Big shots — Eruption photographers find their work appearing far and wide

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Just like any good news photographer, David Wartinbee didn’t waste time celebrating the good luck that put him in the right place at the right time with a camera in his hand as a spectacular mushroom cloud bloomed over Mount Redoubt on Saturday afternoon. He lifted his camera to his eye and started shooting, and didn’t stop until the eruption subsided.

Then he went straight to his computer and filed his images. Later that evening they started showing up in media venues across the state, and soon, the nation and world.

All in a day’s work for an intrepid roving news photographer.

Except Wartinbee isn’t a news photographer. He doesn’t work for a media company or wire service; doesn’t have a press pass or journalism credentials. He’s a biology professor at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus with a recreational interest in photography whose front porch in Soldotna faces out across Cook Inlet, and who happened to be pulling into his driveway just when the mountain started to go off.

But through the power of digital cameras and the Internet, and a world that’s becoming insatiable for instantaneous imagery, Wartinbee and other central peninsula residents were deputized as newshounds that day, by virtue of having cameras, having something spectacular to point them at, and being willing to share.

Shots seen ’round the world

Until Saturday, Mount Redoubt hasn’t been terribly cooperative with photographers in this round of activity. Other than some visible steam plumes, most of the volcano’s many eruptions since March 22 happened at night or were shrouded behind clouds and haze. Redoubt hadn’t produced anything nearly as visually exciting as the iconic image that came from its last eruptive cycle in 1989-1990, when a massive, red-tinged mushroom cloud spread over the mountain April 21, 1990.

Saturday was different. Clouds lifted, the air was clear and the mountain was visible from the Kenai Peninsula around 2:30 p.m.

“Kathy (Wartinbee’s wife) and I came home from whatever we were doing — I think we did something exciting like go to the dump. When we came back and were driving down the road to our driveway, I could see that the mountain was visible, and we hadn’t seen it for days,” Wartinbee said.

He got out his camera to take a few shots, and showed Kathy the spot where he’d taken a photo of Redoubt venting at sunset on March 15.

“I started taking pictures from the deck and as I did I could see something was going on. I said, ‘Hey, there’s a bubble there, and it’s growing.’ And it was growing very fast and we just sat there and watched this thing blossom. We were absolutely dumbfounded by how fast it happened, how fast it went from a little bubble to bang, this thing is there. It wasn’t 15 minutes from the time it started to the time there was this huge, anvil-shaped cloud that was moving toward us,” he said.

Wartinbee’s first shots were dark as the ash cloud was low on the horizon. As it gained altitude it caught the sunlight. By the end of the event Wartinbee had to zoom out to get the spreading ash cloud in the frame.

He went to his computer and downloaded the images, then sent some to the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which posts volcano images on its Web site, www.avo.alaska.edu. The photos are free to download and use, and media sources can print or air them, but must include the photographer’s name. Wartinbee also sent a few to news sources in the state, thinking they might want some eruption shots.

KTUU TV aired one of his photos in its late newscast Saturday, and the Anchorage Daily News ran the same shot in its Sunday edition. From there it was picked up by The Associated Press, a content-sharing membership organization for media outlets worldwide. And that’s where it went — worldwide.

Wartinbee did an Internet search for the photo Sunday, and found it on Web sites for National Public Radio and several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and papers in a Syracuse, N.Y., Buffalo, N.Y., Taiwan, South America and Finland. It’s also on the U.S. Army Alaska’s Web site and numerous blog sites — all with his name attached to it.

“I just thought, ‘I wonder how far this thing has gone? If they (the Daily News and KTUU) picked it up, I wonder if anybody else did?’ And it’s amazing how far it’s gone. It’s like, ‘Wow, how many people are interested in this little news item?’” Wartinbee said. “My 15 minutes of fame.”

Jaden Larson, of Nikiski, is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame, as well — one for every year she’s been alive.

The Nikiski Middle School eighth-grader was driving home from a movie in Kenai on Saturday with her sister when they noticed an oddly dark cloud creeping overhead as they were passing The Salvation Army thrift store on the Kenai Spur Highway.

“We just kind of thought it was an odd-looking cloud so I got some pictures because I didn’t know what it was,” she said.

Jaden and her sister continued driving north, but stopped around South Miller Loop to take more photos as the dark ash cloud spread overhead. When they got home, Jaden’s mother called the Alaska Volcano Observatory about the ash fall, and the woman they spoke to encouraged them to e-mail photos that AVO could post on its Web site. Jaden sent about 26 pictures, and eight or nine were posted on the Web site, she said. The photos spread from there.

“We saw one actually on National Geographic, their Web site. It was also on the Anchorage Daily News. We’ve been looking around. It’s pretty cool,” Jaden said. “It’s exciting. My mom was calling all our family to go look. Everyone at school was like, ‘Did you see your pictures online?’”

Jaden said she enjoys photography, and is starting to turn it into a moneymaking endeavor doing portraiture, especially maternity and newborns. She posts her work on her site, www.smilineyesphotography.weebly.com.

“I’ve always liked to take pictures and my parents bought me an expensive camera so I’ve been doing more of it,” she said.

Jaden said she likes portraiture, and hadn’t considered going into news photography in the future, which is still a long way off, considering she’s in middle school. But if she ever does, she’s already got a widely circulated breaking news shot to her name.

For Wartinbee, Saturday fulfilled a dream he’s long had — to see a volcanic eruption in person.

“I’ve seen pictures from years ago, and a friend from up here in Alaska sent me ash in ’89, and I’ve always wanted to see one,” he said.

Now he’s not only got the memories and photos to prompt them, he’s also got some notoriety to go with the experience.

