Dog owners snap over traps — Conflict brews in recreation areas of Cooper Landing

By Joseph Robertia

Redoubt Reporter

As Cooper Landing musher Robert Bear headed up to a major mid-distance sled dog race in the Interior last weekend, he did so without two of his best dogs. Back at home were his two leads, sitting out this race, and others to come, due to injuries sustained after being caught in the bone-crushing clamp of a leg-hold trap early last month.

“One of the dogs lost its front right leg and the other part of its front paw,” Bear said.

This is the second time in two years he’s had a dog caught in a trap, although he was able to quickly release the dog the last time, he said. This time, however, was not so fortunate.

He was hooking up for a training run off of Snug Harbor Road. The dogs were amped to go, Bear explained, and as he was attaching dogs to the lines as quickly as he could, it wasn’t quick enough for one of the dogs just behind the leaders. It chewed through the mainline and set the two leaders free.

“They took off sprinting,” he said. “I immediately went out looking for them, and nothing. I continued looking for them for 48 hours before I finally heard one of them howl as I was going by.”

Bear followed the sound a short distance through the forest and found the two dogs, cold, dehydrated and hungry, but alive. They were clamped in side-by-side traps.

“This was less than 50 feet from the road and between the senior center and the Girl Scout camp. Baited with meat and feathers, so I think any loose dog could have been caught in them,” he said.

Equally concerning to Bear is that, while trapping season for many species opened Nov. 10, lynx season wasn’t set to begin until Jan. 1. Bear’s dogs were caught Dec 13. From the trappers he’s described the setup to, it seemed the traps was either legally targeting coyote or illegally targeting lynx.

Despite the accident, Bear said that he’s not against trappers or responsible trapping.

“I use ruffs and other fur for mushing, so I’m not anti-trapping,” he said, “but I do want to create an awareness of the dangers within our community. It’s not safe right now. We can’t hardly recreate on trails they call multiuse, because once those traps are set, they kind of become single-use in the mind of most dog owners.”

Ken and Kate Green, of Cooper Landing, have had their Labradors caught on multiple occasions, as well.

“Since trapping in this area is a significant problem for hikers, skiers and dog walkers, it would be very nice to get the word out. We have had our dogs caught in foothold traps and snares over the past three years. All traps were within 25 to 50 feet of the lake or roads and, to the best of our knowledge, unmarked,” Kate said.

Her husband, Ken, remembers each of the events clearly, since he was with their dogs. The first time was while recreating with his three Labradors — two of the younger ones off-leash — at a popular picnic site referred to by the locals as Five-Mile Beach or Waikiki.

“About 20 feet from Snug Harbor Road — up the embankment, on the beach just at tree line — the loose puppy got caught in a snap trap — jaws, but without teeth. Other than the howling and whining, she was unhurt. I released her easily enough. The trap was rusted, the bait seemed to have long deteriorated, and the only marking was a small piece of surveyor’s tape, which was faded. The trap appeared to have been there for some time,” he said.

Green wasn’t sure if the trap was deliberately deserted or just forgotten about by whoever set it, but either way he said it shouldn’t have been left behind since it could only have made the intended species unduly suffer since no one ever came to check it, but also because it could have caught a nontarget animal or even a small child recreating in the area.

The second time one of Green’s dogs was caught, he said it was again at a common recreation site for Copper Landing residents. This time it was along the shore of Kenai Lake.

“I was walking the same three dogs the next early spring, this time along the Quartz Creek side. The road ends at a small turnaround and a path leads to the beach which is wide and walkable at that time of year,” he said. “I noticed a DVD disc hanging on a branch just off the beach, and figured that some kids were playing around. When I came across another in another tree, I realized what they were.”

Almanac: Cooper Landing pioneers didn’t skimp on cozy craftsmanship

By Clark Fair

Photos courtesy of the Cooper Landing Historical Society. A Forest Service construction crew takes a break in their temporary cook shack along Upper Russian Lake in 1951.

Redoubt Reporter

The three 60-something Cooper Landing men posed for a photograph in the temporary cook shack they had erected along the shore of the northern end of Upper Russian Lake. The roughly rectangular structure was open in front, enclosed with canvas and aluminum on the other three sides, and roofed with log rafters and wooden planks.

Hanging from the log supports were two trout, their bellies slit and guts removed. Behind the men were shelves of mainly canned food and dry goods, cooking supplies, and a calendar for June 1951.

