Western

In his second season on “American Ninja Warrior,” Nick Hanson has advanced to the Los Angeles City Finals. The Unalakleet athlete qualified with a top-15 finish last week, and now he’ll compete for a spot in the National Finals.

“I came into this season with a little bit more focus,” he said. “You can see it on the show — I’m really pumped up. I’m more game-face and more into it. I mean, words can’t describe how pumped-up I still am.”

Hanson completed the obstacle course in 4 minutes and 44 seconds for a 13th-place finish. He said he felt motivated by memories of last season when he fell to 31st-place and missed the qualifying round by just three-tenths of a second.

“I think that lit a fire in me to say, ‘Okay, I failed. The best thing to do after you fail is to get right back up and keep doing it,’” he said. “I wanted to make sure the kids around here got to see me come back and do something better.”

In an upcoming episode, Hanson said viewers can watch him take on an even harder course with new obstacles. His goal is to post another strong finish and advance to the national competition in Las Vegas.

In the middle of a gravel lot, surrounded by rusty equipment and old storage containers, one brand-new container is making history. Inside, it’s filled with hydroponically grown, leafy green vegetables — the inaugural crop from Arctic Greens.

The company is the first organization above the Arctic Circle to get certified as Alaska Grown, and soon its produce will be available at Kotzebue’s local grocery store.

Past the control room and through the nursery, Jeff Hicks stands in the growing room of the standard 40-foot connex. While spinning exhaust fans and glowing purple lights regulate the temperature of the container, he takes inventory of its 600 seedlings.

“Mizuna, mustard, and watercress,” said Hicks, the Chief Operating Officer of Kikiktagruk Inupiat Corporation (KIC), which owns Arctic Greens. “We have spinach, kale, red lettuce, green lettuce, and butterhead lettuce. We have basil, cilantro, and several other different kinds of herbs.”

Right now, Arctic Greens can grow 45 different plant varieties from hydroponic seeds. Once the operation is fully up and running, the connex will deliver 450 heads of local produce each week — even in the middle of winter.

KIC started the subsidiary last fall after discussions with Vertical Harvest, an Anchorage company that designs and builds hydroponic containers. Hicks said the deal was sealed when they sent him back to Kotzebue with a special souvenir.

“I actually brought four heads of lettuce from one of their hydroponic units, and I talked to the manager over at the AC store. I said, ‘Hey if we brought you this, would you buy it?’”

Rob Boudreau is the manager of Kotzebue’s AC, owned by the Alaska Commercial Company and one of the few grocery options in town.

“I said, ‘Yeah. If you could grow them in town, it’d be a great thing for Kotzebue,’” he said.

Boudreau says the store will have a special section for Arctic Greens produce, which will come from just a few blocks away as opposed to hundreds or thousands of miles.

“It’s a good deal for the citizens of Kotzebue,” he said. “Better produce, no travel time, no sit-and-wait in different locations. It’ll just be fresher by the time it gets to the store.”

Hicks said the corporation is still talking with AC about how to price the vegetables, and he declined to share the cost of the custom-built connex, which was specially outfitted for the Arctic and flown into town on a C-130.

But he said growing the produce locally will save on shipping and therefore save customers money. Not to mention the other big advantage of Arctic produce.

“No pesticides,” he said. “They’re not genetically modified. It’s not organic, but it’s really as close as you can get.”

If the pilot phase goes well this summer, Hicks said KIC plans to purchase three more connexes and expand the operation in Kotzebue. After that, he said the corporation hopes to start hydroponic projects in other communities, including Nome. KIC has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Alaska Commercial Company, which would sell the locally grown produce at stores statewide.

In Kotzebue, Arctic Greens will harvest its first crop on June 21. The produce will go on sale at AC soon after.

Starting this summer, an abandoned hot springs in the heart of Western Alaska will go from a deteriorating historical site to an operational community garden. At least that’s the vision of Unaatuq, LLC, a consortium of seven regional organizations that owns the Pilgrim Hot Springs property.

Pilgrim Hot Springs isn’t easy to access. You have to drive 53 miles on a gravel road, and then turn down a seven-mile side road that’s sometimes impassable due to flooding or snow. The hot springs once housed a roadhouse and an orphanage, and starting this summer, Pilgrim will be home to a new community garden.

The Alaska Center for Energy and Power works closely with Unaatuq. It helped secure a “Conservation Innovation” grant through the National Resource Conservation Service to help fund the Pilgrim Project. Research Engineer Chris Pike sees a connection between the grant’s energy focus and growing food.

“One of the things that we really want to do is use that geothermal energy that’s at Pilgrim Hot Springs to grow vegetables,” said Pike. “And then food is a way to export energy. We always think of electricity and heat, but food is just as much of a need.”

Pike said Unaatuq will spend the summer building basic infrastructure, like water tanks and housing for workers. They also have to plant a soil-enriching cover crop and test field at the hot springs.

“So that’s going to be dug up in a couple different phases,” he said. “There’s going to be a cover crop that’s going to be planted in a certain area and then there’s going to be some vegetables that are planted. And then we’re coming up with a business plan and a market study.”

The original vision was to use Pilgrim for community supported agriculture. But Robert Bensin said those goals have changed. Bensin is Construction Manager for the Bering Straits Development Company. Instead, he said they’ll be providing food to local groups in Nome and the surrounding communities.

“We’re not targeting AC or Hanson’s, we’re going to be targeting the XYZ center, the hospital, the school district, the regional ANICA stores and the native corporation stores,” Bensin said.

But food isn’t the only focus of this project. Matt Ganley is with the Bering Straits Native Corporation, the managing member of Unaatuq. With the help of ground-penetrating radar, Ganley said the company also hopes to locate a mass grave.

“There were 89 people buried at Pilgrim,” Ganley said.

According to Ganley, the grave holds the bodies of victims of the 1918 influenza, which he said killed about half of the Alaska Native population between Unalakleet and Shishmaref.

Unaatuq is also hoping to preserve the history of Pilgrim Hot Springs. The company is working to secure funding to one day stabilize the historic buildings. For now, they’re planning to build a gate to separate the old hot springs site from the new summer construction.

Unaatuq is looking for volunteers to help with summer projects and plans to start moving out construction equipment later this week.

FBI agents along with State Troopers and Bethel Police conducted searches in at least three subdivisions in Bethel on Tuesday in connection with possible illegal alcohol sales.

Taxis formed a line, and one by one, opened trunks and doors for inspection by authorities.

Atone Avio works in the Trailer Court neighborhood in Bethel.

“Troopers and FBI, they’re raiding all these Korean cab drivers,” Avio said.

Quyana Cab, owned by Jung Jun, employs many Korean drivers and is the operator of all the cabs being searched here.

Avio works right across the street from the highest concentration of law enforcement. He said he spent most of his morning watching the officers in action.

“Just seen a couple of them now, but they’re at about five or six other trailers around here,” Avio said.

In addition to the line of cabs, law enforcement made their way in and out of houses in both Trailer Court and on Sixth Ave. Many cab drivers live in both areas.

Like many in Bethel, Avio heard rumors the company had been selling alcohol on the black market.

“Couple people took a cab from the airport and they were saying that they were selling alcohol,” Avio said. “I think they possibly might be selling alcohol,” said Avio.

A press release by the Alaska State Troopers stated the search warrants were being exercised as the result of a large-scale investigation that began in December 2015 into illegal alcohol sales by many Bethel businesses .

Just moments after authorities left, in the same neighborhood, one of the owners of Quyana cab lies on a couch at her home rubbing her eyes. She says that she’s tired.

One of the co-owners agreed to speak but asked that her name not be used in this story.

“We don’t do nothing wrong, what happened? Why they make us bad people? I don’t understand,” the owner said.

She said that Tuesday morning she woke up to the sound of officers knocking on her door.

“So I just open the door, and see a shotgun or something,” the owner said. “How many big guys come to me and [say] hands up? And then handcuffed me. And then they take me outside. And then I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what happened,”

The owner said authorities did not tell her why she was being handcuffed. She said rumors that some of her drivers have made illegal sales are true, but she does not sell it herself.

“I know that somebody do that but I don’t want to talk about that one. That’s not my business you know. If I don’t do, that’s ok, I don’t care,” the owner said. “I hate the Illegal people, that’s why I fire the cab driver. Just driving, just driving, no sell the alcohol. I always say that.”

When asked to clarify if she had fired an employee for selling, the owner said,“yeah…I don’t exactly remember. That’s why when people order the booze I say no, don’t sell the booze, don’t sell the booze.”

Police have not reported if or how many arrests have been made following the operation but the owner says that she knows of at least one.

Orange drones were launched in Dutch Harbor last summer to measure sea ice retreat. Now Saildrones are back in the Bering Sea with a new mission and new features.

One of them is to record North Pacific right whale calls to help track its migratory patterns. There are only 30 North Pacific right whales in U.S. waters. The other new feature will help determine how many fur seals and pollock live in parts of the Bering Sea.

The pollock fishery there is the largest in the U.S.

“Is it going to be a winner or a loser over the next decade in terms of the effects of warming, ocean acidification and loss of sea ice?” asks Douglas DeMaster, a science director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Alaska Fisheries division.

DeMaster says scientists are concerned about the fur seals, which feed on pollock, and the diminishing stocks of pollock.

“It’s something the fishery needs to plan for and adapt to. And the only way to do that is with good information,” DeMaster said.

https://vimeo.com/167481038

In addition to testing the temperature, oxygen and salinity of the water, the Saildrone will also be using echo sounder technology. DeMaster calls it “a sophisticated fish finder.”

“It’s basically a ping, a sound impulse that’s sent through the water column and it’s reflected off of fish,” he said.

NOAA has used it on research vessels before but never on the Saildrone. Scientists will be able to sit from the comfort of their office or even in a coffee shop, as some of the data is collected in real time. In September, they’ll pluck the Saildrones out of the water when the season changes. They run off battery and solar power. It’ll take six months to a year before scientists can draw solid conclusions from the data.

Christopher Sabine, the director of NOAA’s pacific marine environmental lab, says pollock stocks have dropped before. The temperature of the Bering Sea warmed up in the early 2000s.

“Then it got cold again and the fish stocks came back,” Sabine said. “We’re now swinging back into a warm period again and we’re looking at potentially three years for this to manifest itself in the fisheries side of things.”

Since the Saildrone were launched two weeks ago, some startling information has already come back. Sabine says temps in the lower Bering Sea are about five degrees warmer than normal.

Janet Mitchell says she and many others in Kivalina were encouraged last year when President Obama gave a shout-out to her village, and the peril it faces, after a flyover during his visit to Alaska.

“… On my way here, I flew over the island of Kivalina, which is already receding into the ocean,” Obama said in a Sept. 2 speech in Kotzebue.

Mitchell is Kivalina’s city administrator. She and others have been working for years to get state and federal agencies to help move the village to higher ground, where it won’t be threatened by flooding from waves whipped up during the powerful storms that slam into western Alaska late in the fall.

That’s what residents of Kivalina told Obama in one of the meetings he held with Alaskans during his three-day visit to the state, which he alluded to in the Kotzebue speech: “… The waves sweep across the entire island, at times from one side to the other.”

Mitchell says her Inupiaq forebears wouldn’t have built a village on the exposed site at the end of an 8-mile-long sandy island on the northwest-Alaska coast that’s barely above sea level. But she says the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs did that just over a hundred years ago because it seemed like a handy place for boats to offload supplies.

“This was the easiest spot to drop the material and build a school,” she said. “And we’ve been here ever since.”

Mitchell says it wasn’t long before the people of Kivalina began trying to move their community. She says state and federal agencies have provided some help, but that it seems they’ve just begun to learn how to respond to this new type of slow-moving disaster.

“Oh, very much so,” said Joel Niemeyer is the federal co-chair of the Denali Commission, which the president has tasked with overseeing the village-relocation effort.

“The failure mechanism … you could say is a disaster event over a long period time – not over hours, but over years,” Niemeyer said. “And there are no congressional authorities for that.”

Niemeyer says lessons-learned in places like Kivalina should enable those agencies to respond more ably in the years ahead, as more coastal communities face erosion and more powerful storm surges energized by a warming climate.

“What’s happening in Alaska is the start of climate-change effects,” he said, “and this could well be occurring in the Lower 48.”

Niemeyer says he hopes Congress will soon grant agencies additional authority so other communities won’t have to cope with both climate change and bureaucracies that aren’t prepared to respond to it.