Outdoors

An Alaska hunting guide is spending six months in an Oregon prison for illegally selling big-game guiding services as well as multiple other violations over a five-year period.

Stephen Jeremy Hicks, a 45-year-old Anchorage resident, was sentenced in U.S. District Court last month.

The prison time was part of a plea deal in which Hicks admitted he guided hunters onto federal lands on a sheep hunt near Max Lake on the west side of Cook Inlet in 2018 without a permit. Along with prison time, he agreed to forfeit a Piper PA-18 Super Cub and pay $13,460 in restitution.

Hicks’ attorney, Kevin Fitzgerald, said his client started serving his prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon, in late July.

It’s fairly unusual for an Alaskan guide to get a prison sentence for violating wildlife laws.

But in this case, federal prosecutors say, Hicks participated in a “multi-year wildlife crime spree” from 2015 until 2019 that triggered the need for a harsh penalty, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo earlier this year.

Many of the infractions he was accused of occurred while Hicks’ guiding license was on probation or revoked.

State officials put his license on probation in 2016 for failing to provide clients contracts before providing services and failing to maintain safe and satisfactory field conditions, according to the sentencing memo.

The license was permanently revoked in March 2019 by a state administrative law judge following complaints raised by a “thoroughly miserable” hunting trip in October 2017, as the judge wrote in that case.

Last month’s federal sentencing focused on the 2018 Max Lake incident, but prosecutors during the sentencing phase referenced numerous other state-level charges against Hicks.

The state’s accusations spanned a five-year period and included charges of wasting moose meat, not accompanying clients, killing bears using bait to lure them, and making use of a plane and electronic communications to spot big game.

State attorneys dismissed those charges this month after the federal sentence was handed down, according to Ron Dupois, an attorney with the Office of Special Prosecutions. That’s because the federal sentence made use of the state charges for what’s called relevant conduct, Dupois said.

Chief U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason took the state charges into consideration in her sentencing decision and awarded half the restitution to the state.

The federal sentence satisfied the state’s sentencing goals, Dupois said. Hicks “had no plane, he had no guide’s license, he went to jail for six months.”

Gleason during last month’s sentencing hearing in federal court referenced the lack of investigative resources for wildlife protection, the fact that Hicks profited from his crimes, and the trust placed in big game guides by the state of Alaska, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage.

The judge said “the need for prison is to make clear that blatant disregard for state and federal fish and wildlife rules will not be tolerated.”

The 2017 hunt that led to Hicks’ license revocation took place in the Cape Yakataga area between Cordova and Yakutat along the rugged northern Gulf of Alaska coast.

Several of the clients on that hunt told investigators they endured a rain-soaked trip involving a filthy cabin with a flooded woodstove, rotting food and rodent feces, and Hicks didn’t show up for several days, leaving them to fend for themselves and clean up the mess, according to a 36-page decision document.

A brown bear one client killed himself on the beach was the only animal successfully harvested on the trip, according to the decision document. Another man shot and injured a goat on a hunt with Hicks’ assistant guide. The guide, who led his client into difficult terrain for the hunt, said a steep ravine where the animal ended up was too dangerous to retrieve it and “shot the goat ‘to put it out of its misery.’”

Judge Cheryl Mandala in 2019 found Hicks “failed to provide clients with minimally adequate shelter, encouraged clients to engage in multiple violations of state hunting laws, and improperly engaged in same-day airborne hunting” — all while on probation, she wrote in the decision to revoke the license.

The practice of guiding others without a license can be legal under what are called “buddy hunts,” where people involved agree to share the costs but there’s no official guide.

Federal prosecutors, however, catalogued a number of instances where it appeared Hicks was paid for services, drew up contracts and accompanied hunters in the field after his license was revoked.

Once out of prison, Hicks will remain under supervised release for three years. During that time, he isn’t allowed to fly private aircraft or engage in any commercial hunting activity in any capacity.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

After garlic is harvested, it can be cured by hanging in a warm, dry place with good air circulation for a few weeks.

Master gardener Ed Buyarski says that he has garlic hanging in his greenhouses, his furnace room and his garage.

“In fact, last week I bought a dehumidifier to go in my garage underneath the garlic, and I’m emptying it twice a day.” Buyarksi says. “So I’m hoping that it will dry it better so it keeps better.”

Some of the garlic has been set aside to be eaten fresh rather than preserved. They show signs of the fungus disease botrytis. Buyarski recommends keeping them separate from unaffected garlic plants and giving them a quick rinse in a 10% bleach solution.

“We’ll eat them, friends will eat them. But we will not use that for the replanting later on in late September and October.”

A couple of days of air-drying is all that’s needed to preserve garden herbs, too, such as the oregano Buyarski grows in his greenhouse.

“Dry it just on cookie sheets in the open. I don’t bother to put it in a dehydrator.” he recommends. “Because if you heat it then you lose some of the volatile oils.”