The men — Jack Lean (holding a rifle), Frank Towle (holding two metal plates) and Bill Parchins (holding a coffee cup) — were taking a break from the construction of a Forest Service cabin near the lake. They were building it from native spruce logs, and although it has undergone some renovations over the years, it is the same reservation-only cabin that greets hikers at Mile 12 of the Russian Lakes Trail today.

But it was not the first cabin on this backcountry lake.

Jack Lean (standing) assists Bill Parchins and Frank Towle in the construction of the Forest Service cabin on the Upper Russian Lake in 1951.

Upper Russian Lake, which is split from end to end by the boundaries of the Chugach National Forest to the east and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge to the west, was already occupied when construction of the recreational cabin began.

In fact, one of the residents of an earlier cabin on the lake made this notation in her journal on June 30, 1951: “This is our 36th wedding anniversary. Cooked a chicken for the Forestry Crew … and they ordered a case of beer from town.”

In 1939, Luke and Mamie Elwell homesteaded a 40-acre parcel across the lake from where the Forest Service would build 12 years later. There they built their home, which doubled as a hunting and fishing lodge. Visitors came to the Elwells’ lodge from around the world to fish for trophy rainbow trout or to be guided by Luke after big game.

The Elwells, in the their late 40s when they arrived at the lake, hailed from Ohio, where they had met

The Forest Service cabin on Upper Russian Lake gets some visitors in the winter of 1972, showing its ongoing popularity for recreational use.

and eloped at the age of 20, according to Mamie’s great-niece, Abby Everett Tignor, in a fall 2005 Women in the Outdoors article. They shared a love for outdoor adventures, Tignor said, and by the early 1920s they had departed the Midwest for Alaska. Near Fairbanks, they purchased a 160-acre gold-mining claim, which they worked for several years before making sojourns in other remote parts of the territory.

By the time they moved to Upper Russian Lake, they were seasoned veterans of outdoor living. For their first cabin, they used native spruce for the walls and had most of the rest of their building supplies flown in. According to Tignor, Mamie laid the wooden floors, built and hung the doors, and made carvings of local scenes around the ceiling.

Booming memorial — Fuller’s friends salute Cooper Landing gunsmith with muzzleloader and bull-shooting session

By Joseph Robertia

Photos by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Don Neal, of Anchorage, lines up a shot during the 24th annual Bill Fuller Memorial Muzzle-Loading Gathering in Cooper Landing on Saturday, while, in the foreground, Dennis Poss, of Sterling, waits his turn to fire.

Redoubt Reporter

Mike Gephardt stared down the long, octagonal barrel of his rifle to align his peep sight onto the silhouette of a Dall sheep 500 yards away and several hundred feet in elevation on the side of a mountain. The ram was a cast-iron cutout, rather than flesh and bone, but the target not being able to run didn’t make this shot much easier, particularly considering the firearm Gephardt had chosen to use.

This was no modern, bolt-action rifle outfitted with the latest scope to magnify his target and sight it in the finely calibrated crosshairs. Oh no. Gephardt was using a muzzleloader — a black powder gun favored by trappers, traders and explorers of the 1800s, rarely used nowadays by modern hunters.

Still, Gephardt wielded the firearm as if he had grown up hunting buffalo on the plains. His fingers moved across the double triggers, first setting the action with the rear trigger, so that the front one became a hair trigger.

Tripped with the lightest of touches, his thick, calloused finger had only begun to make contact with the front trigger when the rifle made a thunderous boom. It bucked backward while belching a huge cloud of white smoke from the muzzle, along with a lead ball flying at 1,150 feet per second.

Just as the sweet smell of gunpowder was tickling Gephardt’s nose, through his earmuffs a familiar

Mike Gephardt, of Cooper Landing, fires a Hawken replica built by Fuller. Black-powder rifles tend to belch much more gunsmoke than modern firearms when fired.

“ding” could still be heard. It was the sound of his lead bullet flattening out as it connected with the Dall sheep target, something Gephardt and the small group of fellow black-powder enthusiasts watching from behind him call “the bang and clang.”

“That was pretty good,” said Sterling resident Dennis Poss, although his lips — and the toothpick sticking out of them — barely moved as he grunted the accolade.

“Or, pretty lucky,” Gephardt said.

Snared in trapping debate — Chugach National Forest sees overlap of trapping, dog owner recreation

By Jenny Neyman

Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Skiers pass on a busy day at the Russian River Campground groomed ski trails in Cooper Landing earlier this month. The trails are open for people to bring along their dogs, but groomers worry about the potential for problems with trapping also allowed in the area.

Redoubt Reporter

Sitting inside, chatting on the phone or sipping coffee while having a conversation about the conflicts between trappers and dog owners, cool heads can concede that a middle ground exists with reasonable precautions and common sense applied on both sides.

