By Jenny Neyman
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Kayce James, of Cooper Landing, tries out skate skiing on the freshly groomed Russian River Campground ski trails.
Redoubt Reporter
Up until this winter, skiing in Cooper Landing has meant a backcountry experience — slogging through snow to break trail along the Old Seward Highway, Kenai Lake or Bean Creek area, bumping along over rocks, roots and iced-in ruts from snowmachines, or navigating stands of brush on downhill runs.
“When we moved down here most of your skiing in Cooper Landing was thrashing through alders. There were a lot of primitive trails people put in over the years but no groomed trails. A lot of it was more like hiking with skis on,” said Ed Holsten.
Not that that’s bad, Holsten said, it just limits opportunities. Skate skiing isn’t an option in backcountry conditions, skijoring with a dog proves more challenging, and the overall difficulty level of skiing is higher, making it harder to learn to ski and for the timid or untrained to be inclined to practice.
When he and his wife, Sandra, moved to Cooper Landing from Anchorage in 2005, much of the reason was to get away from the development of the big city and get back to a more rustic community. But they did miss a few things about their former home, especially the groomed ski trails. Having both worked for the Forest Service — Holsten retiring from about a 30-year career as a research etymologist, particularly focusing on spruce bark beetles — they like to be active outdoors in the winter as well as summer.
“I was used to good groomed ski trails and have seen the development of the trails in
Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Ed Holsten drags a groomer past skiers at the Russian River Campground earlier this winter.
Anchorage over 30 years, and they’re just such a phenomenal asset,” Ed said. “Sandra really missed skiing in Anchorage, too. She screwed her knee up real bad backcountry skiing, so she was a little leery of that. But the closest place for really good trails is Soldotna, and that’s a little long of a drive to do regularly.”
That’s no longer the case. Now when people want to ski in Cooper Landing, they can do so with the best of both worlds — the ease of developed facilities and the away-from-it-all setting of a backcountry experience.
Thanks to a partnership with the Forest Service and grant from the Alaska Parks Service, the Russian River Campground in Cooper Landing has a new winter existence as a cross-country ski facility, with 10 kilometers of groomed trails, parking and restroom facilities. But it’s still got the scenic, quiet, tucked-in-the-woods appeal that is a hallmark of Cooper Landing, with the trails ushering skiers along an ice-blue bend of the Kenai River and up over gentle rises that offer vistas of the surrounding snow-capped mountains.
“Last year I went up to Bean Creek a lot and the trails weren’t groomed, they were just snowmachined on. This makes a world of difference,” said Kayce James, of Cooper Landing, who was exploring the Russian River ski trails in January with Mike Smith, of Moose Pass.
The two had both recently bought skate skis and were learning to skijor, as well. Having access to groomed ski trails has been a big incentive to get out and enjoy winter even more than they have in the past.
“We get out as much as we can. Now that it’s getting lighter I plan to get out here a lot more. It’s great exercise,” she said.
Katie Seichtinger and Julie Seramur are two more Cooper Landing residents whose vehicles can now often be found among the growing number parked in the Russian River lot on any given day this winter. In past years they’ve skied along the shore of Kenai Lake, down the old Sterling Highway from Quartz Creek to Tern Lake, and at Bean Creek, slogging through backcountry conditions that don’t allow for much speed or focus on technique. But this winter, they, too, have fallen under the sway of the groomed trails and find themselves loading up their skis, boots and poles more often than they used to.
“We’ve been skiing in Cooper Landing for years, and now we’ve got another place to go,”
Classic ski tracks line the road along a bend of the Kenai River on the Russian River Campground ski trails, maintained by the Cooper Landing Ski Club.
Seichtinger said. “It’s great. We can skate ski in our own town without having to drive an hour or more. And it’s beautiful out. It’s a great place to get some exercise.”
That’s exactly what the Holstens want to hear, and are spreading word of the trails as far and wide as they can.
“Maybe I’m prejudiced, but it’s like the best skiing anywhere. I’ve really been enjoying it,” Sandra said. “I’ve had people I ski with go, ‘I didn’t know this is what you were talking about, Sandra. I had no idea. This is wonderful.’”
When the Holstens moved to Cooper Landing, they heard about a system of primitive trails in the Bean Creek area that volunteers put in and maintain by hand. At best it’s an improved version of backcountry skiing, not a full step up to the level of groomed trails, and it’s a struggle to manage even that.
