UAF photo by Robin Wood.

By Sharice Walker

The October 2012 christening and launch of the Research Vessel Sikuliaq in Wisconsin were dramatic milestones in the ship’s construction process.

The R/V Sikuliaq perches high above the crowd’s heads, secured in launch cradles along the riverbank. Bathed in a afternoon sunshine, the ship’s freshly painted colors — black, white and arctic blue – are striking against the sky. A slight breeze ruffles the bunting decorating the bridge.

After nearly 40 years of planning, designing and redesigning, the christening and launch of the vessel are less than 24 hours away.

UAF Dean Emeritus Vera Alexander, ’65, and Professor Emeritus Bob Elsner, the ship’s co-sponsors, submitted the first proposal for an arctic region research vessel in 1973. For decades they continued to push for a ship designed for polar fieldwork.

Now, Alexander and Elsner are visiting the Marinette Marine Corp. shipyard, on the banks of the Menominee River, to review their assignments in a dry run of the next day’s ceremony. Elsner lingers near the ship a er the rehearsal, gazing intently at the product of so many years of work.

“It looks great from any angle,” he concludes, smiling.

There is nothing dry about the actual ceremony the next morning. A relentless rain had moved in during the night, and gusts of wind buffet the crowd throughout the program. The first bottle of champagne falls victim to the wet conditions, slipping out of Alexander’s hands and shattering on the ground without touching the ship. But Alexander is sprayed generously with champagne when the spare bottle smashes properly against the ship’s bow. Then, moments after Elsner pushes the button initiating the launch, he is soaked in a jet of water that surges over the dock after Sikuliaq drops into the river.

Onlookers whoop and holler as the ship slides down the lowered beams and hits the water. Then they suck in a nervous breath as the ship lurches away from shore and angles precariously onto its side, toward the water. The cheering erupts even louder as the ship rights itself, the mast swinging back up into the air.

There’s still work to be done on the ship’s interior, and then it’s o on its first voyage, through the Great Lakes, down the Eastern seaboard and through the Panama Canal before it arrives in Seward in January 2014.

When science operations begin in early 2014, the 40-year-old dream of a vessel designed for arctic research
will finally be a reality.

Sharice Walker, ’04, is the public information officer for the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

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Late last summer, UAF’s Davis Auditorium filled with fans of National Public Radio’s live music program, Mountain Stage, for the taping of the second show in its two-day run. My friends and I found a few seats together in the back of the auditorium among a typical Fairbanks summer crowd — Hawaiian shirts and gray ponytails, younger folks in jeans and Carhartt cut-outs, little kids skipping down the aisles to their seats.

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Gary Gray started his new job last September as athletic director and chief cheerleader for 10 Nanook teams.

Originally from eastern Canada, Gray has spent most of his professional life as a college faculty member and administrator in the western United States, including Oregon, Iowa and Montana. He served as the athletic director at Montana State University Billings for 18 years before coming to UAF.

Sporting man

Tried out for the Canadian
Olympic volleyball team

Huge Red Sox fan

Has hiked almost all 700
miles of the Beartooth
Mountains’ trails

Started playing hockey at age 4 (he is Canadian, after all)

Old north [The Patty Gym’s] original old wooden bleachers are very challenging and not real comfortable. We’d been told maybe we could sand [the gym floor] down one more time. This building’s 50 years old, and that’s not going to change.

Fans in the stands We want the game environment to be positive and inviting and comfortable and a great place for people to come.

Headstrong We have some student-athletes who are just the cream of the crop academically, very high grade point averages, 3.8s, 3.9s, etc.

In good company It’s no small accident that there’s over a thousand institutional members of the NCAA. People understand what intercollegiate athletics, particularly NCAA athletics, brings to a campus, a community, to the individuals.

Disappearing act If we didn’t have an athletic program there would be a lot of young men and women who would not
have the value of getting an education at UAF because they would not be here.

Steady growth The key word is balance. You come as an 18-year-old, you leave as a young adult, college educated, degree in hand, career in mind, and you understand what you can contribute. That’s a very, very important and exciting thing to balance.

The post The new recruit appeared first on UAF Cornerstone news and information.

What is the state of journalism in Alaska?

