"Evolution of a System"

Action on the Tsalteshi Trails system.

EVOLUTION OF A SYSTEM

MARCH 2012

During a bicycle ride in the spring of 1987, the fate of cross-country skiing on the central Kenai Peninsula began to shift upward.

Prior to 1980, Nordic skiing on the peninsula had been mostly a backcountry affair, although the Kenai National Moose Range offered a few miles of groomed trails near Soldotna and allowed for some racing to occur in the area of Headquarters Lake. Kenai Central High School had a cross-country ski team, as did Homer and Seward high schools, and the chance to compete gave the sport focus and energy.

With the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, however, the moose range became the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and the management plan there no longer supported racing or related events. Enthusiasm for the sport began to wane.



Backcountry action dominated the Nordic scene until the 1990s.

The KCHS team disbanded in the early 1980s, and when Soldotna High School opened in 1980 it did not include skiing in its sports repertoire.

Meanwhile, the Kalifonsky Nordic Ski Club, which had begun in the late 1960s, also faded in popularity and was in need of new members and fresh ideas. The last president of the club, Alan Boraas, along with club member Charlotte Ischi went into the bank and closed out the club account. They then created the Kenai Peninsula Nordic Ski Club, and in the mid-1980s attempted to create a new trail system near Centennial Park along the Kenai River. But the new trails were not of the caliber necessary to attract a large following, and so widespread interest in Nordic skiing remained tepid.

Then came the fateful bicycle ride.



Boraas, a professor at Kenai Peninsula College, was riding into Soldotna from his home in Kasilof when he reached the top of the big hill just south of town. At about Mile 98 of the Sterling Highway, he was surprised to see that a huge swath of the hilltop forest west of the highway had been bulldozed and that the land was being prepared for the construction of a new public school, which initially had been dubbed Central Peninsula High School but later was renamed Skyview High.

Boraas rode his bike down into the clearing and looked around. There, his gaze was arrested by the sight of the rolling wooded hills bordering the north side of the campus. Mental gears clicked faster than his bike gears, and he imagined ski trails weaving in and out of those trees and over those hills. Later, he strolled into the offices of the Kenai Peninsula Borough to investigate the terrain further and determine its ownership. It turned out to be all borough land and ideal for a new system of trails.



Alan Boraas (front, left) with his KCHS ski team from the late 1970s.

From personal experience, Boraas had a strong sense of the landscape and conditions necessary to create a solid trail system, and he liked the idea of such a system being right outside the back door of a school, just as the Hillside Park trail system lies adjacent to Service High School in Anchorage. He considered the areas around neither Kenai Central High School nor Soldotna High School to be favorable to such a plan. But this new school, he thought, might be just the ticket.

“This was a golden opportunity to create a trail system,” Boraas said. “It was by a high school, conducive to high school skiing, and also as an access point to the general public.” Although he’d already walked the property by the time he consulted with the borough, envisioning trails as he trekked, he enlisted a few friends to walk it with him and see whether their visions matched his own. They did.

It was time to enlist more help.

Enter Lily Kloes, a third-grade teacher at Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School and a member of the ski club. After Kloes, Boraas and other club members had committed to paper some specific ideas about what a trail system would look like and how it could benefit the community, they made presentations to the Board of Education and the borough’s planning commission, receiving recommendations from each that the borough assembly grant them a five-year permit to build, operate and maintain a trail system next to Skyview.

The next stop was the Borough Assembly meeting of May 19, 1987, at which Kloes employed her “enthusiasm of a third-grade teacher, a non-burned-out third-grade teacher,” according to Boraas, to convince assembly members that the ski club’s plan should move forward. After considerable debate, the club got its wish.

Resolution 87-45, which passed by a 12-3 vote, permitted the ski club to build a public trail “described as being 12 feet wide and seven miles in length,” and required the club to provide a site plan to the borough administration, to flag the trail route, and to have that route approved by the administration prior to starting construction. The club also had to provide an as-built site plan once the construction was complete.

Furthermore, the resolution stipulated that: (1) the use of dog teams or motorized vehicles on the trails would be unlawful, and (2) a five-year extension to the permit could be granted by the borough mayor “if (deemed) in the best interest of the school district and community.”

With permission in hand, Boraas consulted with Anchorage’s Jim Burkholder, a principal architect of both the Hillside

Early Cat work on the trail system.

Park and Kincaid Park trail systems, and considered by many to be a kind of guru of effective trail development. Burkholder urged the ski club to keep in mind five keys to such development:

First, he said, the trail system must eventually fall within an area dedicated to that purpose so that “trails” becomes its essential function, rather than being a parcel of land that can be snatched away on some political whim.