“I made friends with other gals who have skied for 30 years. They’ve been cutting trails in Bean Creek, and I cut ski trails for a couple winters with them and had a great time, but basically they are in a logged area that is growing back in alder, and 50- and 60-year-old women who were tying to cut 10 miles of trail by hand wasn’t panning out too good. We were all getting tendonitis,” Sandra said.
Rather than giving up on skiing in her new home, she decided to give trails development a try and approached the Kenai Peninsula Borough for permission to bring in heavy equipment to clear, maintain and groom the Bean Creek trails. She was told the borough would need to lease her group the entire area — 100 acres.
“A 100-acre plot for 10 miles of trails. We weren’t a big enough club to handle that. We’re just sort of learning here,” Sandra said.
Through that process she heard of a different approach used in Moose Pass area. Skiers had gotten permission from the Forest Service to turn the Trail River campground into a winter ski area by grooming ski tracks on the roads that loop through the campground. In Cooper Landing, the Russian River campground bustles with activity during the summer fishing season but sits deserted in the winter, with just occasional snowshoers, backcountry skiers or ice fishermen heading to Upper and Lower Russian lakes.
“I went over (to Moose Pass) and thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty good,’” Sandra said. “I approached the Forest Service about Russian River and they had a pretty positive attitude. They absolutely wowed us. In two weeks we had our permit and they have done everything from brought in signs and opened up the restrooms for us. They’ve just been fantastic. And for the taxpayers, now we are using a facility that otherwise would sit unused for nine months.”
Permission to groom proved to be the easy part. Getting set up to groom was much more challenging, even with a loan of grooming equipment from the Tsalteshi Trails Association in Soldotna.
“At first we thought, ‘Well, how much can it take? We’ll just pack it with snowmachines.’ And we found out that doesn’t work too good,” Sandra said. “Most snowmachines that are geared for fun and recreation aren’t geared low enough to pull the weight of grooming equipment. We thought we could get started just with our own equipment, but it didn’t happen.”
It became clear that the Cooper Landing Ski Club would need to obtain grooming equipment and a snowmachine specifically for that purpose. But how? And what should they buy? It’s not like ski-grooming machinery is stocked at the local hardware store.
“I talked to the guy in Anchorage that does grooming out there (at Kincaid Park),” Sandra said. “He was showing me this big equipment that costs like $175,000 and I just kind of left. I was like, ‘This may be more than a little community like ours can take on.’”
The process was starting to wallow, just like skis sinking into fresh, ungroomed powder, but ski trips to Moose Pass made it clear that the project was worth pursuing.
“It gave me a lot of faith. When I’d get tired of working on grants I’d go over to Trail River. It’s about a 30-minute drive and when I’d get there two-thirds of the cars in the parking lot were Cooper Landing people, so I’d go, ‘You know, maybe this it worth it,’” Sandra said.
Then came word that Alaska State Parks had approved a $25,000 grant for ski equipment for the fledgling Cooper Landing Ski Club. It was enough to purchase a snowmachine, trailer and three pieces of grooming equipment — a big, heavy drum used to pack down fresh snow, an apparatus with metal teeth that scratches up crust and packed-down snow to create an icing of corduroy, and a track-setter to carve parallel classic ski tracks into the snow.
“Evidently we got the exactly perfect equipment for our situation, which is really good because if we had ended up with the wrong equipment people would have really been frustrated,” Sandra said.
Still, having the equipment was one thing. Having the knowledge to use it was quite another. The ski organizations in Seward, Soldotna and Homer stepped in to help, offering grooming training and a grooming safety clinic.
“The beauty of it was the ski community on the peninsula. You’re kind of oblivious to it until you need to connect with them,” Sandra said. “They were wonderful.”
The Cooper Landing Ski Club now has eight trained groomers that have a rotating schedule of grooming duties, with more people in the community wanting to learn. They aim to groom two to three times a week, depending on conditions, and prefer to do it in the morning or evening so the trails have a chance to firm up before they’re skied on. If all goes well it takes about three hours to groom the roughly 10 kilometers of loops through the campground and set classic tracks, Ed said. The more they groom, the more they get the hang of it and the easier the task becomes.
“It just takes a lot of trial and error,” Ed said. “My first day out I got everything stuck. When you’re pulling 400 pounds of metal behind you, you don’t have much steering so if you try to make a sharp turn you still go straight. You have to learn when to raise the teeth up and when you put the teeth down.”
On one of his first attempts at grooming at the beginning of this winter he tried to make a turn, not realizing at first just how far you need to hang off the side of the snowmachine to help counterbalance the weight.