By Lynne Lott

Extreme Alaska is a multimedia newsroom project of the Journalism Department. It’s a training ground as well as a multimedia news site that covers UAF and the greater Fairbanks community. The independently run Sun Star (not shown), staffed and produced entirely by students, publishes in print and online.
Extreme Alaska (www.uafjournalism.com), Sun Star (www.uafsunstar.com)

Libby Casey remembers feeling like she was in a movie as she jumped into a taxi and said, “Take me to the Justice Department!” It was her second day of work as the Alaska Public Radio Network’s Washington, D.C., correspondent. She was on her way to Congressman Don Young’s office for an interview when her phone rang.

U.S. Senator Ted Stevens had been indicted.

“I was covered in sweat and my hair was frizzed out beyond belief,” Casey recalls. Unfamiliar with her new hometown, she was surprised again when the cab dropped her just two blocks from where she’d started. Flustered but not shaken, Casey dove into the story. Less than a week on the job and she was reporting some of the biggest news Alaska had seen in decades. It was just the beginning.

Alaskans who travel frequently likely remember 2008 as the year Outsiders stopped asking “Do you live in an igloo?” and “Is it really dark all winter?” and started asking “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” Casey was one month into her job at APRN when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate.

After years on the fringe of the national consciousness, of being a dream cruise destination or the place where someone a friend knew was stationed in the military, Alaska suddenly seemed to show up everywhere.

“It changed dramatically,” Casey says of the time following the Palin pick. “Suddenly people had this heightened interest in Alaska.”

Reality television jumped on the bandwagon. Following forerunner Deadliest Catch came Alaska State Troopers, Ice Road Truckers, Sarah Palin’s Alaska and more. Alaska now draws interest, viewers and readers like never before. While that intrigue may have leveled off, Casey says, “You can’t go back to unmarked snow.”

Around the same time, Alaska newsrooms underwent a different sort of change: media began to shrink as part of a national trend. Now as the state enjoys unprecedented coverage nationally, the state of the state — at least journalistically speaking — is far less certain.

The long and wired road

When the Anchorage Daily News hired Wesley Loy in 1991, the newspaper was one of two dailies in Alaska’s largest city. Loy’s job would be covering retail businesses in Anchorage and beyond. The paper had a reporter dedicated to the fishing industry and another with the oil and gas beat. All told, Loy was one of five reporters covering Alaska business in a department with its own editor.

Today, Loy says, “there is no business editor and no business reporters. They don’t even have a reporter covering oil and gas, the lifeblood of this state.”

“There were times back when [reporters] would fly out to places and cover things at the drop of a hat if it was a big deal,” says Casey Grove, ’06, who has worked at the Daily News for two years. “But that was before my time.”

The Anchorage Daily News is hardly the exception. When he started at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner 18 years ago, managing editor Rod Boyce says, the paper boasted double the number of reporters it has now.

None of the reductions happened overnight. Journalism enjoyed a heyday in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a golden age for reporters, brought on by coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Journalists enjoyed enormous popularity, and while the paycheck didn’t always match the prestige, hundreds of bright young people entered journalism’s ranks hoping to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. In Anchorage, the Anchorage Times and the Anchorage Daily News duked for the title of “best newspaper on the Last Frontier.” Pulitzer Prizes were won in the process. Yet even after the Times shuttered in 1992, Alaska’s media presence remained robust. Communities as small as Dillingham possessed both a radio station and a newspaper.

Newspapers have always lived on the margins — the defunct Anchorage Times stopped running long before the Internet — but the modern wired world poses new threats to paper-based media.

Then, the Internet

The rise of the web caught journalism off guard. Media outlets scrambled to build websites without a revenue model in place. Craigslist, with its free online classifieds model, poached revenue from daily and weekly newspapers. On-demand television and iTunes provided ample opportunity for music, news and information without having to go through traditional means.

With newspaper and station websites, “there was this ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality,” says Charles Mason, professor and chair of the Journalism Department. “No one bothered to think about how they would pay for it.”

The post Breaking the news appeared first on UAF Cornerstone news and information.