“One of the blogs (that posted his photo) said, ‘Beautiful picture by David Wartinbee.’ Well, that’s cool. Thank you very much.”

Environmental concern over Drift River spill potential grows

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

A tank farm at the base of Mount Redoubt containing 6.2 million gallons of crude continued to raise concerns this week, while officials formed a unified command to react if volcanoic ash and melting glacial ice sent floods down the Drift River plain.

Fearing risk of an oil spill in Cook Inlet during this period of eruptions, Cook Inletkeeper Director Bob Shavelson went to the Coast Guard’s boss at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Shavelson’s letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urged her to order Cook Inlet Pipeline Co., to remove the 6.2 million gallons of oil at the Drift River Terminal at the base of the erupting Mt. Redoubt volcano until conditions improve.

“We are writing to ask you to take swift action to protect Alaska fisheries and the countless people they support from the threat of a major oil spill in Cook Inlet, Alaska,” Shavelson wrote. He described the precarious situation of the terminal’s location at the base of Mount Redoubt with the volcano erupting, sending mud, water and debris flowing down the Drift River.

“This scenario did not unfold overnight. Similar events transpired during the 1989-90 eruption of Mt. Redoubt. In the current instance, the Mt. Redoubt volcano has been in a heightened state of seismic activity since late fall of 2008. Since that time the DFT operator — Cook Inlet Pipeline Company… has refused to release to the public information on the facility’s Volcano Readiness Plan and the volume of oil remaining in the facility’s tank farm, citing Homer Security Act exclusions,” he wrote.

The Coast Guard backed the company’s decision to not reveal how much crude was stored in the Drift River tanks, even though it’s now established policy for tankers in Prince William Sound to release their tank volume information.

The situation boils down to two questions, Shavelson said. “Why was Chevron hiding behind façade of the Homeland Security Act? (And) why don’t our laws and rules accommodate a worse-case scenario in places where we know the risk is high?”

The Coast Guard has regulatory power over Cook Inlet Pipeline Co., said spokesperson Sara Frances. “We have the authority, if there is a significant threat to the environment, the Coast Guard can direct them to remove oil or suspend operations,” she said.

The Coast Guard did not ask the company to suspend operations or move the fuel. Instead, in a press conference Monday, Coast Guard officials joined with terminal owners and the Department of Environmental Conservation to form a combined command to pool spill resources and expertise.

“This is an ongoing operation, and granted it exists at the base of a volcano, but they have the containment in place, they have contingency plans, so at this time we don’t feel it’s necessary to make them remove the oil,” Francis had said last week. “In any case, it’s not safe to allow a vessel in to do the removal, or we don’t know if it’s safe because debris and mud slides have occurred, and the tanker could be damaged.”

This could also risk a spill, she said.

After Thursday and Friday blasts from Redoubt, the company released a statement saying the engineer who designed the dike had performed an aerial inspection of it.

“And (he) is confident the dike remains sound. He and a CIPL engineer are scheduled to fly out to Drift River Terminal to continue assessments as soon as ash clears and weather permits,” the statement read.

CIPL is developing plans to remove debris and clear the road to the safe haven and the heliport as the first step of action. Clean up of the outbuildings will follow.

“The initial goal is to prepare the facility to load a tanker as soon as is safely possible,” it read. By Monday, the company was holding firm on this decision, with DEC and Coast Guard collaboration.

The Coast Guard plans to perform tests at the loading platform and will advise CIPL of the results. These tests determine the level of debris and depth of the water and will decide when it is safe to allow a tanker to enter the area.

Not only is the terminal of concern, but also a 42-mile pipeline on the west side of Cook Inlet that carries the crude from oil drills to the terminal, Shavelson said.

“Certainly we are aware of the threat to the environment, but there’s also the issue of commerce and jobs, as well as products to Alaska residents that come from oil,” Francis said.

The terminal is made up of seven tanks, with a maximum capacity of 277,000 barrels, Francis said. The facility includes buildings for workers and a platform leading two miles from the terminal to the dock where crude is loaded onto tankers.

The facility was built in 1967-68 on land Chevron purchased from the Kenai Peninsula Borough. Environmental protections and processes were not yet developed to regulate the facility during the time of its construction. According to the EPA, it operates on two clean water discharge permits that require renewal every five years.

After Redoubt blew in 1989-90, the company installed a dike for flood protection. Francis said the engineering work on the dike won a design award.

So far, the dike has held, but buildings at the terminal experienced flooding after the Thursday morning blast unleashed lahars, landslides of wet volcanic debris running down the side of a volcano. Shavelson, who said he has been to the facility, said he is not reassured by the positioning of dikes. The power of nature has proven stronger than man-made innovations.

“And you can’t lose sight of the fact that the public was denied information before the situation got into crisis mode,” he said.

When viewing the terminal, Shavelson said it is surrounded by a broad flood plain.

“I also see the force of nature and I think we can look at Katrina and any number of instances where it is no match for nature’s force. A lahar can dig a new channel, moving directly at this terminal. The situation can change rapidly. We’ve been extremely lucky.”

Cook Inlet does not have the capacity to deal with a spill potentially 6 million gallons strong, he said.

Plugged In: Don’t let Redoubt’s ash be downfall of electronics

Before concluding our series about cost-effective computer upgrades, here’s a brief word about dealing with the byproducts of our namesake across Cook Inlet, whose unpredictable geological mutterings are likewise kicking up some dust on the central Kenai Peninsula.

Volcanic emissions are potentially damaging to almost any mechanical or electrical device. Damage can occur in several ways. Although light traces of ash are not a problem, it’s wise to remember that local volcanic ash is an industrial-grade abrasive, which, in sufficient quantities, can abrade and mechanically damage engines, bearings, fans or any other rotating or mechanically actuated devices.

