Tourism

Nearly half a million cruise ship tourists visited the Mendenhall Glacier last year.

John Neary is director of the glacier’s visitor center, run by the U.S. Forest Service. He’s trying to figure out how to maximize enjoyment of the glacier as both a National Forest destination for tourists and a city park for locals.

Neary says part of that involves informing people about climate change and its effect on the glacier.

“How can we give people a message about sustainability? How can we motivate the community and others to step forward and say this looks like a great opportunity to affect half a million people a year with a very proactive message about, ‘What can I do to help climate change?’” he says.

Neary wants to start creating a master plan for the Mendenhall Glacier and its visitor center. He’s speaking at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center at 7 p.m. tonight about “Changes Coming to Your Backyard Glacier.” He says it’s an opportunity for people to say what they want the visitor center and surrounding area to look like in the next couple of decades. Community input in the plan is critical, including from local residents who participate in tourism, like bus and taxi drivers.

“I would hope that the industry leaders, the company owners would come out to the table. I would hope that the agency representatives that represent the bears or the salmon or the birds or all the wildlife that has no voice – I would hope they would come to the table to advocate for those resources,” Neary says.

Each year, 465,000 cruise ship visitors are allowed to visit the glacier, a limit imposed by the Forest Service. Permitted tour companies are each allocated a certain portion of that total.

Neary says the tourism industry would like to bring more visitors, but there are limitations, including current infrastructure and complying with environmental regulations.

“Until we have better traffic flow and better parking and better restrooms, more stalls – until we have those things in place, we can’t just offer more, more, more. We’re saying it’s a community response we need to this and we don’t have the funding, so we have to come up with other solutions,” Neary says.

Meanwhile, the public can expect to see a change at Mendenhall Glacier as early as this summer. Neary says, for the tourist season, temporary rubber speed bumps will be placed on the last half mile of road leading to the glacier.

New U.S. Forest Service Juneau District Ranger Brad Orr has traded the Rocky Mountains and dry grasslands of north central Colorado for the rainforest and glaciers of Southeast Alaska.

The Juneau Ranger District covers 3.5 million acres of the Tongass National Forest, making it the largest district in the United States and a popular destination for tourists.

As the man in charge of all that land, Orr brings with him a wealth of recreation management experience. You could say he was born to do the job.

“My father was a park ranger, so I grew up in the national parks. So it was sort of in the blood,” says Orr, who took over as district ranger in late February. “I’ve always had a real interest in natural resource management and getting people connected back with nature.”

A district ranger oversees all programs and projects within an area of a national forest. In Juneau that includes public cabins, trails and campgrounds, as well as private enterprises like mining, logging and heli-skiing.

Orr, 59, has spent 34 years with the Forest Service, including the past 11 managing recreation programs at the Sulphur Ranger District in Colorado’s Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest. That district includes a national recreation area, hundreds of miles of trails, 15 campgrounds, and a major ski area within two hours of Denver.

“There are some similarities: A huge recreation workload here, as was the case on my previous district,” says Orr. “We also managed the national recreation area, which had recreation fees, just like the Mendenhall Glacier does. So I have a lot of experience implementing a recreation fee program.”

While most of his experience is in recreation, Orr also did firefighting and timber management early in his career. He has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Northern Arizona University and a master’s in forestry from Oregon State University.

He says a lot of the job is balancing competing interests.

“People want to use their national forests either for leisure activities or they are seeking to harvest resources from them,” he says. “So it’s always a challenge trying to balance those competing needs.”

He says federal budget cuts have been a challenge in recent years. A few projects he was working on in Colorado were delayed by last year’s federal government shutdown. But for the most part, Orr says, budgets do not affect the actual work.

“Being a federal agency we’re always subject to political movements one way or the other,” he says. “But in my experience, and of course I’ve worked at the lower levels you might say of the organization, we pretty much carry on.”

Jennifer Berger manages wilderness and special uses at the Juneau Ranger District. She’s only worked with Orr for three weeks, but calls him thoughtful, articulate and focused.

She says his recreation experience will be put to good use during the summer, when Juneau sees almost a million tourists.

“Since he’s been here, you know, we can see him engaging with stakeholders, whether that’s our neighbors, our locals that live right here, or folks who work with visitors all summer long,” says Berger.

Orr takes over for Marti Marshall, who retired in January.

He and his wife Marilyn have a son and a daughter in college in Colorado. His wife worked for the Forest Service in Sitka and Hoonah in the mid 1980s and he says she’s excited to move back to Southeast Alaska.

A public reception to welcome Orr to Juneau is Thursday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m., at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center.

