KYUK - Bethel

A member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet visited the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta last week.

Linda McMahon is the head of the Small Business Administration, or SBA, and she spent Friday morning in Bethel touring local facilities and meeting with local business owners and CEOs at Yuut Elitnaurviat.

McMahon then took a crowded boat to Kwethluk for lunch where she visited the construction site of the village’s new state-of-the-art school.

The trip was one of many for McMahon, who has promised to visit each of the SBA’s 68 offices across the country.

She’s trying to raise awareness about the many opportunities that her department provides.

“SBA is actually an incredibly well-kept secret,” she said.

The SBA offers mentoring for entrepreneurs and guarantees loans for small businesses.

Businesses aren’t always aware of these resources, according to McMahon.

McMahon also discussed Alaska Native corporations which are businesses themselves. She said that they can take advantage of lucrative government contracts ranging from $7 million to $20 million in size.

“More Alaska Native corporations should take advantage of those government contracts,” McMahon said. “They’re substantial programs.”

Prior to her political career, Linda McMahon and her husband founded Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, where she served as CEO until 2009.

She considers Trump a friend and says that while she never sought or expected to direct the SBA, she is honored to do so.

Bethel resident Nate DeHaan took the next logical step in becoming a ninja this week.

The local pilot and dog musher made it through a qualifying round Monday of “American Ninja Warrior,” a popular fitness competition on NBC.

Nate DeHaan was a man on a mission at 7 p.m. Monday.

The challenge? Leap from step to step across a moat of water, swing through a steep set of red metal rings, and jump on a trampoline with enough gusto to grab onto a swinging cylinder of foam hovering above him. It looks like a punching bag, and it’s always just out of reach.

For those of you who don’t watch the show, “American Ninja Warrior” is a fitness contest that’s comprised of a series of obstacle courses. It’s designed to test athletes’ agility and strength, and it’s different every episode.

Contestants don’t see the course until right before they compete.

“It’s pretty intimidating, at first, to try to figure out,” DeHaan said. “You’re acting on instinct at that point.”

Nate is a laid-back bush pilot with a wide smile and an unkempt beard.

He lives in Bethel with his wife, baby girl, and 15 sled dogs. For the past year he’s been doing CrossFit at Tundra Family Fitness and running up a wall modeled after one of the competition’s obstacles that he built himself in his front yard.

DeHaan won Bethel’s half-marathon earlier this summer.

He was inspired to become a ninja warrior by his close friend Nick Hanson, the self-styled Eskimo Ninja from Unalakleet.

Hanson also is competing in “American Ninja Warrior” this year, and made it through one of the show’s qualifying rounds too.

They train together whenever they can, DeHaan said.

“It’s important to go in confident in yourself, but not so much so that you get sloppy,” DeHaan said.

“The most intimidating obstacles are the balance obstacles,” he said. “That’s the one where you’re like, ‘Oh jeez, how am I gonna do this?’”

DeHaan ran, climbed, and jumped his way Monday through most of the “Ninja Warrior” challenges: the floating steps, the ring set and the bouncing spider trampoline.

But he was stumped by the railrunner, a narrow metal rail suspended above a pool of water that he had to work his way across.

While DeHaan fell in the middle of the course, so did pretty much everyone else.

The trampoline challenge took out about a third of the contestants; the floating steps took out more.

Because of his elapsed time and the number of obstacles he completed, the show ranked DeHaan as one of the top 30 ninjas competing Monday and he lived to fight another day.

When asked if he had any advice for the future ninjas of Bethel, DeHaan laughed. “You just have to get out there and try it,” he said.

DeHaan actually competed in “Ninja Warrior” last May – the show is prerecorded — and he can’t tell us how well he did yet because of his contract, but he says that he’s proud of his performance.

You can watch him compete against more ninjas in August, when NBC airs the next episode that features him.

Fishermen are selling more salmon than the Yukon River’s only buyer can handle.

Record-breaking sales Monday closed a commercial opening for fishermen upriver.

Those fishermen spent Tuesday watching tens of thousands of dollars swim by during the river’s first opportunity to sell king salmon this decade.

District One in the lower Yukon River saw its first commercial opening of the fall season on Monday, and Kwik’Pak Fisheries bought five times its usual amount of fish.

The buyer canceled the opening scheduled Tuesday evening for District Two.

“Everybody’s got their limit and we’re at our limit, physically,” said Jack Schultheis, who manages Kwik’Pak Fisheries in Emmonak.

The 12-hour opening targeted fall chum salmon, which sold for 60 cents a pound. And for the first time since 2011, any kings caught could be sold as well for a whopping $5.50 per pound.

The opening infused hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pocketbooks of fishermen on the lower river.

One of those fishermen was Matty Beans, who is from St. Mary’s, which is in District Two where the opening was canceled.

The day before, he’d boated with his fishing partner to District One.

“Fishing last night was great,” Beans said. “We had six totes of chums, roughly about 4,000 pounds.”

And one king salmon.