But opinions and tempers can tighten and snap as quick as the mechanism of a trap when the topic is sprung in the field, by a four-legged friend yelping in fear and pain at being snared, or by trappers’ realizations that the time, effort and expense they’ve invested in establishing their trapline have been wasted by someone stealing or tampering with their equipment.

Those situations can start heads scratching over a more official approach — specifically, whether or not to institute regulations and, if so, what, when, where and how.

On the Kenai Peninsula, Cooper Landing has had an up-close experience in that debate. Though the community is home to less than 300 year-round residents, those residents and growing numbers of visitors have become increasingly active in wintertime outdoor recreational pursuits, such as skiing and snowshoeing, oftentimes bringing along their dogs. At the same time, the area also is traditionally popular among trappers, both from the area and beyond.

“The trapping around the Cooper Landing area is not exclusively done by Cooper Landing residents, but also people from Seward come in, Moose Pass, people from Anchorage and Girdwood also come down. They come from far away. I had people all the way from Fairbanks come down and set traps here,” said Robert Gibson, owner of Kenai Lake Lodge in Cooper Landing, executive director of the Kenai Peninsula Trappers Association and a member of the Cooper Landing Fish and Game Advisory Committee. “It’s a rural activity for the residents that live there (in more urban areas). Where there’s lots of people, I couldn’t imagine somebody setting traps there. Here, there’s not so many people.”

Not so many people in residence, certainly, but, especially with the advent of groomed ski trails in Cooper Landing and also in Moose Pass in recent years, there are more people out and about in the backcountry than there used to be. The trails are open for skiers and snowshoers to bring their dogs, as well.

“There have been a number of dogs that have, in the last couple of years, either been killed or been snared and/or injured by trapping. There was a dog this year right off our ski trails at Russian River caught in a snare,” said Ed Holsten, part of the volunteer crew of ski trail groomers in Cooper Landing. “There are some people who are adamantly against trapping and other people, like me, I’m kind of 50-50 on it. I’m not against it but I think, especially in Cooper Landing and also Moose Pass, where the last few years we put in a lot of time and effort into increased winter recreation use by grooming ski trails at Trail River Campground, the Old Sterling Highway, Russian River Campground and Resurrection Creek Trail, we’ve seen more of an increase in recreation use in the wintertime because of these groomed trails. We open the trails up to skiers, skijorers, snowshoers, people skiing with dogs or without dogs. This issue needs to be explored.”

Proposals for increased trapping regulations, such as requiring that traps and snares be set back a certain distance from recreational trails and around homes, have been proposed to the Cooper Landing Fish and Game Advisory Committee, which has supported them to the Board of Game, to no avail. So, the debate continues over whether an elixir of awareness, common sense and good behavior can soothe this issue, or whether a dose of regulatory action is needed.

“The local Fish and Game Advisory Committee is wrestling with this, the balance between what’s legal and what should be ethical. I think as Alaska grows up, there’s often this conflict between the way it’s always been and the way it’s going to have to be,” said Chris Degernes, who lives with her husband, Bill, in Cooper Landing.

On track — Cooper Landing club sets base for recreation

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.

Landing help when needed — Cooper Landing festival appreciates community contributors

By Clark Fair

Photos courtesy of the Cooper Landing community. The Cooper Landing Museum was a favorite stop during the two-day celebration.

Redoubt Reporter

Cooper Landing residents are so proud of their town that a group of them decided to show it off for a couple of days last month.

The Sexy Senior Dumpster Cleaners and the Cooper Landing Community Club united for a two-day Spotlight on Cooper Landing celebration, which featured a bus tour of the community’s nonprofit projects, including the historical museum, the visitors center, the emergency medical services facilities, the senior housing complex and the new community garden.

Guests on the tour included state Rep. Paul Seaton and his wife, U.S. Forest Service District Ranger Travis Mosley, Doug Letch from state Sen. Gary Stevens’ staff, and John Cox, who was running for U.S. Representative.

Almanac: Mud no more — Tern Lake’s name, image gets polish over the years

By Clark Fair

Photo by Clark Fair, Redoubt Reporter. This is a panoramic illustration of Tern Lake, near the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways. A popular tourist/traveler stop now, the lake in the 1940s was much smaller and had a different name. The panoramic image was “stitched” together from four separate photos taken recently; the process of joining the photos creates some distortion, as if curved by a fish-eye lens.

