issues this summer

By Jenny Neyman

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Problem brown bear interactions continued to decline on the Kenai Peninsula this year.

Redoubt Reporter

As fall comes to a close and brown bears on the Kenai Peninsula start settling into their dens for winter, they do so without a lot of fanfare, not having been the subject of near as many headlines or problem interactions with people this year as they were just three years ago.

Biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game are hoping the comparative lack of attention bears generated this summer on the peninsula is because people are actually paying more attention to them. Only time will tell if this being a quiet bear year is a factor of temporary conditions or an increasing payoff of efforts to reduce negative bear interactions on the peninsula.

“We did have some activity — we always do — but I would say it’s down from what it was a few years ago. I’m hopeful that’s a trend we’ll continue to see,” said Jeff Selinger, area wildlife biologist with Fish and Game.

So far in 2010 in Game Management Units 7 and 15, covering nearly all the peninsula, there’s been 18 reported human-caused brown bear deaths attributable to something other than hunting. This can include vehicle collisions — one brown bear was hit and killed by a train this year — and, mostly, bears killed in the defense of life and property. In 2009, there were 21 nonhunting, human-caused mortalities. In 2008 there were 40.

Selinger said he’s hoping this downward trend is at least partially the result of efforts to create better bear awareness on the peninsula. Fish and Game and community partners have been encouraging the use of bear-resistant garbage cans and electrified fencing for chicken coops and livestock, and reminding people to secure outside freezers, take care in disposing of fish waste and not leave pet food, bird feeders and garbage out where they could draw bears looking for an easy meal.

“A lot of people are now taking steps to minimize the availability of attractants around their homes,” Selinger said. “All you have to do is drive around. There’s bear-resistant garbage containers in a lot of places there never used to be. People are electrifying chicken coops more and are more cautious about storing things in freezers outside.

“It’s grown. When you start something new like that a lot of people are reluctant to change. As it starts pushing along, my belief is you get to a tipping point eventually where pretty soon the majority of people are doing it and new people moving in are aware of it right away — ‘Oh. This is how you store stuff here.’”

Air apparent — Youth go big in skate, BMX bike challenge

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. At left, Jake Graham, of Soldotna, wows the crowd with a backflip during the inaugural Soldotna Bike and Skate Challenge on Saturday. The trick lend to him placing first in the competition for his age division.

Redoubt Reporter

The scene looked like a cross between a shoot for a John Hughes film, an energy drink commercial and an X Games competition.

Teens dressed in fluorescent-colored clothes, oversized sunglasses and trucker hats swigged back 16-ounce cans of sugar and caffeine while waiting to ride their skateboards or modified BMX bicycles.

They nervously laughed with each other before taking their turns to ride, and attempted to stay warm in the 30-degree temperatures. As cool as the air was, though, the adrenaline surging through their veins and the fire of competition burning within helped keep warm and sharp the nearly two dozen athletes who had come to participate in the first Soldotna Bike and Skate Challenge on Saturday at the Soldotna Skate Park.

“I ride every day, for five to six hours a day. I feel like I’ve worked hard for this and put in the time,” said BMX athlete Jake Graham, of Soldotna.

Competing in the event was not something anyone could just jump on a board or bicycle and do with success. Like any traditional sport, freestyle skateboarding and BMX riding requires hard work, practice and perseverance, and the vertical disciplines of these action sports are perhaps the most extreme manifestations. It takes not just skill, but cool nerves to ride the U-shaped half-pipe ramp that stood roughly 10 feet tall on either side. And these athletes didn’t just ride the ramp, they blasted off it, seemingly defying gravity as they performed a multitude of tricks midair.

“I moved to Alaska when I was 10 and that’s when I started riding,” Graham said. “I’m 18 now, so it’s taken me this long to get some of these tricks

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Travis Bittick, of Soldotna, concentrates while riding at the top of one of the half-pipes during Saturday’s competition.

down.”

Fancy that: Creativity — no cleanup required

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Jaci Bettis shows off her painting tool of choice, a hand that’s as smeared with color as her paper is. Celina Pelletier, one of the studio instructors, stands ready to offer more paint or praise for whatever the young artists create.

Redoubt Reporter

The stated goal for a recent Readcreate class at Fancy Pants art and crafts studio in Kenai was to have the 3- to 5-year-olds try their daisy blossom-sized hands at color theory.

Kelsi Staton would read a page from “Warthogs Paint: A Messy Color Book,” where the overexuberant beasts run amok in a paint studio and the resulting spillage of primary hues mix into a new batch of colors. Then it was the young artists turn to try to replicate the “accident,” getting squirts of paint onto rigidly outstretched palms and fingers to mix together on sheets of paper taped to the window.