By Doug Reynolds, illustrations by Harrison Carpenter

In January 1991, Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, proclaimed that the struggle to control Kuwait would be “the mother of all battles.” But Hussein’s words rang hollow, as it took a mere 100 hours for Iraq to lose Kuwait to the U.S.-led forces. However, Hussein’s words may have had more meaning than expected. During the famous Iraqi retreat some 700 oil wells were torched, and it took eight months to extinguish them. Nearly a billion barrels of crude oil were lost, the equivalent of $100 billion, which does not include the cost of the effort to extinguish the fires or of the war in the first place. Given the expense of the Gulf War and the subsequent invasion of the coalition into Iraq — actions that involved the security of oil supplies — you might say that oil is the mother of all resources, and may indeed be worth more than one war.

In the 1970s, I knew energy was the key to the world’s future, and I assumed, like most economists, that new technology would come to the rescue. After all, we know that necessity is the mother of invention. I have now come to a very different conclusion: rather than invention, necessity is the mother of adaptation. Counting on technology to solve a crisis is at best a 50-50 proposition.

But counting on adaptation to respond to a crisis is 100 percent reliable. Adapt and thrive. So, I decided to adapt ahead of time and find the most successful strategy to use less oil, partly as a research experiment, partly to make a significant lifestyle change at my own pace, and partly to explore a new future.

Fairbanks is a perfect place to carry out such an experiment because the Fairbanks economy is intensely dependent on oil. There is a major oil pipeline and a refinery near town, and the majority of residents use fuel oil to heat their homes and gasoline to drive their cars. However, contrary to what you might expect in an oil-producing state, Fairbanksans pay more for gasoline than most Americans, even with a refinery nearby. Additionally, the town is heavily dependent on tourism and mining for employment, industries that rely on oil to transport tourists, employees and machinery. Finally, according to the weather service, we have 100 percent probability of snow on Christmas. So, how to adapt?

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Running or hiking the Equinox Marathon and Relay in September is a rite of seasonal passage for many Fairbanksans, and the patch that only full marathon finishers receive is a badge of honor. It’s reckoned by many to be among the toughest marathons in the country.

UAF’s involvement has been integral to the Equinox from its inception. The course begins and ends in front of the Patty Center, and miles of the route wind over UAF’s ski trails. Like many sporting events, maybe all of them, the Equinox has many layers and many stories. You can compile quite a list of startling statistics over 50 years of 26.2 miles, and some deeply personal observations, such as those shared by Ned Rozell.

The original Equinox Marathon finisher’s patch, designed by Gail Bakken, one of the race’s founders. The coveted patch today remains virtually unchanged and is still handed to every person who finishes within 10 hours.

1963	The Equinox Marathon is founded by UAF ski coach Jim Mahaffey and UAF skiers Nat Goodhue, ’65, and Gail Bakken, ’65, among others. The inaugural race features 143 starters and 69 finishers. Goodhue in 3:54:22 and Bakken in 6:08:00 are the winners. The race begins and ends, as it has every year since then, in front of the Patty Center.
1964	The Equinox is the largest marathon in the world, and will be again in 1966 and 1967.
1969	With no entry fee, a record 1,630 people register. There are 1,160 starters (260 runners and 900 hikers) and 821 finishers. Entry fees of $1 for hikers and $2 for runners are instituted the next year, and fewer people sign up.
1972	The Boston Marathon, begun in 1897, allows women to run officially for the first time. The Equinox has allowed women to compete from its inception.
1984	Stan Justice, ’75, runs 2:41:30 to set a record that still stands and has never been seriously threatened.
1990	A two-person team relay race, quickly a popular option, is added. The next year it is bumped up to a three-person relay.

UAF photo by Samuel Winch.

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With smoke curling from the cannon, the crowd bobbed up the hill ahead of us. I suppressed a comical urge to pass people, and shoved the Chariot up the first steep hill of the Equinox. My eyes watered while ascending the old UAF ski slope, a bit overwhelmed that I was healthy/lucky/alive enough to again run the race.

Twenty-one years earlier, I had started up this same hill in a T-shirt and nylon shorts. I wished I had more insulation when it snowed on Ester Dome that day, but I made ’er home in 4 hours, 18 minutes. Not a great time, but at that moment it was the most impressive thing I had ever done.