This can quickly cause major computer failures. For example, if the bearings on your CPU’s cooling fan fail, either your computer will shut down almost immediately or your CPU will basically suffer catastrophic heat stroke within a few seconds. Modern processors really do put out enough heat to cook themselves unless constantly and efficiently cooled. In addition to general abrasion of moving parts, other electronic devices like printers, scanners and photocopiers are highly vulnerable to mechanical scratching of interior parts and can become quickly and permanently unusable unless covered and cleaned with compressed air. Don’t try to wipe the dust off such parts and surfaces — blow it off.

Volcanic ash can also damage electronics because it’s electrically conductive, which can cause short circuits. It’s also chemically corrosive due to sulfur oxides which, when combined with atmospheric water, hydrolyze into sulfuric acid, among other noxious chemicals. That’s the same process that results in long-term toxic acid drainage from open-pit mines and mine tailings exposed to oxygen.

Even if abrasion, corrosion or short circuits don’t get you, and even if the ash doesn’t clog your computer’s cooling fans, accumulated ash and other dust is a good heat insulator, causing electronic devices to retain heat, sometimes to the point that the device fails.

I have lost high-end Western Digital Raptor hard disks because I forgot to take a computer outside every few months and thoroughly blow out any and all dust, including dust hiding on the bottom of exposed hard disk circuit boards. The older, 36-gigabyte Raptor hard disk ran pretty warm even when everything was being cooled properly. That disk didn’t have a chance when its circuit board had a nice warm insulating layer of dust. Redoubt’s ash falls will greatly increase the need for regular internal cleaning.

What to do? Appropriate precautions are quite straightforward. Monitor the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s Web site, www.avo.alaska.edu, throughout the day and evening so you’re informed about any explosive ash events and the probable trajectory for any ash that might be ejected over the next 24 hours. You can’t predict whether there will be ash at any given time but you can predict where any emissions will travel on the winds over the next 18 to 24 hours.

When there’s any chance of an ash fall coming down over your area, shut down all of your electronic equipment immediately. Also shut down any uninterruptible power supplies or other battery-operated devices to avoid possible short circuits due to conductive ash. Unplug them from the wall if you don’t have high-grade surge protectors installed. If there’s a power loss, then there’s also the possibility of damaging voltage surges when electrical power is restored. Homer Electric Association’s state-approved tariffs provide that you, the end consumer, are responsible for preventing surge damage and that HEA is not liable.

If possible, keep dust from infiltrating into your premises. Seal leaky windows with wide masking tape. Prevent ash from being tracked into your house and workplace. Put extra filters on any air intakes. For example, I put some regular furnace filters in front of the normal dust filters in my office’s air-handling system. This should provide an easily replaced second line of defense against ash being sucked into my building and being uniformly distributed by the heating system. Also consider shutting down your air-handling systems if you’re present during the day, or setting them so low at night that they’ll not activate very much, if at all, throughout the night.

Covering all electronic and sensitive mechanical equipment is obvious. For more expensive or sensitive devices, I have been fully covering the top and sides of each individual device with a 33-gallon trash bag and then covering the entire area with large, heavy-duty plastic drop cloths bought at Trustworthy Hardware. That gives me a second layer of protection. Ash slides easily, so I have been turning up the edges of the drop clothes to prevent ash from sliding off them on to whatever I am trying to protect.

You’ll need to internally clean any ash or dust regularly. Even if you’re not in the path of an obvious ash event, there’s enough circulating ash that your computer will build up a damaging layer of heat-insulating internal dust more quickly than usual. The best way to clean this dust is to buy several cans of compressed nitrogen or dried air. These are available locally at Three Bears, Save-U-More and other stores.

Unplug your computer or printer, first noting and marking where each cable attaches so that you’ll be able to reassemble the computer without any configuration problems. Then, take the entire system outside, remove each of the sliding side panels and thoroughly blow out any and all dust. In addition to obvious general dust, take particular care to clean the system board, the underside of any hard disks, all fan blades and fan housings, all power supply openings, and the air spaces between the fins on the coolers on the CPU, the video card and any smaller fans on the system board. Repeat regularly while Redoubt’s dust is floating about.

Local attorney Joe Kashi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and his law degree from Georgetown University. He has published many articles about computer technology, law practice and digital photography in national media since 1990. Many of his technology and photography articles can be accessed through his Web site, www.kashilaw.com.

Borough is ready for rumbles — Emergency management team keeps tabs on Redoubt eruption

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Scott Walden usually gets up at 4:30 a.m. He was about ready to head to bed around 10 p.m. Sunday night. But when you’re the coordinator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and a volcano starts erupting across Cook Inlet, sleep can be hard to come by.

After three months of on-and-off rumbling, Mount Redoubt finally made good on its threats. The volcano began a series of eruptions at 10:38 p.m. Sunday night, followed by others at 11:02 p.m., 12:14 a.m. and 1:39 a.m., according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The largest blast of the morning occurred at 4:03 a.m. Monday, sending an ash cloud more than 60,000 feet — 12 miles — into the air. Another large eruption occurred at 7:41 p.m. Monday, sending another ash plume 60,000 feet into the air.

Walden’s work cell phone, a 24-hour necessity for occasions such as these, started ringing between 10 and 10:20 p.m. Sunday, he said, when it became clear Redoubt was ready to do more than just rumble.

With that, the borough’s Office of Emergency Management was in motion.
Built in 2006, the borough’s Emergency Management Center on Willow Street in Soldotna is a self-contained, state-of-the-art facility that serves as incident command center when a natural disaster or emergency strikes — be it a flood, wildfire or volcanic eruption.