“I went straight into a tree well. I had to unhook the groomer, drag that out of the way, back the snowmachine out and hook everything up again. So once you do that, you don’t do it again. Then you teach the other groomers,” he said.
The ski club started a blog site online at http://grooming.cooperlandingnordicskiclub.org, and the groomers are just as faithful about posting trail condition updates as they are getting out and grooming.
Grooming takes a significant time commitment — time they could spend skiing — but Ed said he enjoys doing it and that the community seems appreciative of the groomers’ effort.
More like downright kiss-their-snow-covered-boots grateful, Sandra said.
“They get stopped all the time with people thanking them,” she said. “It’s kind of funny with Ed because everybody knows when he’s grooming, even before he posts a trails report. He runs on the volunteer ambulance crew, and of course everybody around here has CB radios. So now when Ed calls in and says he’s ‘10-7’ (the code for off duty) for three hours, they know what that means.”
Sandra, especially, gets a return on her time investment in writing grants and coordinating with the Forest Service. That return is good skiing conditions.
“She’s got it made because she gets to sleep with the groomer, so she’s the first person out here,” Ed joked.
“There’s nothing like it when you’re the first person behind the groomer on the trails,” Sandra said. “I used to say I wanted to be rich enough to have a massage whenever I wanted it. Now I want a massage whenever I want, my own ski trails and a groomer that goes out whenever I want to ski. So I’m pretty close.”
The trails are well-suited for a variety of uses — classic and skate skiing, skijoring, learning to ski and training for racers.
“What’s good about Russian River is it’s easy skiing,” Ed said. “There’s nothing advanced in there at all. There have been people out here for the first time on their skis because it’s groomed, there’s no major scary hills, it’s wide and it’s not bumpy. So it’s getting more and more of the locals out skiing. And you can get a heck of a workout skiing all the loops a couple times.”
With the easy grades and lack of sharp turns, the Russian River ski trails also provide an accessible opportunity of winter recreation for people with disabilities.
“It’s a safe place, there’s easy access, the campground’s a well-known location. It’s so perfect for people with disabilities. I don’t care if only three people a year use it, it would be an experience they can’t get everywhere,” she said.
As happy as they are with what they’ve got now, the Cooper Landing Ski Club is already looking to the future. Holsten would like better signage at Russian River listing the trails rules (no walking on groomed trails, no motorized vehicles, clean up after your dogs, etc.) beyond the one yellow sheet of plastic-covered paper stapled to the closed-up tollbooth in the parking lot.
She’d also like the rest of the peninsula and beyond know about the new ski experience Cooper Landing has to offer, and join the 15 to 20 or locals who are out skiing any given weekend day. She hopes the ski trails become a vital winter boost to Cooper Landing businesses, in the otherwise sleepy community with only about 400 year-round residents.
“A lot of our businesses that stay open in wintertime, they basically stay open as a service to us at a cost to themselves. One business person told me that, in wintertime, they don’t even make enough to pay the electric bill,” Sandra said. “It’s a beautiful place to spend the weekend but you want something to do. We’re hoping that people in the wintertime will say, ‘I’ll go to Cooper Landing. There’s a place to go ski.’”
The club is working on becoming self-supporting. It currently accepts donations through the Cooper Landing Community Club to cover the cost of gas and maintenance for the grooming snowmachine and equipment, and in the future would like to secure funds for a better grooming storage facility, possibly lighting for the Russian River loops, and money to hold events, like ski clinics, night skis and races.
Down the road the club’s plans are even broader. The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly passed an ordinance that allows for granting trails authority to groups interested in creating and maintaining recreational opportunities, which has revived the Cooper Landing Ski Club’s interest in the Bean Creek area. They’d like to develop 10 to 20 miles of groomed ski trails in that area, which has varying topography to allow for more challenging skiing.
It might sound like a daunting chore up front, but with the rapid, rampant success of Russian River under their belts, expanding to even more trails might not prove much of a trial at all.
“It’s really worked out well. This was manageable enough, especially because so many of the support facilities were here. It was a good place to start out,” Sandra said. “And when I see the kind of enthusiasm and use that it gets, it gets me going on what our next step will be.”
For more information on the Cooper Landing Ski Club and grooming reports for Russian River Campground, visit http://grooming.cooperlandingnordicskiclub.org. Donations to support the ski club can be made through the Cooper Landing Community Club, P.O. Box 508, Cooper Landing, AK, 99572.
