Tourism

Managers of Juneau’s most popular tourist attraction say they’re planning for a more sustainable facility, even as the very object of many a visitors’ fascination continues retreating at a faster rate because of climate change.

Most of the $415,000 dollars for drafting a master plan for the U.S. Forest Service’s Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center comes from the Federal Highway Administration. The plan may address everything from Glacier Spur Road access to improving parking, culverts, trails and other outdoor areas, and even heat loss from the large, inefficient windows at the Visitor Center.

Visitor Center Director John Neary briefly explained the plan during a press conference Tuesday about potential impacts to the Alaska tourism industry from climate change.

“It seems like a no-brainer to me,” Neary said.

We have people coming on cruise ships that are belching emissions that are contributing (to climate change), and they get on diesel buses that are belching emissions, and they land at the glacier, and get off, and they see this glacier, and they’re not making the connection between everything they’ve just done and what they’re seeing before them.”

Neary went into more detail during an interview with KTOO immediately after the teleconferenced presentation. He’s open to ideas such as reconstruction of a Nugget Creek hydroelectric project that served miners a century ago, closing off the end of Glacier Spur Road and using an electric circulator or tram to transport visitors from a parking lot to the Center, and offering incentives for tour companies to electrify their bus fleet.

Such as, if we were to provide plug in stations for those buses with electricity at competitive rates, and with those stations offering the best parking spot that is available.”

Neary points out that the Mendenhall Glacier is the most popular tourism destination with 450,000 visitors, or almost half of the total number of cruise ship passengers that visit Juneau each year. Of that number, about 10,000 visitors to the glacier are locals. He also said companies can’t sell trips to other destinations in Juneau (like the DIPAC hatchery, for example) unless the Mendenhall Glacier is included in the package.

Neary admits that achieving zero-net energy and zero-net waste at the Visitor Center, or entirely eliminating carbon emissions would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. But that’s not the ultimate goal anyway. He said their job as interpreters is about making that link, or connecting people to the landscape in a way that they never had thought about before.

We’re not making the fact that ‘You are the cause of the retreating glacier. You and everyone else.’ We all collectively need to address this. And a starting point would be right here at this Visitor Center.”

He hopes that visitors will then go home, start a discussion, and take action in their own community.

Neary said they’ll finish the plan and have priorities identified by next spring. Implementation of the plan, however, may take years and a lot more funding.

A downtown Juneau cleanup is set for July 25. It’s an effort by of a coalition of business and property owners, and others that have joined together to tackle problems in the city’s core.

Bruce Denton has had an office in the Senate building on South Franklin Street for about 30 years. In May, he spent a lot of time outside painting, watching over downtown.

“I had no idea how bad it had become.”

Now he’s a man with a mission.

A video

Denton asked filmmaker Pat Race to produce a short video of some of the things he’d seen from his perch.

“My marching orders to Pat was that I didn’t want it to be an indictment of any one group. I just basically wanted the bad and the ugly of what was going on downtown,” Denton says.

The bad and the ugly?

“It’s everything,” he says.

The video starts at Front and Franklin streets and pans the burned-out Gastineau Apartments.

“You look up Franklin Street and think why would I want to go there?”

Pat Race calls his short video a snapshot of downtown.

“I filmed everything from like puke and poop and people passed out on the doorsteps of businesses and broken windows and busted up sidewalks. It really ran the gamut,” Race says. “It’s just a deterioration of attention.”

It even picks up the north wall of Denton’s Senate building.

“It looks horrible,” Denton says. “I thought, ‘Pat, why did you do that to me,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is what we’re talking about. We all need to take ownership.’”

Race deliberately shot the footage over a short period of time.

“It’s not cherry-picked, it’s not all the greatest hits from the last month. It’s everything that just happened within a few days,” he says. “And it’s pretty pervasive.”

Race also owns a business downtown. He says he wasn’t surprised at the images he saw in his camera, but at how long he’d shut them out.

“I think the thing that surprised me was how much I had my blinders on now,” he says.  “I think once you start looking around it’s pretty appalling how many cigarette butts are on the ground, and how things haven’t been painted in quite a while and just what we let people get away with in a public space.”

Denton calls it “just a lot of obnoxious activity, a lot of people operating below polite society.”

An informal coalition

For the past month, Denton and Race have taken their concerns and the video to small groups of business and property owners, a few CBJ staff and a couple of elected officials. Even the Downtown Neighborhood Association has joined.

Juneau Police Chief Bryce Johnson dubs the informal coalition DIG, for Downtown Improvement Group. Earlier this month, Denton and Race met with Johnson and Lt. David Campbell. They don’t need a video to understand the issues.

“Typically, what we encounter in the downtown area is a lot of public nuisance-type complaints. Alcohol is a contributing factor to it,” he says. “A lot of people are consuming alcohol.”

Downtown Juneau consumes a lot of police presence, especially on nights and weekends.

When he steps out of his police lieutenant role, Campbell admits downtown is sometimes an unpleasant place to be.

