Outdoors

Twenty young activists from around the state gathered in Juneau this week for the 12th annual Civics and Conservation Summit, sponsored by Alaska Youth for Environmental Action.

The week-long conference teaches teens about the legislative process and how to talk to lawmakers about their issues.

KTOO’s Casey Kelly has more.

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Fresh king salmon on the grill is one way to get legislators to your event in Juneau. Not that the Alaska Youth for Environmental Action needed much help at a reception across the street from the capitol building on Thursday. The young conservationists – ages 13 to 18 – spent most of the week meeting with lawmakers to promote AYEA’s legislative agenda.

Emily Brease is an 18-year-old senior at Tri-Valley School in Healy. This is her second year attending the Civics and Conservation Summit.

“Last year was just life changing,” says Brease. “You just don’t realize how much of a difference you can really make, how much you can really be involved in the process, and how much it means to the representatives when you come and you sit down and you talk about the issues you care about .”

Early in the week, the teens split into groups and choose the bills they want to urge lawmakers to support. Brease’s group worked on legislation that would ban certain chemicals from being used as fire retardants in household products sold in Alaska. The chemicals are known as PBDEs.

“Polybrominated diphenylethers, so it’s a mouthful,” Brease says. “It was chosen, because I think a lot of people don’t know about it and it’s these toxic flame retardants are used in everything – your electronics, your furniture, your upholstery – and they are shown to have medical effects. Thyroid, reproductive, and possibly carcinogenic.”

Fourteen-year-old Barrow High School freshman Jonathan Nelson worked with his group to promote a bill that would require legislative approval for large scale sulfide mining activity in the Bristol Bay watershed. It’s an attempt to slow down or stall the controversial Pebble Mine project. Bristol Bay is a long way from Barrow, but Nelson says the mine’s affects could be felt around the state.

“A person from, like, New York hears that a fish in Alaska got mercury in it. He’s not going to say it’s only Bristol Bay – he’s going to say Alaska,” Nelson says. “And, that’s going to basically tarnish the whole entire salmon name in Alaska.”

For Nelson, attending his first Civics and Conservation Summit included an important lesson about the realities of the legislative process.

“The only sponsor for my bill – SB 152 – is Hollis French, Senator French,” he says. “We went and talked to him. He knew that the bill wasn’t going to pass.”

Senator French says that’s just the way it goes sometimes in Juneau.

“You know, we may have had a frank conversation about it, and it’s probably not going to pass,” French says with a laugh. “But it’s an important conversation starter. It’s important for them to know that they have people in the building who are willing to advance ideas that may not always get there. But you have to have the dialog, you have to have the debate, and so I’m proud to be a part of that.”

French, along with Senators Bill Wielechowski and Gary Stevens were honored as AYEA’s Legislators of the Year on Thursday.

Wielechowski, who sponsored the bill banning PBDEs, says he was impressed by the students’ knowledge of the issue.

“They knew what they were talking about. They had done a lot of research,” Wielechowski says. “They asked me some very pointed questions about it, which showed they really had been studying it.”

Wielechowski’s bill is currently in the Senate Rules Committee, usually the last stop before legislation goes to the full Senate for a vote.

Senator Stevens was honored for working to re-establish the Alaska Coastal Management Program. That legislation is currently working its way through the House.

Other bills supported by AYEA this session include Senate Bill 3, which would provide state matching funds for the federal school meals program, and House Bill 100, which would ban genetically modified fish in Alaska.

The U.S. Forest Service is warning Juneau residents not to cut their own firewood from trees removed as part of a state project to widen Glacier Highway out the road.

“That stretch of road obviously is being worked on. So, there’s machinery, there’s state workers, there’s contractors out there, they’re all working on it. So, it’s busy,” says USFS Forestry Technician Chris Budke. “And then we’re worried about people parking in the middle of the road. Because the whole reason the state is working on it is to make it safer, and right now it’s incredibly narrow. So, if you’re pulling off in your pickup truck, which there really isn’t anyplace to pull off, you know, you’re in the road.”

The four-mile section of highway, just past the Eagle Beach State Recreation Area, is being widened from 20-feet across to 26-feet. The project will also straiten some curves and make surface and drainage improvements.