Redoubt Reporter

Every year, thousands of tourists and travelers stop at Tern Lake, at the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways, to gawk at terns or swans, to photograph waterfowl, to capture the reflection of the surrounding mountains, or simply to stand in awe of this freshwater jewel glistening in the summer sun. Most of these visitors to the lake are, however, blithely unaware that it was little more than a marsh a half century ago, and that it was not always named Tern Lake.

In the late 1940s, when tour bus driver Willard Dunham used to haul passengers from the steamships docking in Seward’s harbor up the rough, new Seward Highway, one of his regular stops along the way was what was then called Mud Lake because it was — despite its attraction to terns even then — little more than a spongy bog. A 1915 reconnaissance map of the area depicts no body of water there at all.

Today, Tern Lake sits at a confluence of asphalt ribbons and alpine valleys. Travelers can drive west toward Seward, north toward Anchorage or east toward Soldotna and Kenai. To the west lies Trail Lake and Trail River; to the north, the upper Quartz Creek and Summit Creek drainages; and to the east the lower Quartz Creek and upper Kenai River drainages.

Tern Lake itself is drained by the narrow, meandering waters of Daves Creek, which parallels the Sterling Highway east until it dumps into Quartz Creek and continues, united, toward Sunrise Inn on lower Kenai Lake. Tern Lake is fed largely by snowmelt from the surrounding mountains, chiefly Wrong Mountain, just west of Crescent Lake.

Daves Creek and Tern Lake form high-quality spawning and rearing habitat for chinook, coho and sockeye salmon; rainbow trout and Dolly Varden char, slimy sculpin and round whitefish. These fish in their various stages attract predators such as the terns, and the flora in the lake and along its perimeter attract browsing moose and feeding, dam-building beavers.

Because of the lake’s location, it is an ideal spot for wildlife viewing, and throughout the summer camera-toting passers-by can be seen sliding from the seats of their vehicles parked in the large turnout along the lake’s northern shore.

Even back in Dunham’s day, the lake was an attraction because the terns were so plentiful.

“I’d stop at Mud Lake and let (the tourists) watch the terns — feeding, chasing ducks, and nesting,” Dunham said. “And the terns were always there. Loads of ’em, and they were great to watch.

Almanac: Soft on the rules — Fun is priority in annual Cooper Landing Softball Tournament

By Clark Fair

Photo courtesy of Mayme Ohnemus. A Moose Pass player comes in to score in a recent Cooper Landing Community Softball Tournament, which has been going on since 1995.

Redoubt Reporter

The hard-luck story of the Float-N-Fish team in the Cooper Landing Community Softball Tournament went almost all the way back to the tourney’s inaugural season in 1995, but it ended decisively last June 7 when Float-N-Fish defeated Mountain Madness 6-5 in the championship game.

Float-N-Fish had defeated Moose Pass, Alaska Wildland Adventures, Princess Lodge and Mountain Madness in quick succession to open the double-elimination slo-pitch tournament. Then, atop the winner’s bracket, Float-N-Fish had to await the survivor of the loser’s bracket, which turned out to be Mountain Madness.

Formerly a Forest Service-based team from the Moose Pass/Crown Point area, Mountain Madness then defeated Float-N-Fish 7-4 to force a decisive final game.

The title, and the traveling trophy that goes with it, marked the first time Float-N-Fish had won more than a single game in the tournament, and it was emblematic of the way that the wealth (i.e., victories and titles) has been spread around in this event, which takes place in the decidedly rural environs of the upper Kenai River valley.

Since the 10-day, 10-team tournament began on the field adjacent to the Cooper Landing Community Hall, no team has won more than two titles.

Float-N-Fish, on the other hand, had struggled to win at all until 2009.

The first incarnation of Float-N-Fish began in 1996, when the original owner of Cooper Landing Floating & Fishing, Howard Mulanax, first sponsored a team. The Float-N-Fish team played until 2002, when Mulanax retired from guiding and allowed the team to fold with an all-time mark of five wins and 14 losses, which included two winless tournament appearances.

For “entertainment” during the 1997 tournament, Darwin “Pete” Peterson glided onto the softball field during a game. Peterson and his brother, Andy, had launched themselves off Cecil Rhode Mountain across the Kenai River. Andy landed at the nearby Cooper Landing rifle range.

Two of Mulanax’s former players, Heather and John Pearson, took over the guiding business in 2005, renamed it Kenai River Float-N-Fish, and re-started the team — with similar results, at first: three straight winless tourney appearances before a single win in 2008 and the stunning championship run in 2009.

Heather Pearson credited continuity, proper beer consumption and the team’s motivational player/coach, Deanna Hoy, for the sudden success.