“As a citizen and a parent, I don’t know, there’s just an uncomfortable air about it,” he says.

Campbell says Denton is on the right track. He points to a study done years ago called Broken Windows.

“You have an area that’s got broken windows and graffiti, it gives an unconscious message that nobody cares,” he says.

And such problems grow. The reverse, of course, is well-cared for property, an inviting downtown.

“You keep places clean, you know you have the impression that somebody cares about it, is watching it. And as you’re able to get ownership and get back, it actually has a positive effect toward these low-level, quality-of-life issue crimes,” Campbell says.

Cleaning up is a start

As Denton spreads his message, he says peer pressure is the way to start cleaning up downtown.

“If your neighbor on both sides of your building cleans up their act, it kind of puts a lot of pressure on you to do the same thing,” he says.

While a general clean-up may be the best way to start addressing the issues, Denton and other members of the downtown group know it’s superficial; the tougher solutions may take years.

Those conversations are just getting underway.

 

Editor’s Note: This story is the first in a series on downtown Juneau issues. You can read the second part here: Bring your brooms and scrub brushes; downtown cleanup is Friday

An Alaska-bound cruise ship had to return to Seattle late Saturday after a small fire broke out on board. But it was able to restart its voyage.

No one was injured in the incident.

According to the Coast Guard, the crew of the Holland America cruise ship Westerdam reported a fire in a boiler room around 5 p.m. Saturday. That was about an hour after the cruise ship left its summertime homeport of Seattle for a seven-night Alaska cruise.

Coast Guard petty officer George Degener says tugboats escorted the Westerdam back to its pier with no injuries reported.

“Thankfully, the crew members on board the vessel were able to safely extinguish the fire and they were able to make it back to port on their own,” he says.

Degener says Coast Guard investigators boarded the cruise ship to assess the damage. It resumed sailing after inspection and repairs.

The scheduled route called for stops in Juneau, Glacier Bay, Sitka and Ketchikan.

Holland America said in the statement that the Westerdam was fully booked with more than 2,800 passengers and crew.

 

Water is still rising in Suicide Basin on the Mendenhall Glacier, but if or when it will release isn’t predictable.

Suicide Basin is a natural collector of rainfall and snowmelt, and is dammed by the glacier. The dam has broken the last three summers, causing various levels of flooding on Mendenhall Lake and Mendenhall River.

The National Weather Service said on Friday that a visual check of the basin indicates the amount of water already exceeds 2012 levels when the dam released, and a  jökulhlaup could happen at any time.

Jökulhlaup is the Icelandic name for a glacial outburst flood. According to the weather service,  it takes one to two days for water from Suicide Basin to affect levels in Mendenhall Lake.

A pressure sensor in the basin shows when it starts draining, but can’t predict the volume of water that may be released, or whether it will come as an outburst or slow release.

The U.S. Forest Service is warning kayakers, rafters and hikers to be smart on and around the lake, due to potential flooding.

Mendenhall Glacier Visitors Center naturalist Laurie Lamm says the glacier poses a danger at any time.

The face of the glacier is never a safe spot to be, because the glacier calves without warning. And if you’re close to the face of the glacier there are a couple different potential dangers. There’s the actual piece of ice falling on you, the ice popping up from underneath, or the wave that’s created by the ice. It’s not a safe spot to be,” Lamm says.

Commercial operators must file an annual operating and safety plan with the Forest Service that includes the distance their boats will stay from the glacier.

“There isn’t a Forest Service standard in our management plan that says you shall stay back X-amount of feet, so it’s recommendations,” says Natural Resource Specialist Jessica Schalkowski.

Four commercial companies are operating on the lake this year. Depending on the tour, Schalkowski says, the plans range from 300 feet to 600 feet from the face of the glacier, and 150 feet from ice bergs.

Alaska Travel Adventures offers a Mendenhall Lake trip from Skater’s Cabin beach to Nugget Falls. Adventures Tours Manager Niles Hansen says the  operating plan recommends the 15-passenger canoes stay 300 feet from the face of the glacier, but they remain about a thousand feet back.

“We’re allowed to go closer, but with our canoes we just don’t feel like it’s safe,” Hansen says.

Schalkowski says it’s the inexperienced, unguided boaters that cause concern.

“Be it somebody that has a kayak personally or has rented a kayak,” she says. “They’re not with a guide that can kind of direct them to stay back from some of those dangers or recognize some of those hazards.”

The general rule of thumb: The farther away you are from the face of the glacier or ice bergs, the safer you are.

The state ferry Columbia will not return to service until June 18^th, about seven weeks later than expected.

The ship has been out of service since September for a major overhaul, including new engines.

Now there’s a faulty oil pump in the port engine.

State transportation department spokesman Jeremy Woodrow says it could impact some Southeast Alaskans returning home from Celebration, the biennial dance and culture festival in Juneau.