The IRS has given a sliver of ground in how it has applied tax rules to air taxi flights. Sen. Mark Begich is calling it a win for small air carriers, but Joy Journeay, executive director of the Alaska Air Carriers Association, says the concession is less than it appears.

“It is not clear at this time that it is going to help anyone,” she said.

The association has said the rules were unclear on when a small plane operator has to collect federal excise taxes from passengers. Several air taxi businesses say they didn’t know they were supposed to collect the money until they were audited and hit with tax bills that, in some cases, exceeded a million dollars.  The IRS last week wrote a letter to Begich saying it will refund any excise tax air services paid for day tours. The IRS letter doesn’t say whether it will also refund the penalties and interest audited businesses had to pay, and an IRS spokesman said the agency didn’t want to talk about its decision. But the letter says the agency is only lifting the tax retroactively. Next month it will apparently revert to its previous interpretation of the rules, which Journeay called baffling.

“The letter issued to Sen. Begich from the IRS doesn’t clear up any of the ambiguous language in the regulations or address any of the items that the Alaska Air Carriers have asked them to address for multiple years,” she said.

The IRS has previously said whether the tax applies to a day trip depends in part on the purpose of the trip. If the passengers deplane to see a glacier or watch bears, the air service doesn’t have to collect the tax, but if they land to fish, that might be taxable, if the pilots fly to the same places with some degree of regularity. The way the agency has defined regularity has also exasperated air carriers.

Journeay says as she reads the letter, the refund only applies to carriers that already paid the tax. For years, even attorneys and tax accountants advised air carriers the excise tax didn’t apply to their small planes, Journeay says. She notes small carriers would still pay a tax to the federal government in the fuel they buy.

You may have seen pictures of the Mendenhall Glacier ice cave flooding social media over the last few weeks. National news websites have even recirculated pictures of Juneau residents standing in awe inside the blue-tinted ice walls or looking up into daylight through a giant vertical shaft in the back of the cave.

But is it a safe place?

Laurie Craig, a naturalist at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitors Center, has this advice for people embarking on the mile-and-a-half hike on the frozen Mendenhall Lake out to the cave:

Just for people to be really cautious, be safe, (and) be prepared.”

The ice cave is located near the western terminus of Mendenhall Glacier. While the Forest Service is not encouraging people to visit the cave, it’s not prohibiting access either.  In case of an emergency, it will be Capital City Fire/Rescue – not the Forest Service – that will arrive on scene and try finding a victim in distress in the vast expanse of the glacial area.

It’s kind of thing that people need to be aware of, particularly those folks taking a lots of children out. Keep the children with you, be prepared for rescuing yourself because it’s very difficult for anybody else to get out there.”

Signs are posted warning visitors of the dangers of the glacier and lake ice, part of which she calls a dynamic environment.

Jason Amundson is associate professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Southeast and has researched tidewater glaciers and glacier ocean interactions. He said the cave was likely formed by a stream coming down off of Mount McGinnis.

The water is carrying heat with it and that heats goes to melting the ice. As it’s gotten bigger in the summer, there’s water running into that ice cave, but there’s also warm air that can make its way into the ice beneath the glacier.”

Another stream on the glacier surface found a fissure or crack and, over time, created the giant circular shaft or moulin that allows daylight into the far, accessible end of the cave. Amundson said it’s a fairly common feature on glaciers.

You get water running over the surface of the glacier and it drops into a crevasse. Water is more dense than ice and it wants to move downward, and so it basically drills a hole through the glacier. That’s probably just something that formed at the surface. It could’ve been there for a long time and maybe – as the glacier has moved down-valley – it’s now just right in the same spot as where that ice cave is.”

Amundson said different layers of the glacier may flow at different rates. It’s the same for the center versus the edges where friction with the ground and surrounding hills can slow the ice movement.

UAS environmental science associate professor Eran Hood believes the ice in that area may be over 200 years old.

You can see in the walls there’s a lot of subglacial sediment that’s been entrained. Some areas of the ice looks actually quite dark because there’s a lot of the sediment in there which the glacier has just picked up.”

Visitors to the glacier can be deceived by the apparent stillness and sublime beauty of the area.

The Mendenhall calves all the time, even in the winter. Craig said the five-story high, snow-covered blocks of blue ice near the western edge broke off about a week ago. Calving events can cause lake ice to undulate or even shatter over large areas.

Someone who was skiing on the lake when that happened on Thursday afternoon, he said he could feel the ripple as it rolled across the lake.”

Landslides off Mount Bullard near the eastern edge of the glacier and the slow, constant movement of the glacier could mean perpetually thin and unstable lake ice at the terminus.