“We really had been practicing a lot, and it just finally started coming together for us. Once you start playing with the same people for long enough, you just kind of jell together, and we just sort of became the well-oiled machine that we had been trying to be.

“We also got our beer-and-softball ratio dialed in a little bit better. There were years when we maybe had too much beer, and there were years when we didn’t have any beer, and neither of those strategies worked well for us as a team. So we had a few before the game, you know, to loosen ourselves up, and then we did fine.”

For the good of the sheep … eventually

By Clark Fair

Redoubt Reporter

The premise for the research seemed sound: to establish a baseline of information on the Dall sheep living in the mountains in the Cooper Landing area. It was the “execution” of this research that baffled and even angered some onlookers.

The work by Alaska Department of Fish and Game regional research biologist Lyman Nichols centered on three mountain systems — Surprise Mountain (now called Bear Mountain), Crescent Mountain (now Right Mountain), and the Cooper Landing Closed Area (sometimes called Slaughter Mountain).

When Nichols began his research project in 1970, Crescent and Surprise mountains were open to hunting, and each of the three systems was home to a distinct and relatively isolated herd of Dall sheep being monitored by Fish and Game. In fact, Nichols and fellow biologist Al Johnson had spent 10 days in late November hunkered down on the slopes of these mountain systems, observing the rutting season and taking copious notes.

These observations were part of a larger goal to more fully understand the movements, behavior, diet and life cycles of the wild Alaska sheep. And, in the end, Nichols was successful in furthering this understanding. In fact, many years and many studies later, he was considered a resident expert in not only the Dall sheep, but the mountain goat as well.

Part of Nichols’ plan in 1970 involved controlling the herd numbers on Crescent Mountain, and then comparing them to the numbers on the other two mountains over a five-year study period. Doing this would give Nichols one controlled herd, one regularly hunted herd, and one “natural” herd protected from hunting.

The “control” he hoped to exercise involved reducing the herd size to a specific manageable number and then keeping that number as constant as possible while also maintaining close tabs on each mountain’s range and climate.

According to an article in the Jan. 23, 1971, Cheechako News, Nichols wanted to determine the “ideal range capacities” for the three systems, and to see whether range and population influenced the health of the herd, and the incidence and spread of disease among the sheep.

His goal, then, was to eventually produce the best management plan to ensure the healthiest herds, chiefly to maintain healthy sheep populations that Fish and Game could regulate and humans could harvest.

In order to ensure this healthy state, however, he was going to have to kill some sheep — a lot of sheep, as it turned out.

In the fall of 1970, Nichols performed an aerial survey of the Crescent Mountain herd and counted 287 individual animals. His goal involved working with only 200 animals because, according to the Cheechako, “that is the number biologists feel is ideally suited to the range.”

To begin reducing the number of animals, Fish and Game allowed a special autumn hunt in 1970 to help cull the herd. The hunt resulted in a harvest of 15 sheep.

Consequently, Nichols stated in a Fish and Game release that the further reduction would occur during the winter through the selective targeting of about 75 lambs, ewes and young rams. These sheep would be taken at a rate of approximately 10 per month until biologists did an aerial survey the following summer to determine the success of spring lambing.

Accompanying the Cheechako story was a trio of photographs, the first of which depicted a helicopter in midflight. Dangling in a large net well below the fuselage was the first load of harvested animals, which had been shot sometime earlier that day by biologists from the helicopter itself.

With this load, and subsequent loads in later months, Fish and Game personnel flew the animals to the Soldotna Fish and Game headquarters — located at that time just behind the current site of the Wells Fargo Bank — where protection officers helped unload them.

One of those protection officers was Dan France, who held a degree in wildlife management and did not think highly of Nichols’ research techniques.

“I didn’t see any reason for them to do this — to kill all them sheep with a helicopter,” France said. “I didn’t see any sense in what they were doing.”

After the sheep were unloaded, they were taken inside the Fish and Game facility to be measured, weighed and assessed for health. They were then eviscerated so that biologists could examine them internally for diet and disease; tissue and other samples were taken and sent off to labs for analysis.

Previously, blood samples had also been taken from the animals on the mountain, just after they had been shot and the bodies were still warm.

After the testing procedures were complete, France was then in charge of making sure that none of the meat was wasted. He had to call people on the road-kill list to see whether they wanted meat. Nichols’ original plan, according to the Cheechako, called for the meat to be donated to the school at English Bay, but France said he wasn’t sure whether that donation occurred.

Meanwhile in the community, several conservationists expressed their disapproval of the project, and in January 1971 the fledgling Peninsula Clarion wondered in its gossipy section called “The Ear” whether it was ethical for the biologists to shoot dozens of game animals while citizens were being arrested for harvesting moose out of season.