It’s a huge step up from the trailer behind the Borough Building OEM used to inhabit, Walden said. Now there’s the necessary space, equipment and facilities to do what needs to be done in times of emergency.

For the most part, that’s gathering and distributing information, Walden said.

“Our job mainly is to coordinate information to get accurate information out,” he said. “We don’t create the information so much as contribute to the creation of it.”

OEM is the borough’s link to the agencies and experts monitoring the situation — in this case, primarily the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the National Weather Service. OEM also is the point of coordination between Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and any other areas of the state facing the same situation, and the multitude of departments, organizations and agencies that have a hand in weathering the storm — the Federal Aviation Administration, National Guard and Alaska Department of Transportation, to name a few.

It’s a two-way interface, with OEM getting updates from the volcano observatory and the weather service on eruption activities, ash cloud trajectory and weather forecasts, and being expected to return the favor if the borough has any information to report, such as ash fall observations.

“We get a lot of e-mails from people saying ‘Redoubt is erupting, there’s ash fall in Safeway parking lot.’ And I go and look, if need be,” Walden said. “We got reports of ash fall here around 2 o’clock (a.m.). I looked again, and of course it wasn’t happening.”

In a situation like Redoubt that’s happening beyond the borough’s boundaries, OEM’s main role is to disseminate information. OEM gathers updates on volcanic activity and ash fall advisories — basically, everything everyone needs to know — posts them to the borough’s OEM Web site, e-mails them to an extensive list of contacts in the media and community, updates the borough administration and department heads, the school district, hospitals, service areas, emergency response agencies, maintenance departments and a long list of others across the borough that most people wouldn’t even think of. But OEM does.

“If there is a really bad situation, we’ll let everybody know what’s going on,” Walden said.

The OEM office is staffed 24 hours a day for the duration of an emergency and has different levels of response it can escalate to, up to having 30 or 40 people working around the clock, with 100 extra phone lines patched in and a chaplain at the ready for the community, if need be.

The Redoubt eruption had staff at the lowest level of response, Walden said. Extra personnel were brought in to answer phones, which were ringing off the hook for about 40 minutes when power to all Homer Electric Association customers across the peninsula — 28,000 meters — went out around 8 a.m. Monday. Though it was just a coincidence, people assumed it was caused by the volcano erupting, Walden said.

Joe Gallagher, spokesman for Homer Electric Association, said the outage was caused by an unknown problem with the transmission line between Anchorage and the peninsula. Engineers were working Monday to determine what exactly happened, Gallagher said.

“We don’t have any reason whatsoever to link this to the ash fall,” he said.
Heavy ash fall could potentially cause a problem if it accumulated on power lines, transformers or electric facilities, Gallagher said, but that would only cause a localized outage.

“We’ve had experience with ash fall in the past. It’s never been anything where we had to shut down the system or anything like that. There’s been instances of isolated arcs, where in fact ash did get into the system, but it was isolated to distinct spots,” he said.

The transmission line was brought back online by 10 a.m., and the system was fully restored by 10:40 a.m.

Other than that curve ball, the day went smoothly, Walden said. The school district was apprised of eruption activity and ash plume trajectory early in the morning, and decided by 5 a.m. to go ahead with school. All the communications systems and information releases came in and went out as expected. Mother Nature even cooperated, from the Kenai Peninsula’s perspective, in keeping a steady wind out of the northeast that spared the Kenai from ash fall.

It was a relatively undisastrous disaster, even for the areas that were directly affected, like the Susitna Valley. Ash fall was light, Walden said, probably lighter than the images people conjure up about it.

“A trace amount is under a millimeter. Medium ash fall is one to three millimeters. When you realize a trash bag is 10 millimeters, that’s not a lot of ash. If we got significantly dumped on, that might be as much as a dime,” he said.

Even small amounts of ash can be a big problem, though. If mixed with snow, ash can contribute to roof collapses and other weight-bearing issues. It’s a health risk if inhaled, especially for people with respiratory problems. It can turn roads into Slip ’n’ Slides and wreak havoc with delicate machinery and electronics.

That’s probably the biggest difference between this eruption and the last time Redoubt was active — the amount of electronics equipment in use.

“Even the grocery store, you don’t have someone who figures out your bill and gives you a receipt, it’s all electronic,” Walden said. “That kind of stuff needs to be looked at now, whereas 20 years ago it wasn’t a concern. Nowadays it’s vital.”

Other than the rash of calls during the blackout, the emergency center was relatively quiet, Walden said. People seemed to know how to get information and were already prepared in the event of an ash fall.

“We did a lot of public information before the eruption about what people should do, so when something like this occurs you don’t have people panicking,” Walden said.

People Outside seem more concerned about the eruptions than locals, Walden said, probably due to imaginations or sensationalized news coverage running wild.

“It’s just kind of an unusual situation to have a volcano in your backyard. The image of what a volcano does and what we’ve seen it actually do are two different things,” Walden said.

“For the most part people are pretty reasonable. They listen and don’t react too much to what cable television is telling them.”

Image courtesy of Game McGimsey, Alaska Volcano Observatory / U.S. Geological Survey
Flooding and tephra deposits — volcano-produced, airborne material that settles on the ground, churn down the Drift River Valley off Mount Redoubt after eruptions Monday.

Editorial: Peninsula scores passing marks for Redoubt round 1

OK, be honest now:

Who went to bed Sunday or woke up Monday thinking: “Gee, I really should have stocked up on water/air filters/flashlights/etc.” by now?

Consider this your warning.

Attention to Mount Redoubt wound down after months of activity without an eruption. Then, within a day, Redoubt decided to no longer be ignored.