Underwater currents can also erode the underside of ice-locked icebergs, causing them to unexpectedly flip or roll with a change in the center of gravity.

Laurie Craig said she will never cross the lake ice.

There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen, but you can always hear creaking and groaning because it’s continuously moving down the slope, even in the winter time. If you get a look at the terminus, you’ll see that’s just a huge jumble of great big icebergs and they’ll stay there until the lake ice thaws. But it’s indication of how much ice is falling off all the time. So, any place that people congregate, it should hopefully be on land.”

While the interior of the ice cave is located on land and several dozen feet under the glacier, the overhead ice at the entrance may only be a few feet or even several inches thick.

Eran Hood said he escorted a National Geographic photographer to the back of the cave two years ago, but he won’t take his child there.

The one dangerous place, in my view anyway, is near the entrance to the cave where you have some overhanging ice that’s pretty thin and you can actually have blocks breaking off there. I just didn’t feel like taking my five year old daughter back through there and feeling like something could fall down on us.”

Hood said the ice that’s deep inside the cave may be relatively solid, but there is always a risk of collapse.

Below is a video from Firefight Films which appears to include drone shots of the Mendenhall Glacier ice cave that were filmed during the summer. Near the end of the video is a shot that seems to show the apparent thickness, or lack thereof, of the roof ice at the cave entrance.

The City and Borough of Juneau has lost its appeal of a decision allowing the new Petersburg Borough to operate with expanded northern territory along the mainland.

The decision was issued Friday by Juneau Superior Court Judge Louis Menendez and it essentially means that the area from the middle of Holkham Bay down to Cape Fanshaw will remain under the jurisdiction of Petersburg.

The CBJ argued the Local Boundary Commission did not properly consider evidence submitted by Juneau officials. They also argued the contested area was more closely associated with Juneau.

Petersburg officials claimed stronger ties to the area and argued that Juneau’s evidence was actually considered when the LBC took up their borough incorporation petition.

As both Juneau and Petersburg submitted separate petitions for overlapping land annexations, Judge Menendez also wrote that there was no requirement for the LBC to compare both communities’ interests and connections to the contested area.

Juneau City Attorney Amy Mead said they can still appeal the decision to the Alaska Supreme Court. But that won’t be her call.

“I think that there were some significant legal problems with the analysis,” Mead said. “But I really feel I need to apprise the (CBJ) Assembly of that before I am more specific.”

Petersburg officials also warned that invalidating the current voter-approved boundaries would create chaos with dissolution of their municipality and a possible restart of the borough incorporation process.

Petersburg Mayor Mark Jensen was boarding an Alaska Airlines flight Tuesday morning to take him right past the contested lands on his way to Juneau for the regional high school basketball tournament. Jensen was happy about the ruling.

“Well, I think that’s great,” Jensen said. “We’ve been going through the transition period already and spending some of the money the state has supplied us. Hopefully, there’s not an appeal by the Juneau borough and it’ll just stand and we’ll move forward.”

Petersburg dissolved its city government and became a borough government after voters approved the change in late 2012.

Juneau Mayor Merrill Sanford did not return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. Bruce Botelho, who was mayor when Juneau’s annexation petition was filed, declined to comment until he had a chance to review the judge’s decision.

Oral arguments on the appeal of the LBC decision approving the Petersburg boundaries were held in Juneau Superior Court on Sept. 4, 2013.

Related stories:

Juneau-Petersburg boundary dispute argued in court

Juneau appeals Local Boundary Commission’s Petersburg borough decision

Boundary commission postpones Juneau’s annexation petition

The ongoing dispute between the Alaska Commercial Fishermen’s Memorial and the City and Borough of Juneau continued in court on Monday.

Juneau Superior Court Judge Louis Menendez heard arguments over whether to block the city from moving forward with a massive cruise ship dock project in front of the memorial.

Bruce Weyhrauch, an attorney and president of the Fishermen’s Memorial board of directors, argued the city should be barred from hiring a contractor or paying money for the two floating berths until the State of Alaska completes the transfer of submerged tidelands to the municipality. The Juneau Assembly last month approved a nearly $54 million contract award to Seattle-based Manson Construction.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources in January approved the land transfer, but the Fishermen’s Memorial appealed. The decision was automatically put on hold pending a ruling from DNR Commissioner Joe Balash.

Weyhrauch said a massive dock in front of the memorial would permanently and negatively alter the annual Blessing of the Fleet.

Assistant City Attorney Christopher Orman argued the memorial does not have standing to try to block the project. Orman said the city does not believe the docks will cause irreparable harm to the memorial.

Menendez said he would issue a decision soon. The judge previously denied a motion from the Fishermen’s Memorial to immediately stop work on the project.