Longtime Soldotna resident Joanne Odom was bothered enough by the biologists’ actions that she angrily took her three daughters down to Fish and Game headquarters to watch one of the choppers come in with a load.

But the herd reduction — during which biologists killed 48 sheep, according to a report released by Nichols — continued on into the summer, until a June 21 aerial survey. This new count revealed 208 adults and 20 new lambs, which Nichols termed a “poor” number of newborns. He blamed the low lambing numbers on a severe winter and a late spring.

Largely as a consequence of the low numbers, Fish and Game issued in August an emergency closure for all hunting of Dall sheep in the entire Cooper Landing area.

Although his methods sometimes continued to be controversial, Nichols, meanwhile, did learn through trial and error and plenty of hard work. Throughout the 1970s and beyond, he published scholarly papers on the reproduction and survivability of the Kenai Peninsula’s wild populations of mountain sheep and goats.

In April 1976, he presented a paper called “An Experiment in Dall Sheep Management: Progress Report” to the Second Annual North American Wild Sheep Conference held in Denver and sponsored by Colorado State University and the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

Cooper Landing historian, Mona Painter, who has lived in the area since 1959 and knew Nichols personally, said, “This was really cutting-edge stuff, something that hadn’t been done before. And I don’t remember anybody around here being upset about it, really.”

Still, she said, if a biologist tried such research techniques today, “There’d be hell to pay.”

Hydro sites dry up — Kenai Hydro passes on 2 sites, pursues combo project

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Kenai Hydro is abandoning plans to build hydroelectric dams on two of the four streams it was permitted to explore in the Kenai Mountains near Moose Pass, and is moving forward with a combined project involving the other two streams.

The limited-liability company is a joint venture by Homer Electric Association and Wind Energy Alaska, which is co-owned by Cook Inlet Regional Corp. and enXco Inc. The hydro projects were granted preliminary permits in October 2008 and $50,000 grants from the Alaska Energy Authority to help offset the costs of preliminary permit work.

On Sept. 25, Kenai Hydro submitted petitions to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to voluntarily surrender its preliminary permits on Ptarmigan Lake and Crescent Lake, stating for each that, “Our reconnaissance level investigations determined the project to be unfeasible at this time.”

“The studies indicated that both projects faced environmental and economic challenges that would be too expensive to overcome,” stated a press release issued Monday.

A combined project involving the other two waterways, Falls Creek and Grant Lake, is still going ahead, with Kenai Hydro submitting a Notice of Intent and Pre-Application Document to FERC in August.

As originally envisioned, the 3-megawatt Ptarmigan Lake project involved damming the outlet of Ptarmigan Lake, but still allowing some water to be released into Ptarmigan Creek for fish usage, as it is a salmon-spawning stream. An intake structure at the outlet of the lake would have brought water through a 9-foot-diamater tunnel just shy of 1.5 miles to a powerhouse. A half-mile road would be built across from Ptarmigan Campground to access the powerhouse, along with a two-mile, single-lane road from the powerhouse to the lake outlet. By the time Kenai Hydro submitted its six-month progress report on the project to FERC at the end of March, it had already decided the project was unfeasible.

Crescent Lake, a particularly popular hiking and fishing area, was originally pegged for a 5.8-megawatt facility. The plan was to dam Crescent Lake where the footbridge is now, still allowing some water release into Crescent Creek. On the other end of the lake, a 7,750-foot tunnel or deep trench would be dug to install a 13,000-foot steel penstock that would take water from the east end of the lake past Carter Lake and down the mountainside to a powerhouse at 550-feet elevation. The trench would traverse the valley between Carter and Crescent lakes along roughly the same route as the hiking trail. A new, 2.5-mile road would be built up past Carter Lake to access the intake structure on Crescent.

Though there has been opposition from Moose Pass and Cooper Landing residents against all the dams, opponents found the Crescent project to be particularly loathsome, in part because the area is so prized for its recreational uses.

“Crescent Lake and that Crescent Lake bowl is essentially a de facto park. That’s the way the public treats it. To lead off with that one is shooting themselves in the foot,” said Bob Baldwin, president of the Friends of Cooper Landing community group, which had opposed the Kenai Hydro projects from the start.

Fighting at 14 — Cooper Landing man got early start in service

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

These days, 77-year-old Elzie Eugene (“Gene”) Wheeler likes to relax and admire the view from his home in the Cooper Landing senior-housing development known as Senior Haven. When he was in seventh grade back in tiny Tonkawa, Okla., however, he was “bored” with the pace of his life and began making decisions that would change his life forever.