The great news for the Kenai Peninsula is the ash plumes spurted out in the series of eruptions have missed us so far, and weather forecasts predict continued favorable wind patterns through Friday.

The good news is it appears as though, even if we had gotten some ash, the peninsula would have been more or less ready for it.

There were lines at some stores with people stocking up on last-minute emergency supplies, but Scott Walden, coordinator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management, said all remained calm.

Even with what may be one of the most poorly timed coincidental power outages in the history of Homer Electric Association, Walden said he didn’t see or hear of any panic. Concern, yes, and a lot of phone calls to OEM and HEA, but people listened to explanations that the outage was not linked to the volcano, and went on about their day.

Walden credits preparedness with the peninsula’s response to Redoubt. OEM and other organizations have been spreading information on what to do if Redoubt erupts for months now.

Chances are, you’ve heard the message. But if you still have question needing to be answered or supplies needing to be prepared, now’s the time. Visit the OEM Web site for ash information, supply lists and other preparedness information, at www.borough.kenai.ak.us/emergency.

Shaken, not stirred to erupt — yet

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

If the Alaska Volcano Observatory were looking for a theme song, it could turn to The Who and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Current activity at Mount Redoubt volcano is deja vu for Kenai Peninsula residents who lived here during its last period of unrest, in 1989 and 1990.

And while the observatory keeps tabs on the rumbling giant across the inlet, the volcano in turn serves as a measure of how the observatory itself has progressed.

The observatory was formed in 1988, just one year before Mount Redoubt erupted.

“It was really that eruption that sort of showed the state and federal government that that was an important issue,” said Allison Payne, geologist with the observatory.

“It demonstrated how important it is to keep track of those volcanoes. … We can’t predict what the volcano is going to do, but we have a much better grasp of what it might do and a better timetable to work with, and that allows us to be more prepared.”

The observatory has come a long way in the last 20 years, when Redoubt’s eruption came largely as a surprise.

“The onset of the eruption happened quite quickly. We had about 24 hours notice,” Payne said of the 1989 event. “A couple people were looking at seismicity the week before the eruption, and had this premonition that there was going to be an eruption, based on some interesting seismic patterns.”

But the geologists weren’t widely believed until the seismic activity significantly ramped up just prior to the eruption in December 1989. Had the observatory known sooner, it could have sounded the alarm sooner, which would have allowed people to be better prepared for the resulting ash fallout — especially on the Kenai — and possibly could have prevented a KLM jet from flying through the ash plume and nearly crashing.

These days, there isn’t much going on at the volcano that the observatory isn’t aware of.

There’s a Web cam pointed at the summit and geologists monitor real-time seismic data that’s updated every second. They keep a constant watch on satellite data for heat and gas emanations. They do periodic overflights to monitor activity, and take gas measurements to learn about new magma moving in the system. Wind patterns are tracked and particulate matter in the air is monitored. The Web site is continuously updated with new photos and status reports. If unusual activity does occur, the observatory sends out e-mail alerts to anyone who signs up for them, along with its usual communication with government, emergency response, aviation and other agencies.

The observatory will even send out updates via Twitter, a networking service where people send and receive short text messages on cell phones, computers and other devices. That certainly wasn’t around in 1989.

“No, not so much,” Payne said.

So monitoring has changed, but the volcano itself isn’t behaving all that differently this time around. Other than the short notice in 1989, that cycle of activity and the current one share similarities.

Redoubt is displaying two kinds of seismicity, Payne said. Volcanic tremors are small, continuous earthquakes mainly produced from hydrothermal activity, when ground water in the volcano is heated to boiling by magma underneath and moves through the rocks, causing them to break up and jumble round. The other seismicity is more substantial, discreet volcanic events that come in at higher frequencies than the continual tremors.

Both types preceded the eruption in December 1989 and are being measured at Redoubt now, although in 1989 they led to an eruption much more quickly.

“Certainly they were there,” Payne said. “They happened sooner, so right now we’ve had a couple weeks with mostly tremors and just a few events of discrete volcanic events.

“This time we started seeing similar seismicity and we were thinking it could happen rather quickly. This just goes to show nature is very diverse, volcanic systems are really diverse and you never really know what’s going to happen.”

The level of seismic activity at Redoubt over the past month has cycled up and down. During the past two weeks there was a spike in activity Jan. 25, another Jan. 31 and an increase in seismicity over the last several days, Payne said Monday, with the volcano settling down in between.

It’s possible the volcano could quiet back down without an eruption, Payne said, but it’s more likely an event similar to 1989 and 1990 is coming.

“Something comparable to the ’89 eruption, or smaller in scale,” she said. “So that could mean an ash column the same size or smaller — or it could mean more growth of the lava dome, or growth of new lava dome. Or not.

“I think most folks are thinking it’s more probable we’ll have a small eruption. It’s possible nothing will happen, and it’s possible there will be a larger eruption.”

If Redoubt behaves as it did in 1989-90, that means Southcentral Alaska is in for several ash-producing eruptions up to 40,000 feet over a several-month period. Redoubt followed its December 1989 eruption with others in February, April and June.

The 1989-90 eruptions produced several ash plumes up to 40,000 feet, which dusted Kenai with 5 millimeters of ash overall, Payne said. The prevalent wind pattern this time of year blows east, northeast — toward the peninsula. If and when there is an ash-producing event, the peninsula will probably be in the crosshairs.

Eruptions can be from deep within the volcano out through the cone itself, and others are produced by volcanic domes growing and then collapsing, spitting up ash, gas and rock.

The iconic photo from Redoubt’s April 1990 eruption, with a red-tinged mushroom cloud rising into the sky, was caused by a collapse of a lava dome, Payne said, which is why the cloud rose off-center from the volcano, instead of directly from the cone.

