Sports

Jet skis, water skis and wake boards would not be allowed on Juneau’s Auke Lake, under a proposal to limit watercraft to 10 horsepower on the small lake.

The draft Auke Lake Management Plan also recommends towing restrictions.

The proposal was released Tuesday night  to the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, or PRAC.

After a Juneau teenager died from injuries in an accident on the lake last summer, the city began a review of ordinances regulating lake uses. Testimony from a series of public meetings, written comments, and other research form the basis of the draft plan, which was written by city parks and recreation department staff.

Director Brent Fischer said the U.S. Interior Department’s Water and Land Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, or WALROS, also was used to determine the carrying capacity – the number of vessels that can reasonably and safely use the lake.  Only 70 acres of the 165-acre Auke Lake are considered useable.

“The existing 16-foot length limit for motorized vessels should be replaced with a 10-horsepower limit,” Fischer said. “Due to the relatively small size of Auke Lake and its limited carrying capacity, the use of multiple high speed vessels is just not appropriate. Speed limits and wake restrictions are virtually impossible to enforce.  A horsepower limit provides a practical means of controlling vessel speeds. This will result in few user conflicts and allow more vessels to safely use the lake.”

The 10-horsepower restriction would not apply to aircraft taxiing on the lake.

The proposal also calls for the city to replace current buoys that delineate restricted areas with markers that comply with state regulations.  New maps and signs would go up, clearly explaining lake use, and regulations would be enforced by a CBJ park  ranger. The draft plan also maintains the existing no-wake zone and operating area, and a ban on refueling.

Fischer acknowledged the difficulty of including all Auke Lake user groups in the management plan.

“It is true that Auke Lake is one of only navigable lakes on the Juneau road system. However, the lack of other options does not change how it should be managed,” Fischer said. “Auke Lake cannot be all things to all users and must be actively managed to best achieve the management objectives developed by the community at large.”  

Only a handful of people came to the meeting and some didn’t stay once they heard that public comments would not be taken.

Commercial fisherman Aaron Woodrow had hoped to testify Tuesday night.  Before the meeting, he said he was teaching his 10-year-old daughter to waterski on the lake the day of the accident that killed Savannah Cayce. He was flagged down by a jet ski to help.

Woodrow said education is key to preventing accidents on the lake.

“There needs to be some guidelines of how to safely tow someone around the lake.  Myself and my friends have always followed some guidelines of towing around the perimeter, you know in straight lines. You don’t go zigzagging around because it’s not that big of a lake,” Woodrow said. “It’s just education.”

Lake shore resident Dave Hannah claims he has not missed a meeting about Auke Lake in the last decade.  He panned the draft management plan as “rife with error.”

“I think they misconstrued the characteristics of the lake.  They’ve misconstrued the attitude of the public. They’ve misconstrued the attitude of a lot of the residents of the lake.  I think they’ve misconstrued the ability of the lake to support the uses that are there,” he said.

Public comments on the draft management plan will be taken at a Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee meeting on January 29^th.    Written comments can be made now to parks_rec@ci.juneau.ak.us.

PRAC members will use the comments as they determine changes they would like to see in the draft plan.  The PRAC will forward their recommendations to the CBJ Assembly next month.

Parks and Rec director Fischer said the goal is to have any new regulations in place before the ice melts on Auke Lake.

Four Juneau youth are the winners of this years’ Hilary Lindh Scholarships at Eaglecrest. The program gives the students a pass to the city-owned ski area for the 2012-2013 season.

The Eaglecrest Board of Directors awards the passes every year to a boy and girl in kindergarten through 5th grade, and a boy and girl in 6th through 12th grade. Their applications are judged on academic achievement, competitive spirit and financial need.

This year the passes go to Claire Engstrom, a Gastineau Elementary School 4th grader; Iosefa Allen, 1st grader at Riverbend Elementary School; Dalton Hoy, in 6th grade at D’zantik’I Heeni Middle School, and Daniella Fincher, a senior at Yaakoosge Daakahidi High School.

Claire Engstrom says she likes to jump over hills and go through the trees at Eaglecrest. She is in Gastineau school’s marathon club and has finished in the top three in several races.