It didn’t take long before that plan was out the window.

“OK, let’s see if we can get blue and yellow to make green,” Staton told pigtailed Stella Selanoff, 3; winter-boot-wearing Jaci Bettis, 3; and studious Bay Bloom, 4, with her brown hair twisted up in buns.

“I made green!” Bay announced after carefully swirling her colors together.

“Mine’s a bug!” Stella declared.

After being directed back to her paper, Jaci did the warthogs from the book proud and attacked the paint mixing with equal gusto.

“Mine’s brown,” she decided of the thoroughly saturated finished product.

Hey, brown happens. Nothing wrong with that.

“It’s true, all the colors together make brown,” Staton said.

“Oh they all look wonderful,” said Celina Pelletier, the other class director.

Vote for comedy — Election season offers landslide of material for satire show

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Joe Rizzo, left, and Chris Jenness, right, are the coffee shack girls, dispensing caffeine, hair flips and “Oh...my...gods” to all comers, be they Joe Biden or Christine O’Donnell.

Redoubt Reporter

Come Nov. 2, voters head to the polls to cast their ballots for who they think will best represent their interests, values and vision for the state and country in the most dignified, trustworthy and responsible manner possible.

For writers of Triumvirate Theatre’s election-season satire show, “Lame Ducks and Dark Horses,” the weeks leading up to Election Day have a much different focus. Dignity and responsibility matter about as much as any third-party candidate trying wrestle away some of the spotlight in the Miller-Murkowski-McAdams race. Instead, they vote for wackiness — the more ridiculous, the better.

This election season, they’ve got plenty from which to choose.

“As far as the material goes, that was the easiest part of it, because these guys basically write it for us,” said Joe Rizzo, with Triumvirate Theatre. “And it keeps coming. It’s kind of fun being able to get up in the morning and drive to work listening to the news and hear this spat with Joe Miller’s security handcuffing a reporter and think, ‘Oh my gosh. They’re just feeding us this stuff.’ It’s great. We were able to work a whole bit about that into the show at the last minute, because things change that quickly.”

Almanac: Baking a prescription for change — Beemun’s building takes shape

Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part story told in reverse. This is the unusual history of the metamorphosis of the Soldotna structure known today as Beemun’s. Last week covered the history from the current time back through the fire of 1990, to the mid-1980s when the building was a bakery and was not yet square. This week starts in the mid-’80s and works back to the early 1970s. Next week will examine the building’s origins.

By Clark Fair

Photo courtesy of Beemun’s Variety. The is how Soldotna Drug appeared in its early years — from 1968 until 1973. In 1973, an addition virtually doubled the available space.

Redoubt Reporter

The conjoined cylindrical structures that for 30 years had so dominated the lot on the corner of East Park Avenue and the Kenai Spur Highway were gone by 1988. In fact, newcomers to Soldotna might never have known that they had existed at all, since a squarish Beemun’s building stood in their place and was all that anyone could see.

But if one could “peel back the onion” three years, the picture changed incrementally. Beneath the wooden frame in 1987 was a large, 1950s-era Quonset hut inside the main building. In 1986, a second, smaller Quonset was connected to the center-side of the first one — both inside of the wooden building. And in 1985, the wooden building itself did not exist — only those two Quonset huts hooked together in the shape of a large T.

At this time, too, there was no Beemun’s, but only the Golden Nugget Bakery, with its perpetual smell of frosted donuts and of baking bread and rolls. The bakery had been there when the transformation from “rounded” to “squared-off” building began, but by the end of the process it, too, was only a part of history.

The Golden Nugget Bakery began in the main Quonset in 1977. Paul and Joyce Fischer leased the building from owner Earl Mundell when Mundell pulled out his own business and moved it next door (where the former Liquidation World now sits).

Paul Fischer, who would be elected state senator in 1982, said that he and Joyce decided to open a bakery in Soldotna to fill a public need, despite the fact that they were lacking in bakery experience at the time.

“I’d never baked a cake or anything at that point,” said former borough Assemblyman Paul Fischer. “I had one day of experience,” a reference to the time he drove to the bakery in Seward and spent the night watching the baker there preparing his goods for the next day. Later, Fischer hired a man who had worked as a baker on the North Slope, although Fischer said that he soon knew more about baking than his baker did.

Shooting for a challenge — Ptarmigan hunting offers wilderness experience

By Joseph Robertia

Photo courtesy of Jason Young. Three, a black Lab, keeps an eye on Jason Young’s take of ptarmigan.