Payne recommends continued preparedness, because it may be summer before Redoubt goes dormant again.

“It certainly could. The last one was several months,” she said.

Spurred on — Climbers test luck on 3rd volcano summit

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

At 11,070 feet, Mount Spurr stands about a thousand feet higher than Redoubt and Iliamna, and because reaching it would require traveling a greater distance inland from the coast, Craig Barnard, Rory Stark and Tyler Johnson changed their usual modus operandi.

They decided to charter a plane from Merrill Field in Anchorage to Tyonek, take mountain bikes to roll up the maze of logging roads leading out of town and up the Chak- achatna River drainage toward the volcano, and to give themselves at least five days for the round trip.

On a Friday morning in early June, they boarded a single-engine Cessna Skywagon piloted by Spernak Air, and after a short flight they were unpacking gear in Tyonek and preparing to maneuver about a 40-mile maze of backcountry roads that would lead them up along the Chakachatna to its confluence with Straight Creek.

“It was crazy,” said Barnard, the least experienced of the three riders. “These guys were flying. It was all I could do to keep up. And I was hot for every break. I was, ‘Oh, a break! Come on! This is supposed to be fun, guys.’”

Near the confluence, they stashed their bikes and began following the creek, crossing and re-crossing its chilly waters to avoid prying their way through thick tangles of alders. Once, Barnard, who said the water sometimes moved so fast he could feel himself starting to float, tumbled into the stream.

“I bit it. I was on all fours,” he said. “Your legs are numb all day long. And then just in time to start feeling your legs and stuff, you plunge into the river again.”

Eventually, after camping for a night on a gravel bar to avoid all the bears in the area, they reached the source of Straight Creek: a swath of ice they called a “dry glacier” because its dense main vein was topped by a thick carpet of rocky debris.

Johnson called the up-and-down, boulder-strewn traverse of the glacier “tedious.” Stark said it was “just like a moonscape.” But, after day of such travel and a night on the glacier, they exited onto a southeastern flank of the mountain, and it was here that their real troubles began.

The clouds moved in. The light flattened out. Warmer air began to deteriorate the snow.

At about 8,000 feet, according to Johnson, they “got up onto the ridge, and, man, it was super steep. But it was the only way we could see to connect our route to the summit. We’re like 3,000 feet from the summit, and the snow at that point was so soft where you could stick your ski pole all the way up to the handle. Like 4 feet of mush.”

Stark painted an even more severe picture: “There was a cornice on one side of this ridge and then a really steep drop with crevasses running down the other side. This snow, it was just ready to rip. I mean, real sort of unstable snow conditions.

“I pretty much figured if we tried to traverse that ridge, we’d break a slide on it and go into one of the crevasses. And if you stayed high enough to be away from that, then you’d be hanging over the cornice on the other side, which is a cliff. It was pretty untenable.”

They sent Barnard out ahead for a closer look, and even though he said he was “disappointed” to turn back, he knew it was the right call.

“It was such a good decision to turn around,” he said. “Their vibe was totally right.”

They descended to 6,000 feet and camped.

On Monday, they worked down the full length of the dry glacier and camped along Straight Creek. On Tuesday, they reached their bicycles and trundled back into Tyonek, where they called Spernak Air. By Tuesday night they were all at home.

Johnson said they were all disappointed by failing to summit, but they decided to take a practical perspective: “The (other two) trips were so perfect that it was kind of nice to throw in three-quarters of a mountain in there. Nobody’s that lucky.”

Johnson added that he had no regrets.

“They were the cheapest trips I’ve ever done, and the most rewarding,” he said.

In the months to come, the trio would have many more rewards but also more difficulties.

In October, Johnson, Stark and Stark’s brother, Will, flew into Katmandu in the Himalayas and climbed then skied down Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak.

Just before the end of the year, Stark and Johnson were skiing high on Silvertip Mountain on the Kenai Peninsula when Stark, for the second time in his life, was swept away by an avalanche.

“It was horrible,” he said. “I broke my femur in three places, and my tibia was just shattered. For about 6 inches it was just bone fragments. And there was a piece of bone coming through my leg, and I lost a lot of blood, so I had to have a transfusion.”

Stark was rescued by the 210th Rescue Squadron of the Air National Guard. In November, he had surgery to remove 20 screws and some metal plates from his leg. Sometime after this Christmas, he said, he hopes to start skiing again.

In March 2008, Johnson and a pair of other Anchorage racers finished second in the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic. And in July, Johnson and Barnard won the summer version of the race. They plan to compete in the winter classic again this March.

“It was mainly for the adventure,” said Johnson, speaking chiefly of the volcano trips but also about the men’s shared love of the outdoor experience. “It’s not just the mountains and the skiing. That’s fun, but I think for all three of us it’s just the adventure of going out and doing something different, and rolling the dice. If it works it works. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.”

Ascending the dome — Climbers summit 2nd volcano with little planning

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Editor’s note: This week, The Redoubt Reporter continues a series about three seasoned outdoor enthusiasts who attempt to complete a quest to take on three Cook Inlet volcanoes over the course of three long weekends. Last week’s installment accom-panied these stalwart adven-turers as they crossed Cook Inlet, climbed Mount Iliamna, skied back down to dry ground, and then re-crossed the inlet in just three days. This week’s installment will feature the trio’s attempts to similarly conquer Mount Redoubt.

About five months after the successful 2006 climb and ski-descent of Mount Iliamna by Rory Stark, Tyler Johnson and Craig Barnard, Stark found his body in need of an overhaul.

In 2002 on Mount Hunter, Stark, who grew up in Homer, had been caught in an avalanche that injured his hip and mangled his ankles, requiring three surgeries to one ankle, fusing the bones so that front-to-back movement was still possible but side-to-side movement was not. The ankle injury altered his stride; however, it didn’t keep him off his skis or out of the woods.

In 2005, for instance, Stark and Johnson joined with a pair of other competitors to participate in the rugged Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. They won by finishing in less than two days, the first competitors ever to do so, much to the chagrin of former record holder, the renowned Roman Dial.
But Stark’s compromised body could only endure such punishment for so long, and eventually one of his hips began to give out.

In October 2006, Stark went in for hip-resurfacing surgery.

Doctors dislocated the hip, and then ground down the head of the femur until they could mount a chrome-alloy ball on it. Into the hip joint, they affixed a metal socket, then set the ball into the socket and put the hip back together.

Seven months later, in May 2007, Stark was ready to tackle another volcano. The target this time was 10,198-foot Mount Redoubt, standing in its snowy mantle almost directly across from the city of Kenai.

“We realized that (the ease of the Iliamna trek) was complete luck, so we planned this one out a little better,” said Johnson.

To start with, they decided to allocate more time than they had the year before, so they planned for four days.

Although they still carried no climbing gear, they did pack a map, emergency-locator beacons and shovels, and three 4½-pound Alpacka one-man rafts. They also spent some time researching their route. Then, eschewing McDonald’s cheeseburgers this time, they settled on a diet of mainly burritos from Taco Bell, and a fifth of whiskey apiece.

An acquaintance of theirs with some experience on Redoubt laughed at their sense of preparedness, Johnson said. He also warned them about the crevasses on the mountain and worried about their decision to ski the untried north face, but his arguments failed to dissuade the trio.

Again leaving Anchorage on a Thursday night after work, Stark and Johnson picked up Barnard — a Vermont transplant living in Cooper Landing — and headed south. At about 3 a.m. Friday, they launched their 16-foot Achilles inflatable from the Kenai beach near the wastewater treatment plant and motored west across Cook Inlet toward the Drift River.

Entering the river mouth, they followed the stream course until they noticed a road near the river. They pulled into a slough and tied off their craft, realizing the road likely belonged to Chevron’s Drift River facility, but not realizing the scrutiny under which they had just come.

“We got down the road a little ways, and, man, two or three trucks come barreling down the road toward us,” Johnson said. The trucks belonged to Chevron security officials, who were obviously upset by the adventurers’ appearance.

According to Johnson, a Chevron boss from the West Coast had just landed at the facility, and officials there were already on a heightened terrorism alert because they feared possible threats against a whaling convention in the area. Officials talked of confiscating the boat and all the gear until, as Johnson said, “cooler heads prevailed.”

“We had motored right up a pipeline,” Johnson said, and there was a concern about bombs. Ultimately, though, after a long powwow between officials, they decided not only to forget pressing charges but also — after checking out the inflatable and laughing at all the beer inside it — to escort Barnard, Stark and Johnson in a company truck on up the road and off Chevron property.

In the end, the trio saved five to 10 miles of walking. Still, there was plenty of walking to be done and plenty of cold-water crossings to be had, since the Drift River is a braided glacial stream. Fortunately, the bluebird skies continued and the sun remained warm. On Friday night, after stashing their pack rafts along the upper river, they camped at about 2,000 feet.

On Saturday morning they affixed skins to skis and began to ascend through a series of seracs, icefalls and thinly veiled crevasses. Especially nerve-racking was a notch they recognized as a collapsed crevasse beneath the snow fissures that would parallel the direction of their skis on the descent.

All that day, they covered less than five miles, camping at about 5,000 feet near the base of the main mountain. While Stark and Johnson remained in camp, Barnard scouted the route ahead, noting that the avalanche danger was high while still being able to select a reasonably safe route.

“You always want to ski (down) your ascent line because, if your weather turns to crap, you can kind of follow your tracks for a little bit, and it’s real important to know where you’re going,” Johnson said.
By noon Sunday, following Barnard’s plan, they were on the summit and preparing to head back downhill.

“We hit it just right,” Johnson said of the descent. “Another week and probably it would have uncovered a lot of crevasses, and these (snow) bridges would have been gone.”

As it was, noted Stark and Barnard, some of the bridges began to collapse as they traversed them.
Back at the Drift River, they made camp and readied their rafts for the trip out. A distance they had labored to cover over much of Friday, they floated in only two hours on Monday morning, but when they reached the Achilles they discovered that Monday’s smaller tides had left their boat high and dry in the slough. Consequently, they had to drag the craft over the mud and back out into the current.

“We had to take the outboard off,” Johnson said. “We took out all the stuff. Me, Craig and Rory, we drug that boat. It was probably a little over a quarter-mile. And then we had to go back and get the engine and then we had to go back and get all the stuff. We looked like a bunch of mud turtles out there.”

Eventually, they were back in the main channel with their gear packed and ready to go. They reached the Kenai beach on Monday night as the weather began to turn. “It was just blowing up,” Stark said. “It was starting to get just nasty there. We just beat a storm in.”

On the way north, they stopped off at the home of Johnson’s parents in Soldotna and learned that Johnson’s father had tried to “send” them a care package.

According to Barnard, Johnson’s father bought some food at Arby’s and then flew with a friend over Redoubt on summit day, planning to drop a bag of chow to the three men, but the fliers were unable to spot the climbers, and so the delivery never happened.

Less than a month later, they were ready for 11,070-foot Mount Spurr.

Crazy for the climb — Backcountry skiers try mountainous feat: 3 volcanoes, 3 weekends

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part story about three seasoned outdoor enthusiasts who begin a quest to take on three Cook Inlet volcanoes over the course of three long weekends.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, although most of their friends thought they were nuts.