Iosefa Allen says he plans to use his pass to learn to snowboard. He’s a swimmer, in the Riverbend marathon club, and has jumped with the Riverbend Ropers. He says he loves everything outdoors.

Daniella Fincher maintains a 4.0 GPA at Yakoos and plans a career in nursing after college. She says she will snowboard at Eaglecrest this season.

In addition to skiing this season, Dalton Hoy plays hockey. He’s also a musician, playing the trumpet in the DZ band and the cello in the Student Symphony.

The Hilary Lindh scholarship program was established in 1992 in recognition of Lindh’s silver medal in the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics as well her dedication to ski racing. Lindh learned to ski at Eaglecrest and went on to become a professional racer with the U.S. Ski Team. During her 11-year career, she was the first American to win the downhill title in the World Junior Championships, then won three World Cup championships, and had 27 top-ten finishes. Lindh was inducted into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.

Lifelong Juneau resident Dean Williams has died.  He was 95.

Williams passed away Tuesday in a Reno, Nevada hospital.  He had been in Nevada visiting his daughter for the Christmas holidays.

Most days, Williams could be seen in downtown Juneau on his daily walk.  He worked out at the gym several times a week and when the weather was too bad to be outdoors, he walked laps, lifted weights, and did sit-ups in his living room, says his son, Gordy Williams.

Williams’ father, Jay, was in the U.S. Forest Service, and Dean grew up in the outdoors and the backcountry, hiking, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing and skiing in Southeast Alaska.

“So Dad had that ethic and he certainly passed that on to us, both my sister and I were on skis before we knew how to walk. You know, he had pictures of us and him out holding us up on the skis, and getting out,” Gordy Williams says.

He attributes his father’s long life and good health to his love of the outdoors and physical activity.

Williams graduated from Juneau High School in 1936. He went to radio operator school in Seattle then enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corp.   He served with the Signal Corps in World War Two in Nome and the Aleutians.

During a World War Two symposium at the Alaska State Museum in October, Williams talked briefly about the war years.

On Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, he was teaching skiing.  He recalled heading back to Juneau from Douglas Island with three students, including a young Japanese-American woman, who not long after that day, was sent to an internment camp.

“We loaded the skis and we  started across the Douglas Bridge, and there was an Empire boy  there, yelling at the top of his voice , ‘Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor,’ and he didn’t have to say much more than than to know our lives were going to be changed completely,”  Williams recalled.

Williams’ skiing ability was put to good use when he was inducted into the Army in Haines then posted out at Adak and Attu as part of the original military Alaska Communications System.

“The general of the infantry heard that I was a ski instructor, and he said, ‘Sergeant, we’re going to need you to come out to the ski area and give instruction every chance you get.’ So they’d send a command car to get me.  I was riding out there first class,” Williams said.

He said many of  soldiers from the Deep South he taught turned out to be good skiers, but they were initially baffled by the snow, which they had never seen before.

In 1943, Williams married Edna Almquist.  They were together for 72 years, before she died last year at the age of 90.

For most of his professional life, he worked in aviation, first with Pan American World Airways then other airlines, until he started his own to serve smaller Southeast Alaska communities, which “sort of  morfed” into Wings of Alaska, says Gordy Williams.

“When Alaska Coastal got bought by Alaska Airlines and stopped service in Southeast, then he and two partners started Southeast Skyways out of the downtown Seadrome,” he says.

Dean Williams also started the first flight seeing tours over the Juneau Ice field.

Beating the odds, serving the community

In 1954, Williams was struck by polio and told he would never walk again.  But he beat the odds against the disease and returned to all the things he loved to do, adding tennis. He had more time for the sport in his senior years and earned a national ranking for each age group between 60 and 90.  He was inducted into the U.S. Tennis Association’s Pacific Northwest Tennis Hall of Fame in 2003, at the age of 86.  The tennis court at Cope Park is named after Dean Williams.

Over the years, he was a member of Juneau Parks and Recreation, and Docks and Harbors committees, the Juneau Chamber of Commerce and Juneau Rotary, even once named Rotary Man of the Year.

Dean and Edna Williams were Grand Marshals in 2006 for the Juneau Fourth of July parade.  In 2008, the University of Alaska Southeast gave the couple a Meritorious Service award for their years of service to Juneau.

Gordy Williams says his father’s love and respect for Southeast Alaska and its people were most important to him, and he advocated a healthy balance between development and small town values and lifestyle.

Williams Mountain, near Taku Inlet, is named for Dean’s father, Jay, who spent his life out and about in the forests and mountains of Southeast Alaska.

“He wanted to see if he could get a mountain named after his dad, and it was especially nice because they could see it from their home,” Gordy Williams says. 

Gordy and his dad have climbed Williams Mountain.

“We’re going to spread some of his ashes on that mountain this spring or summer,” he says. “We’re going to go up and put him up on his family mountain.”

A celebration of Dean Williams’ life will be held at a later date.

Juneau School District officials and supporters of the Glacier Swim Club are celebrating the selection of Juneau as the host of next year’s state high school swimming and diving championships.

An announcement on Thursday notes that the Alaska School Athletics Association has picked Juneau for next year’s competition. It’s the first time in over two decades that another venue has been selected outside of Anchorage ‘s Bartlett High School.

Glacier Swim Coach Scott Griffith says as many as forty volunteers will devote their time and effort to successfully hold the meet at the relatively new Dimond Park Aquatic Center in the Mendenhall Valley.

Proponent of the center and swimming parent Max Mertz said in a prepared statement that they told the community five years ago that they would work to bring such meets to Juneau.

“We’re happy that five years later we were able to make this happen,” said Mertz.

As many as 500 people including athletes and their parents, coaches, and officials are expected to converge in Juneau for four days next November. The event will officially run November 8th and 9th, 2013.

Juneau’s weather pattern this week will help Eaglecrest open the Black Bear and Hooter chair lifts on Friday as well as Porcupine chair.

Until this week, most of Juneau’s snowfall has been cold and dry, which does not pack into a base.  But in recent days warmer temperatures have brought wetter snow, filling in some areas, says Snow Sports School Director Jeffra Clough.

“There’s some challenging snow conditions… be very minimal grooming this weekend, just because we don’t have a lot of snow cover yet.”

The city-owned ski area opened the lower mountain beginners’ trails, accessed by Porcupine lift, on December 1st.  Last Sunday, Hooter opened. Clough says the plan for this weekend is to operate Porcupine, Hooter and Black Bear chairs Friday through Sunday.  

“There’s some awesome terrain off that Black Bear chairlift, like East Bowl Chutes, and some more intermediate terrain. It’s not going to be for beginners though.”

The season is still early and hazards exist all over the mountain.  The west side of the mountain that’s accessed by the Ptarmigan lift will remain closed this weekend.

 

Juneau’s winter could be dry and cold – but not much snow, according to the National Weather Service. But what falls may stick around longer, due to colder temperatures.

Forecaster Rick Fritsch says major snow dumps may be few this winter.  That’s because Juneau is stuck in a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation, where temperatures at the surface of the ocean are colder than normal.  He says what we need for a real snowstorm is warmer, moist air to move in from the south.

“If we get something like that and it rolls over the top of this cold air with a very strong frontal push, and you get that warmer  frontal air mass, it precipitates cats and dogs,” he says.  “If it  hits that cold air and if it isn’t already snow, it turns to snow, and that’s how we get our 2-foot snowstorms and stuff like that.”  

Eaglecrest is hoping for one of those snowstorms.   Until it comes, the mountain operations crew is making snow, and there’s enough to open the Porcupine Lift on the lower mountain. The city-owned ski area opens tomorrow (Saturday), but only Porcupine will run, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.   All the shops and food service as well as Mountain Lift Coffee will be open.  The mountain will be open for skiing and snowboarding both Saturday and Sunday.  The regular winter schedule starts later this month.

As for changes at the ski area this year, probably the biggest one is electricity to the Hooter Lift.  The old diesel engine has been converted to electric – reducing Eaglecrest’s carbon footprint as well as the noise.