An increasingly antsy Wheeler, who said he was larger and felt more mature than his classmates, began hanging out with 17- and 18-year-olds. When some of these older friends began enlisting in the military, he became determined to do the same.

In 1946, one year removed from America’s victory in World War II, Wheeler (at this point 14 years old) made a conscious decision he now refers to as “joining the Liars Club.”

“There were five of us wanting to enlist, so we went to a Navy recruiting office,” he said. “The recruiter asked us what we were doing at the time. It was February, and three of us were still in school; two were seniors, and I was in the ninth grade. He told us to stay in school and come back in June.”

Such advice did not jibe with their plans. They learned that some Army recruiters were in town, so they tried again. This time, they all claimed to be out of school and ready to serve their country, so the recruiter started the paperwork, warning them that they would need parental consent if they were not yet 18.

“I knew that my parents wouldn’t sign for me, so I did some fast thinking and told the recruiter that I would be 18 on March 21,” Wheeler said.

The truth was that his birthday was Aug. 25, when he would turn 15. But on March 21 he went to the Selective Service office to register.

“A lady asked if she could help me, and I told her I need to register. She asked, ‘When is your birthday?’ I replied, ‘Today.’ She filled out the papers and gave me my draft card.”

The five boys traveled five days later to Oklahoma City and were sworn in at 5 p.m. Then they were directed onto buses and transported to Camp Chaffee, Ark. Wheeler and two of the other original five friends had enlisted for three years and were assigned to the Army Air Forces; the remaining two friends were assigned to artillery.

On his fourth day in uniform, Wheeler was assigned to guard a work detail of four German prisoners who were filling out their time before being sent home overseas. Soon he was shipped off to train at Sheppard Field, Texas, where he was not the only underage trainee, but was the youngest.

It was about this time his parents learned what had become of their son.
“My parents found out where I was when the Army mailed my civilian clothes home,” he said. “My mother went to the school superintendent for advice on how to get me out of the Army.

“He suggested that she consider leaving me where I was. He told her he couldn’t keep me in school, and perhaps it was best that I stay in the Army. She agreed.”
Wheeler soon began training to become a medic. During this time, at Shaw Field, S.C., in early 1947, he got a pass off base and took a girl he had met on a date in town, but the date didn’t turn out as he had planned.

“We went to the movies, and I was walking her home when a police car pulled up beside us,” he said. “They put us in the car, took my friend home, and took me to jail. I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The girl was 17 and we were out after curfew.

“The next morning, my commanding officer, who was also the hospital commander, came to the jail. When he was told what the charge was, I could hear him laughing. He told the police that they had the wrong one locked up. He knew that I was only 15.

“The charges were dropped, but every time the commander saw me going to town he told me to leave the young ones alone.”

In the end, Wheeler served for 20 years, one month and three days, retiring from the military June 30, 1966, at the ripe old age of 34. He had served through the Korean War and the early years of the Vietnam War. He traveled all over the world, acting mainly as a medical technician.

Ten days after retiring, Wheeler went to work for a large nonprofit group that operated hospitals. He did administrative work in Wyoming before coming to Soldotna to help complete and open Central Peninsula General Hospital in 1971.
Although he would continue to work and travel around the country for nearly the next 30 years — as an insurance agent, a real estate agent and a hospital administrator — his time in Soldotna convinced him that the Kenai Peninsula was where he would retire.

In 2006, after seven years in Kenai, he and Anna, his wife of more than 50 years, came to Cooper Landing. They had planned to retire to a small cabin north of Kenai, but they are pleased with the community they now call home.

“I look down on the lake, and it’s beautiful,” Wheeler said. “I can sit here on my couch and look at the sheep on the mountains outside the window.”

In 1997, Wheeler contributed to a 660-page volume of personal stories written by men and women who had entered military service underage. The volume, now the first of three, was called “America’s Youngest Warriors” and was published by an organization called Veterans of Underage Military Service.

According to Wheeler, the VUMS has 2,000 members, the average age of which is in the mid-80s. The oldest living member — and the only one left from World War I — is a 107-year-old Virginia man.

Wheeler said he is proud to be a member of such a select group, and is pleased with the decision he made so many years ago.

“I got to do things I couldn’t have done any other way,” he said of his military career.

When asked whether he would do anything differently, if given the chance, he replied, “Probably signed up a year or two sooner.”