Redoubt Reporter

Jason Young’s bird dog had already been enjoying the day, but the smell coming from the willow clump just a few paces ahead now filled the black Labrador’s body with excitement as clearly as morning sunlight fills a south-facing room.

“Whenever she gets that excited I can tell there’s birds ahead,” said Young, who was hunting with his dog Three, named after the three-pheasants-a-day bag limit Young was used to getting in South Dakota. He brought his love of upland game bird hunting with him when he came to Alaska nearly a decade ago.

“My job is to get her going in the right direction. Her job is to find the birds,” Young said.

Three upheld her end of the deal. She was a few paces away from the birds, but not too far. She knew to stay within gun range so Young wouldn’t be far behind when the birds — almost completely ivory-colored now, with the exception of a bit of black on their tail feathers — burst forth from the willow.

The birds flushed in a blur of white streaks. A half dozen willow ptarmigan rocketed from the bush into sky. The sudden flush and the sounds of their beating wings can startle some hunters, but not Young. He’s honed his skills with a shotgun and was used to coming home with as many birds as empty shells. This day was no exception.

Young traced through the nearest bird with his 12-gauge, his brain doing the instantaneous calculations of how much of a lead to allow the bird, and then he squeezed the trigger. A second later a bird lay lifeless on the ground. Young smiled and Three’s tail wagged as she went to retrieve it.

“Like training any dog, it’s an ongoing thing,” Young said. “But she is pretty good.”

Three gets a lot of practice. She had an active season of hunting ducks the last two months, and has been by Young’s side on several recent occasions as he’s hiked the Resurrection Pass area in pursuit of ptarmigan.

“It’s hit or miss on the peninsula,” Young said. “I’ve been to places with some heavy concentrations, and there’s been a few spots with only a handful of birds, but I usually get my bag limit — usually being the key word.”

Old Duck Hunter: Don’t let wealth of wild fish, game go to waste

By Steve Meyer, for the Redoubt Reporter

There’s nothing quite so disturbing as seeing discarded salmon, halibut, moose or whatever the case may be, after it’s been frozen and ignored. This results in freezer burn and, thus, the freezer burn and resultant piles of waste I find regularly on back trails, making ready meals for ravens, rodents and the occasional coyote or bear.

It’s funny how you never see store-bought steaks or the like heaped in squalid waste around the landscape. Perhaps because the meat is “free,” folks routinely waste fish and game taken from the field in Alaska. Maybe it is the largesse of what we have available to us that promotes such behavior. Who knows? But it is, indeed, disturbing that many folks seem incapable of utilizing fish and game resources as they should.

Freezing fish

I suspect much of this hasn’t to do with reckless disregard so much as not really knowing how to take care of fish and game for the long haul. For instance, who would know that freezing salmon right out of the water, without gutting, heading or anything but bleeding them, preserves them very nicely over a winter?

The skin nature put on the salmon is actually the best preservative of all. There are a couple of downsides to that. One is room in the freezer. Obviously, an entire salmon is going to take up more space than one reduced to fillets. The other is, when you thaw it, the entire fish must be cooked and eaten immediately. That’s not a big deal for a large family, but for an individual or a couple, eating an entire salmon in a sitting is probably best described as glutinous and a recipe for indigestion.

Plugged In: Big benefits from midsized dSLR cameras

By Joseph Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

In the past two years, large-sensor cameras nearly as compact as the Canon G12 and Nikon P7000 have captured major market share, particularly in Japan and Asia. They’re probably the wave of the future.

The advantage of these cameras is that they are not much larger than top-end compacts but have interchangeable lenses and a much larger sensor. That results in greatly improved image quality that sometimes rivals better digital SLR cameras. Some of these cameras are only slightly more expensive than a Canon G12 or a Nikon P7000. As more models are introduced, there’s increasing competition and prices are already beginning to drop.

These cameras achieve near-dSLR image quality in a small package by eliminating the large moving mirror and pentaprism found in traditional SLR cameras, instead using an electronic viewfinder or a high-quality LCD display on the back of the camera. All have a RAW file format option and fully automatic models, in addition to many manual control options for more advanced photographers.

So far, Nikon, Canon and Pentax have not introduced compact, large-sensor interchangeable lens cameras, apparently waiting to see how the market reacts to various models from Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Olympus. Pentax, though, has announced that it is working on compact interchangeable cameras, while Nikon has waffled and Canon has dismissed the trend with lofty arrogance. Here’s what’s currently available: