Two out-of-town hikers got lost on West Glacier Trail on Tuesday night, according to Alaska State Troopers.
In an online dispatch, troopers identified the hikers as Enrico Solano, 41, of Mexico and Lucas Pezzi, 28, of Argentina. They had hiked to the Mendenhall Glacier and couldn’t find the trail back.
Capital City Fire/Rescue launched a boat and found them on the lake’s shoreline. SEADOGS also helped with the rescue.
Two canoes returned home to Haines this week, after spending some time in Hoonah, where master carver Wayne Price assisted in the Huna Tlingit homecoming to Glacier Bay.
A team of volunteers sing as they bring two canoes off of the LeConte Ferry and onto shore in Haines.
“Our ships are home!” yelled Price, welcoming his boats to shore.
The two canoes rode alongside vehicles on the ferry’s car deck. One is Price’s 28-foot Jibba dugout. The other, a strip canoe. Both are painted with the same red and black design.
Price drove to the ferry terminal to pick up the boats on their return trip from Hoonah, where he and a team of volunteers made two 40-foot spruce dugouts earlier this year. The two canoes coming back to Haines were ones made previously. The ones carved for Hoonah remain there.
“We went and worked 12 hours a day or 14 hours a day, seven days a week for nine months straight,” Price said.
Price was contracted to build the larger canoes for Hoonah.
“So that they could have an epic journey to return to their ancestral homelands in Glacier Bay, Bartlett Cove, where at one point they were pushed out and they left on dugouts by the glacier,” Price said. “The ice pushed them out.”
Last month, the two 40-foot boats made the journey to Glacier Bay for the Huna Tribal House dedication, paddled by the Huna Tlingit.
The Hoonah Indian Association and the National Parks Service worked together to facilitate the homecoming.
Price joined them for the 35-mile journey in his 28-foot dugout.
“This is the ancestral homeland of the Huna Kawoo,” Price said. “And they’ve wanted to return for a long time but were denied that return when it was turned into a park.”
Arriving at the ferry terminal in Haines, a group of people are waiting to help transfer the boats from the ferry to a trailer, to be brought back to Price’s home.
Zack James and James Hart worked with price to carve the dugouts in Hoonah. Now they’re lending a hand to bring these canoes back home.
They’re not boys anymore, they’re men,” Price said. “They stood by my side through thick and thin in Hoonah.”
Price’s son Stephen also helped carve the dugouts.
James said through this experience he’s gained a greater respect for how skilled the Tlingit ancestors were at their craft.
“It’s like a 40-foot long sculpture, perfectly symmetrical on both sides, end to end,” James said. “And the ancestors were able to do that with just sticks, maybe a piece of charcoal and string. They were able to make almost an immaculate ship.”
The Hoonah community offered help during the carving process, and Hart said everyone benefited from the work.
“As we were there we were able to see the change that we brought to Hoonah and the change that Hoonah brought out in us,” Hart said. “We’re all growing together and by the time we left it seemed like there was a fire underneath them of cultural awareness and everyone really stepping up and being involved.”
They do use power tools for part of the process now, but Price said at some point you have to put them down and do the work by hand.
“It takes a lot of dedication, a lot of chopping and chipping. A lot of chips. Day after day, chopping and chipping,” Price said.
The returning canoes will be used by North Tide Canoe Kwann in Haines.
Price is the team captain.
The group participates in tribal journeys to promote healthy lifestyle, he said. All of the vessels are healing canoes, made to deal with issues of addiction and abuse.
The idea came to Price in a sweat lodge, when he was going through his own recovery 13 years ago.
“The Creator told me that as I carve the project that’s designated as a healing canoe, then each chip that comes off the dugout represents a life we’ve lost to alcohol and drugs in Indian country and abroad,” Price said.
For Price, being a part of the homecoming in Hoonah was a special experience.