It was a Thursday afternoon after work in May 2006, and the onset of Memorial Day weekend was in the air. Buddies Tyler Johnson, 32, and Rory Stark, 37, had a free Friday and a good weather forecast in front of them, so they decided this would be a good time to climb and then ski down a volcano.

They targeted 10,016-foot Mount Iliamna across Cook Inlet, and sketched out a rough plan of attack: Drive down to Ninilchik, launch their 16-foot Achilles inflatable from the beach, motor nearly 50 miles across Cook Inlet and far up into Tuxedni Bay, work their way inland on foot until they reached snow, and then start climbing on skis with skins.

Simple enough, they thought, despite the fact that neither of them had been there before. It would be an adventure. And Johnson and Stark, both veterans of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, were accustomed to adventure and thinking on their feet.

“Me and Rory, we’re trying to find people in Anchorage (where both men live). We’re like, ‘Hey, we got good weather for three days. We’re gonna take the boat across,’” said Johnson, a 1995 graduate of Skyview High School. “Nobody wanted to take the boat. Everybody’s like, ‘You’re crazy, man. Nobody’s gonna go across in your 16-foot boat. Come on!’ So when we left town, it was just me and Rory.”

Of course, all of those doubters back in the big city didn’t know about 35-year-old Craig “Chunk” Barnard, a carpenter, handyman and extreme-skiing enthusiast living on the Kenai Peninsula.

“Rory was like, ‘I know this guy, Craig. He’s down in Cooper Landing. He lives in a tent. We’ll stop by and see if he’s there,” Johnson said.

“So we stop in Cooper Landing and we start driving down Craig’s road, and there he is, walking from the liquor store with a six-pack. We’re like, ‘Craig, hey, man, you gotta come.’ And he’s like, ‘All right, all right. Yeah, yeah. Hey, can I call my boss real quick?’

“So he calls his boss and leaves a message and tells him he’s not going to show up to work Friday and Saturday.”

According to Barnard, the “invitation” from Johnson and Stark was more of a command.

“We walked into my tent, and they told me what I need and what I don’t need,” said Barnard, 35. “And what I don’t need was ice axes or crampons or ropes. So they just kind of quickly shuffled some gear into a bag for me.”

That rapidly, the three of them were on the road, heading south.

“That’s how it started, completely off-the-cuff, no planning whatsoever,” Johnson said.

They brought no maps and no GPS. They brought no mountaineering gear — just backpacks, skiing gear, some food and alcohol, and their boat.

“We had four days of food,” Johnson said. “We had some Taco Bell. I think we had, like, one thing of Mountain House, maybe, but we just stopped at the fast food.”

They purchased a stack of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s and took advantage of the “10 burritos for ten dollars” deal at Taco Bell. “And that worked out really well. That was our food for the whole trip.”
They arrived in Ninilchik in the early morning.

“We barreled off across the inlet at 2 a.m., and it was pretty rough going across, and then we had to go up Tuxedni Bay,” Johnson said. “We didn’t quite know where we were going, you know. We just knew we had to get somewhere up into Tuxedni and see how far we could get.”

Barnard had been on Iliamna before, just the year before, and had a general sense of the best route to take. In 2005, he had been part of a three-week, fly-in trip onto Tuxedni Glacier, and from there he skied the mountain, eventually reaching the summit.

Based on Barnard’s experience, Johnson and Stark planned to run as far into Tuxedni Bay as possible to reach the glacier flats, but the upper reaches of the bay eventually became too shallow to continue. They beached their boat and dragged it above the high-tide mark, then hoisted their gear onto their backs and began a slow trudge up the heavily bear-traveled mud flats of Center Creek.

They planned to follow the Center Creek drainage into the high country, eventually crossing over a rocky ridge before dropping down onto the Tuxedni Glacier, which they would follow to the base of the actual mountain.

That Friday evening, about 18 hours after leaving Ninilchik, they stopped at about 5,000 feet and made their first camp. None of them had slept since Thursday morning, when they’d awoken to go to their respective jobs: Barnard as a handyman and carpenter, Stark as a pilot for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Johnson as a civil engineer.

The next morning, they were on the move again: up the glacier to the mountain’s southwest flank, and from there to the sulfur-smelling summit of the volcano.

“We had to pick our routes, and there were some crevasses, but the crevasses weren’t that bad. It was more the avalanche conditions we were a little concerned with,” Johnson said. “We picked our way up (the main mountain) in six hours, and then the ski down was like 30 minutes.”

They reached the summit early Saturday evening and soon returned to their Friday campsite for the night. On Sunday morning, they skied off the snow of upper Center Creek, then walked the mud flats back to their boat.

“We got down to our boat, and it didn’t get mauled,” Johnson said. “There’s just circles of bear tracks around our inflatable. We heard that the bears like to take swipes at those boats over there, so we thought for sure something was going to be wrong.

“So we launched it. Nice weather. It was like glass coming back.”

They arrived in Ninilchik in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend fishing flurry.

“We beached the boat on Ninilchik beach, and there’s probably a thousand motorhomes all lined up there, and these people were there, and they come walking over,” Johnson said. “They were just blown away. They’re like, ‘Where’d you guys come from?’ And we’re unloading our ski gear and stuff. They just couldn’t believe it.”

By Sunday evening, all three men were home — satisfied, and yet not satisfied.

Johnson said that when they had packed up in Ninilchik and were driving north, they were all thinking the same thing: “Man, that was absolutely, unbelievably the best trip I’ve been on in a long time. And so we’ve gotta do all three now.”

The Redoubt and Spurr volcanoes were waiting.