I’ve run this race most of the years I’ve lived here, with an intact streak since 2001. I was trained up for my best ever time in 2000. But then my dad died that August, and I was back East during race time. Since then, I’ve thought of him, and the tennis tiger who was my mom, during the hours it takes me to cover the 26.2 miles up, on and over Ester Dome. That’s the part where I get misty, and thankful my carcass can still move that far.

On this chilly September morning, it was time to show my girlie the miles that are such a part of my life. I’m not sure if Anna will be a runner, or even an athlete, but she was going to see the crowd that comes out to cheer everybody on beneath the yellow and orange trees, wrinkle her nose at the musk of highbush cranberries, and feel the heartfelt smiles and hand slaps of the old friends we passed on the out-and-back. She would breathe in the spirit of the day.

As we climbed up the big hill through spruce and aspen, another Equinox memory nudged me. There, in my mind’s eye, was Paco, a friend from college, sitting down right there on the trail, eating berries, resting for another push with a punchy smile on his face. He was trying to once again complete the race without training. Paco, a UAF photography student from Mexico, loved the Equinox. Learning of his murder in Fairbanks one day in October almost 20 years ago was some of the most shocking news I’ve ever received. I thought of him — that gentle, smiling soul — and mouthed another thank you for my blessings.

The richest blessing was the little girl with me. She entered the scene a few years ago, blowing the walls off the me-centered box I’d constructed and maintained for 43 years. With her, everything was new again, from the hoot of a great horned owl to the crunch of little boots on fresh snow.

The miles with Anna did not drag that day. She napped, she walked some, she never complained and she looked forward to the cookies at the aid stations before devouring them.

Nine hours into that glorious day, with Anna on my shoulders as we closed in on the finish line, a woman ran past us. We had seen her before, several times; she had been checking on friends who, like us, were the true back of the pack. As she had several times before, the woman yelled words of encouragement. They were the perfect summation of our new, extra-slow and extra-meaningful version of the Equinox.

“Watching you two today has been beautiful.”

Ned Rozell, ’90, is a science writer at UAF’s Geophysical Institute.

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The innocent eye: A remembrance of Adrina Knutson

By Leonard Kamerling: photos by Adrina Knutson or courtesy of Len Kamerling

“Adrina trusted her place in the world, and in turn was trusted by others,” wrote Maya Salganek, assistant professor of film. “She approached life with wonder, and wonder surrounded her; the mundane seemed magnificent.”

The photograph is one of dozens of extraordinary images from Africa taken by Adrina Knutson. Adrina was a senior in the UAF film program when she was killed in a car accident while working on the Maasai Migrants Film Project in rural Tanzania in August 2012. (The project is run by San Francisco State University.)

Adrina had what photographers and filmmakers call “an innocent eye,” an ability to see beyond the obvious, to see deeply into the humanity of her subjects and translate what she saw into powerful, evocative images. If you asked her about the origin of one of her photographs she’d say something like, “I met these two guys fixing a bicycle,” or, “I played with a bunch of kids coming home from school.”  For Adrina, photographs were not just images but indelible records of relationships and trust.Adrina had an enormous natural talent that was encouraged, honed and disciplined through her studies at UAF. She was fully engaged in her education and all it had to offer. She was the kind of student who brought out the best in teachers, who made them excited about teaching.

In Tanzania I watched her as we began our work in remote Maasai villages and was so taken with how at home she seemed. Although it was her first experience with fieldwork, she was able to forge friendships with Maasai people and transcend the huge gulf of culture and language. She gave her trust freely and openly and received trust in return. You can see this in every photograph and video image she created.

Adrina and her filmmaking partner, Daniel Chien, were working on a film, Darkness to Light, about a Maasai family and the coming-of-age journey of their young son. They spent a great deal of time at the family’s rural homestead, learning their way in the Maasai world and discovering the film that lay before them.As the potential for their story opened, Dan asked Adrina to consider being the cinematographer for their film. She was moved by his confidence in her but worried that her production and camera skills might not be adequate. She turned to her journal to work it out. She wrote, “Just make it beautiful, Adrina. You know how to do that.”

Adrina Knutson will receive a posthumous film degree in May 2013. A scholarship for film students is being established in her name. To find out more, email naomi.horne@alaska.edu or call 907-474-6464.

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