“As a boat builder, to be able to see three of my ships on the water all at the same time full of all those happy places, you have to be there to witness that, to see that, and it’s a very amazing day,” Price said.
Still, carrying two of his boats back to shore in Haines with his team of loyal volunteers was significant in itself.
Thousands of unexpected visitors made a stop in Haines today, when an unscheduled cruise ship docked in town this Tuesday morning.
The boat was headed for Skagway, but high winds caused a change of plans.
The ferry dock is crowded and the wind is strong.
It’s a reminder of why the Crown Princess is stopped in Haines and not Skagway. Some passengers walk back and forth to town. Others wait nearby, while tour operators mingle with the crowd.
“We got up early to do some excursions in Skagway,” Damon Patterson. He and Stephanie Patterson are visiting Alaska from Kentucky.
The Patterson’s are enjoying their time in Haines, but disappointed to not be on the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad as planned.
Haines Tourism Director Leslie Ross said the official call to come to Haines wasn’t made until about 6:30 a.m.
“We were warned a few days ago that they might blow in,” Ross said. “And it’s not a complete surprise. When it gets this windy, sometimes, I mean it’s not the first time it’s happened.”
It’s the first time this year a cruise ship has had to stop in town unexpectedly, though it has happened in previous years.
Still, Ross said this is a larger ship then would normally come to town.
The Crown Princess holds just more than 3,000 passengers.
“So it was dealing with a couple thousand people trying to find places to go this morning,” Ross said.
According to Ross, local tour operators sell tours in both Skagway and Haines, so they were ready to go, but it’s harder to get the word out to shop owners who were expecting a quiet day. An extra cruise ship will bring in a lot of extra money, and Ross said in these situations, usually people end up happy.
“They end up being pleasantly surprised,” Ross said, “and our tour operators jump in and are getting a lot of our folks out but if not they’re just taking our free shuttle downtown and enjoying the area and most people still come back happy.”
The Crown Princess is not the only ship that didn’t make it to Skagway.
Weather also prevented the Nieuw Amsterdam from docking.
Skagway tourism director Cody Jennings said today was supposed to be the last four-ship day of the season.
“What you find out on the streets still though right now is that pretty much all the shops still are open,” Jennings said. “But definitely much lower than we expected today. It’s definitely a quieter day around town.”
With about half the expected visitors, Jennings expected local businesses to take hit.
“We were expecting a little over 10,000 visitors and what we have is just over five (5,000). So for those people that stick it out until the end and want to be here for our visitors, it definitely makes a difference for all of them,” Jennings said. “I expect for all the small businesses as well.”
Still, Jennings says it seems so be business as usual in Skagway, despite the smaller crowd. And she says, this doesn’t happen often enough to be a major concern.
Homer, the little town at the “End of The Road,” is becoming an increasingly popular travel destination.
2016 has been a record-breaking year for the Homer tourism industry, said Jan Knutson, the Visitor Center coordinator with the Homer Chamber of Commerce.
“It has been a banner year for Homer and the surrounding area in terms of the number of the visitors. This year we had over 12,600 visitors,” Knutson said.
The visitor center welcomed 219 tourists on July 21 alone, breaking the record for number of daily visitors. In comparison, the average number of visitors per day was 94 in 2015.
Increases in the number of visitors have translated into higher revenues for a number of Homer businesses.
Homer city campgrounds, for instance, reported a revenue increase of $5,000 in comparison to August 2015.
Local bed and breakfasts also have seen increases in occupancy, Knutson said.
“With several of the B&Bs last year, they had 60 percent occupancy, this year it’s 92 percent. They’re all booming,” Knutson said.
Besides the increase in the number of visitors, the Chamber of Commerce has seen a number of other changes, Knutson said.
“The trends that we see that are new this year, one is more and more motorcyclists are coming in,” she said. “The other trend I’m seeing is more and more people, depending on what their budget is, are coming to camp because their budget may be limited, but they really want to come to Homer.”