Buyarski has even experimented with drying garlic leaves.

“That was quite a failure, that was in a dehydrator,” he says. “Made the house smell wonderful. But the next morning when we went to taste the dried crunchy garlic leaves, there was no flavor left.”

For other herbs that lose flavor when dried, like basil and chives, or are too tender for the drying process, Buyarski suggests freezing them in a baggie or even in ice cubes.

Juneau is scheduled to get soaked this weekend. The National Weather Service office says they expect the area to get 2.5 inches of rain on average across the Juneau area, so they’re calling for 1 to 3 inches.

“One part of town might get the 1 inch and another part of town might get the 3 inches,” said forecaster Nicole Ferrin. “That’s pretty standard to see a variety across the area.”

The system will come in two waves. Heavy rain will fall Friday night, but then there should be a break with lighter rain early on Saturday morning before picking up again on Saturday afternoon.

The storm is expected to move out on Saturday night.

But that doesn’t mean the forecast for the Ironman Alaska race on Sunday will be high and dry. The forecast is for off-and-on showers, with the heaviest showers coming in the morning.

“We often see some breaks form over Lynn Canal,” said Ferrin. “So perhaps the end of the road could see some sunny breaks in the afternoon, moreso than, say, the back of the valley.”

This weekend’s rain event is the result of an atmospheric river — a long, fat column of moisture aloft that looks a lot like a river in satellite imagery. It hitches a ride on the jet stream, which directs it right at Southeast Alaska.

Local rivers and streams will rise with the heavy rain, but Ferrin says we’re fortunate that we had a break from the rain for a few days ahead of this storm.

“A lot of our rivers and lakes were able to fall over the past two days,” she said.

Most of the time when Juneau sees flooding, the days before are really wet and the ground is already saturated. So, Ferrin says rivers could approach bank-full this weekend but aren’t likely to flood.

Temperatures will be in the mid to upper 50s on Saturday and Sunday. By Tuesday, Juneau might see some sun again.

The 100 miles of canoe trails on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge are something of a well-kept secret — a hidden-from-view network of interconnected rivers and lakes that together make up the expansive Swanson River and Swan Lake canoe systems.

Dave Atcheson has been exploring and paddling those trails for the last 30 years.

“It’s one of my favorite places,” he said. “And it’s really underutilized, too.”

The Sterling author and fly-fishing instructor just published a guidebook that chronicles that system so others can also enjoy it. The book is called “Canoeing Yaghanen: A Guide to Kenai National Wildlife Refuge’s Swan Lake and Swanson River Canoe Systems.” It’s published by Alaska Geographic.

The two canoe routes were established back when the refuge was the Moose Range, in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the system includes two rivers and 70 lakes, stretching deep into protected refuge lands on the central peninsula.

Atcheson said he finds the quietude of those trails comforting. He grew up canoeing in the Adirondacks in New York and has been exploring and paddling the Kenai refuge’s trails since he arrived in Alaska.

But he said the breadth of the trails can be intimidating to newcomers. At the moment, there’s no other comprehensive guidebook for the trails.

Leah Eskelin, lead park ranger and visitor center manager with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, said the only other book on the system is now out of print.

“To not have an in-print guide — that especially a new visitor or member of the public here in the refuge can put in their hands and take out and use as kind of a whisper in their ear about best places to check out while they’re out in the canoe system — that’s hard for someone like myself, who really wants to make sure that everyone has the best experience while they’re here at the refuge,” she said.

For Atcheson’s research, he went back out onto the trails last summer, working out ways to explain the routes he’s been paddling for so long.

“I spent a lot of time out there revisiting places I hadn’t been in a while, which was really fun,” he said.

The Dena’ina word in the book’s title, “Yaghanen,” means “the good land,” referring to the Dena’ina homelands of the Cook Inlet region. Atcheson said he wanted to pay homage to the people who have used those rivers and lakes for generations.

The book is filled with maps and visuals from Kathy Lepley of Galaxy Graphics. It’s waterproof, for in-the-field use, and includes pages on packrafting, a guide on what to bring on a trip and information about traveling the trails in the winter.

“I love crust skiing out there in April when the snow compacts and it’s crusty, because you can go anywhere,” Atcheson said. “You can just go places you can’t go in the summer.”

When it comes to writing about the natural world, he said there’s always a give and take.

On one hand, he said it’s tempting to not draw too much attention to places like these trail systems that don’t get a whole lot of traffic.

“But I think the more people who get out and utilize these things and get out in the natural world, the more apt they are to protect it and take care of it. Which we need big time,” he said.

Andrew Simmonds walked out onto Petersburg’s Sandy Beach at 8:00 a.m. on July 30. He wore a hooded wetsuit, gloves, booties, goggles and a fluorescent green swim cap. He had a diving knife and a waterproof radio strapped to him.