Budke says the Department of Transportation’s contractor will make cut logs available for firewood later this spring by permit.

A recent avalanche along the Snettisham hydroelectric transmission line met its match when it hit a 35-foot steel diversion structure, saving the tower it was headed toward.

Alaska Electric Light and Power built the structure in 2009, a year after a giant snow slide took out tower 4-6 and forced the company to generate Juneau electricity with expensive diesel fuel for several weeks.

Since then a vulnerable tower was removed, break-away links were installed on some towers, the steel wedge was built, and avalanche forecasters regularly control snow along the 43-mile Snettisham line.

Forecaster Mike Janes says smaller slides were brought down last week before he discovered the natural release the morning of March 9th.

“It started from the same exact place that the slides in April of 2008 did, and it’s about 2,500 feet in elevation. It’s tough to say with these slides how far they would run, but they ran mostly the full-path width and when I say that I mean the new path, because the 2008 slide created a larger path,” he says. With this slide, “one finger ran full-path width into the woods and the other one, the main path, went all the way to the ocean.”

He says wet snow rose more than half way up the wedged-shaped structure, and there was no apparent damage.

“All the guy wires are intact, none of the steel looks to be bent,” Janes says. “I can only visually see on the outside half the wedge because it (was) buried about half way up, but on the back side where’s less snow, I can’t see any bowing or anything like that, so it appears to be in good shape.”

Janes classifies last week’s slide as medium to large, with the potential to occur every 30 years. He says it ran on a crust overlaid by weak sugar snow, which formed in early February. He calls the weakness in the snowpack a “persistent weak layer,” because it can stay buried for some time before it’s triggered – in this case by heavy loading.

Three-hundred forty-three inches of snow have fallen so far this winter at the Snettisham power house. Janes says more avalanche control work has been done along the transmission line than any previous winter.

Snettisham supplies more than 70 percent of A-E-L & P’s power. The company plans to build two more diversion structures along the line this summer.

Master Gardener Ed Buyarski gets us started on the upcoming gardening season.

A second victim of Tuesday’s avalanche that hit a group of six back country skiers near Haines has died.

Twenty-six year old Nickolay Dodov, of Truckee, California, was taken off life support this afternoon (Wednesday) at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Dodov was one of two people caught in the Takhine Ridge avalanche, about 20 miles northwest of Haines. The skiers – who had accessed the area by helicopter – called the snowslide “massive.”

Their guide, 35-year-old Rob Liberman, of Telluride, Colorado, died Tuesday. Both men were recovered by other skiers and snowboarders using avalanche beacons.

One person is dead after an avalanche struck a party of six skiers outside of Haines on Tuesday.

The avalanche was reported shortly after 11 a.m. Two of the skiers were apparently buried in the snow.

Tara Bicknell has this Wednesday morning update from Haines.

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35-year-old Rob Liberman of Telluride, Colorado, was guiding a group of five skiers for Chilkat Valley company Alaska Heli-Ski when the avalanche occurred. It buried him and 26-year old Nickolai Dodov of Trukee, California.

Liberman is confirmed dead and Dodov was on life support at the Haines clinic Tuesday afternoon, awaiting transport to Harborview hospital in Seattle.

The avalanche occurred on Takhin Ridge, about 20 air miles northwest of Haines, and near a helipad used by skiers at mile 33 on the Haines Highway. One of the two men, who were buried about seven feet under the fallen snow, was skiing as a client with one of the area’s heliski companies. The other, was skiing as a guide.

“They were able to get them out of the snow and one was transported back to 33 mile, the other was transported to the Haines Clinic, and we have one confirmed fatality,” Alaska State Trooper Josh Bentz says.

The remaining ski party located the two missing men using avalanche beacon equipment. Other organizations, including the heli-ski company, skiers in the area, local fire departments, Troopers, and State Parks, helped transport the two men.

The surviving victim is being transported to Seattle. No other injuries were reported in the accident and all skiers are accounted for.

According to the Alaska Avalanche Information Center, Alaska has had the second highest number of avalanche fatalities since 1950, behind Colorado.

Tuesday evening story:

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