The Homer Chamber of Commerce is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the year. It also will be open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays through the end of September.
The search for an overdue hiker headed to the abandoned bus where Christopher McCandless died, ended Monday morning with the hiker being found.
Carlos Castrejon, 45, of Mexico was located walking along the Park Road, Denali National Park spokeswoman Katherine Belcher said.
Belcher says 20 people were involved in the search for Castrejon, whose girlfriend reported him overdue returning from a solo 30 mile round trip hike from the park road to the Stampede Trail area bus and back.
Castrejon hoped it would take 3 days, but terrain was rougher than anticipated, Belcher.
He left Sept. 7, but had told his girlfriend he might not return until the 13, she said.
It’s the second time this summer that a search was launched to locate a hiker overdue on a trip to the bus.
Last month Mathew Sharp, 22, of Manitoba, Canada was unable to hike out from the bus because of high water on the Teklanika River.
He activated a personal locator beacon and was picked by an Alaska State Trooper helicopter.
The trek to the bus was popularized by the “Into the Wild” book and movie about McCandless.
Numerous hikers trying to reach the bus have been rescued, and one died trying to ford the Teklanika in 2010.
Skagway residents are facing a two-and-a-half month disruption in Alaska Marine Highway ferry service sometime in the next year and a half.
The municipality held a meeting last week to hear from residents about what they think the best timing would be for the looming closure of the ferry dock.
The Alaska Department of Transportation is planning to refurbish the dock.
The question now is when?
DOT gave Skagway residents three timing options to consider: summer 2017, fall 2017 or spring 2018.
“Summer would be completely undoable, just not even worth considering,” Nola Lamken said.
She was one of a few residents who said a ferry service interruption in the summer would cause the most disruption for business owners, tourists and summer employees.
The consensus among the residents at Wednesday’s meeting was that fall or winter is the best option.
“We would think that the best time to do this would be around mid-October to I guess mid-January for your three months,” said Gary Hanson, who is on the local marine highway ad hoc committee. “We figured that it was more important to have vehicle service as the tourism season ended in September and also as it gears up again in March.”
DOT Deputy Commissioner Mike Neussl said the only reason he thought summer or spring might be viable options is because flights in and out of Skagway tend to be more reliable during those times of the year.
There also are privately-run summer ferries between Haines and Skagway.
A representative from one of those companies spoke up at Wednesday’s meeting.
Shane Huskey is operations manager for the Haines-Skagway Fast Ferry, which serves mainly as a shuttle for summer cruise ship passengers between the two communities.
Huskey talked about the possibility of the Haines-Skagway Fast Ferry stepping up as an alternative transportation service while the marine highway dock is out of commission.
“We could combine our schedule to match up exactly with what the Haines ferry schedule would be,” Huskey said. “I drove over to the Haines dock and was kind of looking around to see if there was a possibility where there would be uninterrupted service from Skagway straight to the ferry terminal itself instead of going to the [cruise ship] dock in Haines.”
The fast ferry uses the Skagway small boat harbor, so it wouldn’t be impacted by the closure of the marine highway dock.
As for the possibility of continuing marine highway vessel service to Skagway, Neussl said he has concerns about DOT ferries trying to use one of Skagway’s other docks.
The Malaspina will probably be filling in for the Matanuska next fall and winter, he said. That means even if the ferry system did use the railroad or ore dock, it would be passenger-only service.
Neussl said contracting with a private company like the Haines Skagway Fast Ferry or Allen Marine is an option DOT is looking into.
“So (there’s) more research to do on that and still an unknown cost, and whether the project can bear the cost depending on the funding available for the project and what the construction work is supposed to consume,” Neussl said. “But those are things that we’re looking into in terms of alternative service.”
DOT spokesman Jeremy Woodrow said this week his department is waiting on an official recommendation from the municipality before making a final decision about the timing of the project.
The Skagway Borough Assembly is scheduled to discuss the ferry float project at its meeting Thursday.