He was about to try to swim across Frederick Sound — almost six miles from Sandy Beach to the mainland.

“There’s no good reason for me to do this. This is a bunch of nonsense,” Andrew Simmonds said. “But this is what one does when one has nothing else going on in their life. It’s pretty simple. They do things like this.”

He didn’t know how far his body temperature would drop over several hours in 51-degree water — or which way the currents were going. The farthest he’d ever swum before was two miles in a pool.

And he’s 60 years old.

“If I was married, do you think I’d be out here doing this?” he asked.

He waded out into a thick fog and started up a slow, steady stroke.

Simmonds is a physical therapist at the Petersburg Medical Center. He’s originally from New York and says he spent the first 55 years of his life within a 100 mile radius.

When his son went to college, Simmonds joined the Peace Corps and began to travel — South Sudan, Haiti, then Sitka and Hawaii.

He swam in the big waves in Hawaii and liked it, so when he came to Petersburg in November 2021 he started training in the pool to improve his freestyle stroke.  A few months later, he got the idea to swim across Frederick Sound.

Josef Quitslund agreed to spot him in a boat. “I thought he was crazy,” Quitslund says, “but I knew that he could do it.”

When they started crossing the Sound, everything went smoothly. It was flat and calm. They could hear each other well. Around halfway across, Simmonds started thinking that maybe this would be a piece of cake.

But by about six hours in Simmonds, who weighs about 155 lbs, was getting seriously cold.

“Once we got into the iceberg area,” Simmonds says, “I bumped into a piece of ice, which freaked me out a little bit because I thought it was a marine mammal coming to eat me.”

They had reached just northeast of the McDonald Islands, and chunks of the LeConte Glacier were floating by. Simmonds swam harder to warm himself up. He could tell he was losing function and mental clarity.

A strong offshore surface current was pushing against him. On the boat, the GPS showed they were in fact moving backwards. But the shore was less than three quarters of a mile away. Simmonds didn’t want to stop.

“I was pulling harder at that point than the whole time over,” he says. “I was kicking harder, pulling harder and going — nowhere.”

Finally, after seven and a half hours in the ocean, he decided to climb up the ladder onto the boat while he still could.

“He was at the point where he really needed to come out, but he was still coherent,” Quitslund said. “And you know, he was under his own power.”

Simmonds drank some hot cocoa, and when he got home he celebrated by listening to some hard rock. He says he feels like a million bucks.

“The target wasn’t hit, but it was a success,” he said. “I faced the demon, I faced the dragon.”

Simmonds is already planning his next attempt, deconstructing the factors to determine what to adjust. He has no interest in trying a shorter or easier route.

Three hikers were rescued from a popular trail on the north side of Ketchikan on Tuesday.

Jerry Kiffer of the Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad says it happened on a trail above Settlers Cove State Recreation Site. He says state troopers got a call about three overdue hikers around 11 p.m.

The caller said the 35-year-old man was new to the area and had gone for a hike with his two small children, ages 4 and 6.

“This would be his first hike out with the kids, and they were fairly lightly dressed — not really prepared for a day hike, no real supplies, no lights other than what’s on their cell phone,” Kiffer said by phone Tuesday afternoon.

He says a rescue squad team found the man and his kids about two miles up the Lunch Creek Trail just after midnight. He says they were cold and wet but otherwise OK. Rescuers carried the children back to the trailhead, arriving before sunrise Tuesday.

Kiffer says the hikers didn’t mean to attempt the difficult five-mile out-and-back trail — he says they meant to hike the nearby Lunch Falls Trail, which is a half-mile loop.

And they’re not the first people to end up on the wrong path. Kiffer says others who have required search and rescue in the area have made the same mistake.

“They’re under the impression by either the signage, or the way the trail system is laid out that the trail that you can access at the end of the road — at the end of North Tongass Highway — is the actual loop trail that they’re thinking will bring them back down into Settlers Cove Park,” he said. “When in reality … you would enter the loop trail if you went left and went down towards the water. Most people, though, they’re going right, they’re going up on the Lunch Creek Trail.”

In March 2020, a five-year-old boy was found dead on the Lunch Creek Trail after he and his mother reportedly lost their way in the snow. Kiffer says warmer temperatures during Tuesday’s rescue helped prevent dire consequences.

Kiffer says it’s a good idea to bring a flashlight, warm and dry clothes, some way to start a fire, and a GPS beacon when venturing out into the wilderness. It’s also a good practice to let someone know where you plan to hike and when you’ll return.

The Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad loans out locator beacons for free at the Ketchikan Public Library, the Ketchikan Visitors Bureau and the local Alaska State Troopers post.

It’s the second backcountry rescue in the Ketchikan area in less than a week. On July 27, searchers located two hikers who had lost their way on a popular traverse. The pair was unharmed.