The trip took four hours each direction, over 70 miles in harsh weather.

“Thirty-five mph wind in mist rain, and hard rain, and rain that makes your eyes squint,” Beans said.

Most fishermen in District Two didn’t spend the time and fuel going out. They were planning on fishing in their district the following day. So why close the opening?

“Yeah, we just got close to half a million pounds of fish, and we just don’t have the capacity to safely handle another opening,” Schultheis said.

After another buyer dropped out this summer, Kwik’Pak became the only company buying fish.

“Being able to take the fish where we’re not going to have quality issues or spoilage, and all our tender boats are loaded up,” Schultheis said. “To turn those boats around, I mean, it’s just too much for us.”

When the opening in District Two of the Yukon was canceled Tuesday, just hours before it was to begin, fishermen upriver who had not made the drive down the day before had no choice but to stay on shore.

“Communities of Pilot Station, Mountain Village, St. Mary’s, Pitka’s Point, Marshall, Russian Mission, we’re all in the district. None of us are going to be able to fish today,” Beans said. “Well that’s a couple grand we’re going to miss out on tonight. It’s going to affect us buying school clothes for (six) kids, putting more food on the table, stock up on heating fuel.”

Fishermen across District Two have seen a decline in their ability to sell fish during commercial openings after the single buyer in their district, Boreal, never opened.

Kwik’Pak sends a few tenders upriver during openings, but those can fill up with the catch from just a few fishermen.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that more openings are likely this season.

The Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers are having opposite experiences with king salmon this season.

The Kuskokwim kings arrived late, in a small trickle, and state biologists now say that the run may meet escapement goals. Less than 60,000 kings are estimated to have passed the Bethel sonar station.

To meet the lowest end of drainage-wide escapement, 65,000 kings would need to reach their spawning grounds.

Meanwhile, the Yukon River kings arrived early in the largest run observed in more than a decade.

More than a quarter-million kings have passed the lower river sonar site at Pilot Station. The run is expected to meet escapement goals and provide a larger subsistence harvest than last year.

Some Yukon tributaries have already met escapement for king salmon, but high water is disrupting accurate counting on others.

The summer chum run on the Yukon also is experiencing a banner year. More than 3 million summer chum have passed the lower river sonar station, far above historical numbers, and escapement goals for these fish are being met along the river.

Starting July 18, chum salmon arriving in the Yukon River will be considered fall chum.

Alaska Airlines might cut some of its flights between Bethel and Anchorage, just in time for the holidays.

Management confirmed that their flight schedule will change a few weeks before Thanksgiving and remain in effect until a few days after New Year’s, but it’s still unclear what those changes will be.

The only thing we know for sure about Alaska Airlines’ winter schedule is that the version they’ve published online is incorrect.

Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta residents who tried to book a flight this week may have noticed that the early morning flights connecting Bethel to Anchorage have disappeared from the airline’s November and December calendars.

According to Regional Vice President Marilyn Romano, that scheduling change was rolled out by mistake and a corrected listing should to be out by the end of the week.

But while Alaska Airlines isn’t planning to cut all of Bethel’s morning flights this winter, Romano confirmed that there might be some reduction in flights to the community.

Alaska Airlines is upgrading. They’re trading in their aging combis for newer planes with more seats, and it might not be cost effective for them to fly larger planes into Bethel three or four times a day.

According to Romano, too many seats could be empty.

“There’s going to be more seats in the market than Bethel currently utilizes,” she said.

“We want to be very thoughtful in our approach, knowing how important those flights are particularly, in some instances, for people’s ability to do a day trip.”

Day trips are just one of the ways in which Bethel depends on flights back and forth to Anchorage.

Cutting the community’s early morning flights could make it difficult for Y-K Delta residents to commute to Anchorage for meetings or conferences – and vice versa.

That’s not the only potential change to the flight schedule that concerns Bethel residents.

At a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce last week, airline Station Manager Michael Trulin assured locals that the changes shouldn’t impact the noon flight.

Travelers from the villages sometimes rely on that connection to get to Anchorage as soon as possible, when time is of the essence.

“Our noon flight is a lot of Y-K and Medicaid travel,” he told Chamber of Commerce members. “We would have no trouble filling that flight up at noon, because they’re always desperate to get patients into the hospital.”

The winter schedule due out this week is still under review. While the number of Alaska Airline flights in and out Bethel might decrease, Trulin and Romano both noted that the number of seats available to passengers with the new planes will stay the same. It might even go up.

While the winter schedule is still in flux, Alaska Airlines’ summer schedule to Bethel is in full swing with a few minor changes.

According to manager Trulin, the midday flight to Anchorage now departs at 11:30 a.m.

Tonight, Bethel resident Nate DeHaan will climb walls, poles and rope swings on NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior,” a popular competition and fitness challenge.

DeHaan is a pilot and dog musher who won first place in Bethel’s half-marathon this summer. He and his wife live in City Sub with their 15 dogs and baby girl.

You can watch DeHaan tonight at 7 p.m. on NBC.