“We’ve revised the schedules for the Fairweather, the LeConte and the Malaspina. And there are going to be some passengers that might want to try get home on Sunday that might not get home until Monday,” he says.

The Columbia went into dry dock at Vigor Shipyard in Portland on September 1, 2013. Work was supposed to be done by May 1. There have been a number of delays since and when the ferry couldn’t make a Wednesday sailing, the Marine Highway pushed the date to next week.

Woodrow says it was fairly easy to absorb Columbia traffic early in the season. With Celebration, it’s more of a juggle for Marine Highway schedulers.

“We revised the schedule around when we knew the Columbia was going to be late, so we could get folks to Juneau. Now we have to move the vessels around once again,” he says. “The ships are full end of this week and through the weekend. That’s why we made some schedule changes so we can get them all home.”     

Woodrow says the Columbia left the Portland shipyard last Friday. The oil pump problem happened in transit to Bellingham, Wash. He says a new oil pump is being shipped from Finland.

Ferry schedule changes can be found at the Alaska Marine Highway System website, or by calling local ferry reservation offices.

Two of greatest living scholars on Sitka’s Russian and Tlingit past were in Sitka last week to train National Park rangers on the historic battles that took place here. Park rangers give programs, of course, but sometimes they’ll interact with visitors for only a few minutes at a time. So the challenge is: How do you teach visitors about the culture in a way that will have impact – when the most commonly-asked question is “Where’s the bathroom?”

I’m on a bus tour. All the passengers are trained historical interpreters. And the tour guides are the leading scholars on the topic. They literally wrote the book.

Dick: One of the earliest recordings of the history is from Sally Hopkins. And her daughter asked Nora if she would transcribe and translate this…

Nora and Dick Dauenhauer are the author’s of Russians in Tlingit America – the definitive work on the battles of 1802 and 1804.

The bus stops in old Sitka. It’s just a patch of grass near the ferry terminal. But in 1802 it was where Tlingit warriors attacked the Russian fort.

Latanich: This is Dick and Nora is right there in the blue sweater.
Dick: Hello
Park ranger: I like your book!
Dick: Thank you.
Park ranger: I make all of my staff read it.
Dick: It’s a good one I’m glad it’s in there because my memory isn’t what it used to be so at least it’s all in there now.

The Dauenhauers are in town to advise Sitka park rangers how to reinterpret the history for transient cruise ship passengers who know nothing about it.

Nora is Tlingit and a native speaker of the language.

Nora: The way we got into this was I was teaching Tlingit in Juneau high school and I got this letter from a professor.

Dick was the professor, he admired her work. The rest is history.

Dick: We’ve been partners in scholarship for over 40 years and we had our 40th anniversary in November…

Somewhere along the line they got married.

Dick: Still doing business but slower than we used to be.

While their relationship was always solid. The making of Russians in Tlingit American was an on again off again kind of affair.

Dick: The first issue that came up to us in doing this book was who owns history.

Nora was asked to translate Tlingit oral histories recounting the battles. But then Native elders didn’t want to rehash the past, which put the book on hold. When the elders died the new generation wanted to know the history. Then the Soviet Union crumbled – freeing up access to Russian archives. It took decades of cultural and political change before they could complete the book.

Dick: So, these are difficult issues. I think it’s important to kind of be up front that this is living history that this is not just something that happened 200 years ago. People are very aware of that here.

Sitkans might be very aware of the history, but tourists from… Idaho? The challenge is getting visitors to care. I asked second season tour guide Janet Drake about her approach.

Forman: So much research, and so many different sources, a combination of written and oral history, and then you have to try and synthesize this for a group of tourists that…
Drake: know nothing about this place and..
Forman: How do you do that?
Drake: I know, that’s the challenge – finding those pieces that hit home for people.
Forman: What’s the most common question you get?
Drake: Where’s the bathroom? Hahaha! Just kidding… But actually that’s kind of serious.

Chief of Interpretation Becky Latanich is always thinking about how to make the history relatable.

Latanich: I think visitors have a hard time relating to this story. They come here and they don’t know anything about it and they think Sitka and they think totem poles. The battle is a little difficult for people because it’s not well know. It’s not Gettysburg. So do you have any suggestions for our staff about what themes you’ve encountered that people might be able to relate to?

Dick: Whoever controlled Sitka controlled the whole Northwest fur trade… If you got a flare for the dramatic you can reinterpret for the tourists… Imagine Katlian coming down, the Russians on the beach, and all of a sudden the Russians are behind them and here’s Katlian with his hammer because it’s easier to bash heads in than it is to pull a dagger out.

While engaging tourists is one thing, retelling the story in a way that’s respectful of the families that have a personal connection to the history is another. Some parts of this history are so sensitive that the Dauenhauers were actually asked to omit some of the detail. And they did because that’s the respectful thing to do.

Dick: And that’s of course the challenge of ethnohistory you are dealing with the families, family memories, and family traditions.

The idea that family history is complicated? Most people, even out of town visitors, can relate to that.