Fighting at 14 — Cooper Landing man got early start in service

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

These days, 77-year-old Elzie Eugene (“Gene”) Wheeler likes to relax and admire the view from his home in the Cooper Landing senior-housing development known as Senior Haven. When he was in seventh grade back in tiny Tonkawa, Okla., however, he was “bored” with the pace of his life and began making decisions that would change his life forever.

An increasingly antsy Wheeler, who said he was larger and felt more mature than his classmates, began hanging out with 17- and 18-year-olds. When some of these older friends began enlisting in the military, he became determined to do the same.

In 1946, one year removed from America’s victory in World War II, Wheeler (at this point 14 years old) made a conscious decision he now refers to as “joining the Liars Club.”

“There were five of us wanting to enlist, so we went to a Navy recruiting office,” he said. “The recruiter asked us what we were doing at the time. It was February, and three of us were still in school; two were seniors, and I was in the ninth grade. He told us to stay in school and come back in June.”

Such advice did not jibe with their plans. They learned that some Army recruiters were in town, so they tried again. This time, they all claimed to be out of school and ready to serve their country, so the recruiter started the paperwork, warning them that they would need parental consent if they were not yet 18.

“I knew that my parents wouldn’t sign for me, so I did some fast thinking and told the recruiter that I would be 18 on March 21,” Wheeler said.

The truth was that his birthday was Aug. 25, when he would turn 15. But on March 21 he went to the Selective Service office to register.

“A lady asked if she could help me, and I told her I need to register. She asked, ‘When is your birthday?’ I replied, ‘Today.’ She filled out the papers and gave me my draft card.”

The five boys traveled five days later to Oklahoma City and were sworn in at 5 p.m. Then they were directed onto buses and transported to Camp Chaffee, Ark. Wheeler and two of the other original five friends had enlisted for three years and were assigned to the Army Air Forces; the remaining two friends were assigned to artillery.

On his fourth day in uniform, Wheeler was assigned to guard a work detail of four German prisoners who were filling out their time before being sent home overseas. Soon he was shipped off to train at Sheppard Field, Texas, where he was not the only underage trainee, but was the youngest.

It was about this time his parents learned what had become of their son.
“My parents found out where I was when the Army mailed my civilian clothes home,” he said. “My mother went to the school superintendent for advice on how to get me out of the Army.

“He suggested that she consider leaving me where I was. He told her he couldn’t keep me in school, and perhaps it was best that I stay in the Army. She agreed.”
Wheeler soon began training to become a medic. During this time, at Shaw Field, S.C., in early 1947, he got a pass off base and took a girl he had met on a date in town, but the date didn’t turn out as he had planned.

“We went to the movies, and I was walking her home when a police car pulled up beside us,” he said. “They put us in the car, took my friend home, and took me to jail. I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The girl was 17 and we were out after curfew.

“The next morning, my commanding officer, who was also the hospital commander, came to the jail. When he was told what the charge was, I could hear him laughing. He told the police that they had the wrong one locked up. He knew that I was only 15.

“The charges were dropped, but every time the commander saw me going to town he told me to leave the young ones alone.”

In the end, Wheeler served for 20 years, one month and three days, retiring from the military June 30, 1966, at the ripe old age of 34. He had served through the Korean War and the early years of the Vietnam War. He traveled all over the world, acting mainly as a medical technician.

Ten days after retiring, Wheeler went to work for a large nonprofit group that operated hospitals. He did administrative work in Wyoming before coming to Soldotna to help complete and open Central Peninsula General Hospital in 1971.
Although he would continue to work and travel around the country for nearly the next 30 years — as an insurance agent, a real estate agent and a hospital administrator — his time in Soldotna convinced him that the Kenai Peninsula was where he would retire.

In 2006, after seven years in Kenai, he and Anna, his wife of more than 50 years, came to Cooper Landing. They had planned to retire to a small cabin north of Kenai, but they are pleased with the community they now call home.

“I look down on the lake, and it’s beautiful,” Wheeler said. “I can sit here on my couch and look at the sheep on the mountains outside the window.”

In 1997, Wheeler contributed to a 660-page volume of personal stories written by men and women who had entered military service underage. The volume, now the first of three, was called “America’s Youngest Warriors” and was published by an organization called Veterans of Underage Military Service.

According to Wheeler, the VUMS has 2,000 members, the average age of which is in the mid-80s. The oldest living member — and the only one left from World War I — is a 107-year-old Virginia man.

Wheeler said he is proud to be a member of such a select group, and is pleased with the decision he made so many years ago.

“I got to do things I couldn’t have done any other way,” he said of his military career.

When asked whether he would do anything differently, if given the chance, he replied, “Probably signed up a year or two sooner.”