Second, the trails must be designed for both high-level skiers and average skiers. If they’re too difficult, they’ll appeal only to the elite, he said, and will fail to attract casual skiers or those attempting to learn. “Let’s face it,” added Boraas about the Tsalteshi system of trails, “it’s a prime chunk of property. If it’s only for a few elite-level skiers, it’d end up being a subdivision because you’d have no community buy-in.” And if the trails are too easy, said Burkholder, they won’t be good for racing.

Third, good trail grooming is critical. The trails must be kept in quality shape all season long. “You have to match the equipment to the type of snow,” Boraas said. “And you have to have a vision of what the end-result’s going to be.” Early grooming efforts at the trails by Skyview were done with a lot of homemade equipment, which worked, but over the years the quality of the equipment improved markedly.

Fourth, the means of financing the trails must be sound and reliable. The Kenai Peninsula Nordic Ski Club decided early on to eschew federal, state and borough funding, aiming instead to build and maintain the trails through volunteer efforts. Later, trail supporters would apply for federal grants, while continuing to rely on trails association dues.

Fifth, the trail system must have a name, a supporting organization, and a permit. From the beginning, the trails near Skyview had a permit and a backing organization (first the ski club, later a booster club, and eventually a trails association). Its official name would come several years later.

With those keys in mind, trail design and preparatory work commenced, but not without a few hitches along the way.

Although the construction of Skyview was completed in 1988, declining district enrollment and budgetary constraints (in the wake of oil revenue declines) kept it from opening until the fall of 1990. It was during those intervening two years that a confluence of personalities occurred and brought success to the trails perhaps more swiftly than even the most fervent supporters had expected.

The ‘Pied Piper’ Joins the Effort: The Alan and Allan Show

The film Field of Dreams stars Kevin Costner as a man who, despite the consternation of his wife and the incredulity of his friends and neighbors, becomes obsessed with the idea of building a baseball diamond where a cornfield stands behind his house. The film premiered on April 23, 1989, and popularized the line, “If you build it, he will come.”

Two years earlier, members of the Kenai Peninsula Nordic Ski Club had had a similar notion: “The assembly grudgingly okayed it for us to put trails in,” Boraas said, “but they were very clear that these were not dedicated trails. (But) I knew that once we got them built—if we did it right—it was going to accelerate. And that’s what happened.”

Over the next quarter-century, the ski club’s vision evolved into a top-level facility called Tsalteshi Trails, which is now used year round by runners and skiers, walkers and snowshoeing enthusiasts, mountain bikers and a host of organizations seeking a training ground. It is a major draw for all of Southcentral Alaska, is considered one of the state’s best trail systems, and has hosted triathlons, state events, qualifying races for the Junior Olympics, Besh Cup series races, and the Arctic Winter Games.

But it started rather inconspicuously … and very much on the cheap.

“Up until about four years ago, the trails, by design, were very lean in terms of budget,” Boraas said. “We had no borough funding; we still don’t. We had no state funding; we still don’t. And no federal funding. About five years ago, we started applying for major trail grants, so we now have a considerable amount of federal money that has helped with things like lights and so on. We did get some funding via federal dollars for the Arctic Winter Games—snowmachines and such. But before that, it was all volunteer. The core of the trails was all volunteer labor, me and Allan Miller.”

Coach Allan Miller (right) works with a XC runner in Skyview's inaugural season, 1990.

Allan Miller—whom Boraas once affectionately called “a pied piper” for his ability to attract enthusiastic, talented runners and skiers and keep them excited and motivated—came to Alaska in the mid-1980s to teach following a successful career on the Dartmouth College ski-racing team. After teaching in Yakutat and Glennallen, Miller moved to the peninsula and became a Russian language teacher at Soldotna High School, where his life took an unexpected turn.

According to a 1997 Peninsula Clarion article by J.R. Rardon, when Miller arrived in Alaska he was ready to put competitive skiing behind him. “I was sick of competing,” Miller said in the article. “From the time I came up here, it was five years until I decided to race again.”

One of the motivations for this master motivator was Marlene Benson (now Byerly), who was then one of two assistant principals at overcrowded Soldotna High. In early 1990, when the borough school district decided to open Skyview High School that fall, Benson was named the new school’s head principal, and one of her teaching recruits was Miller.

Miller thus moved to Skyview, agreeing in the process to assume control of a brand-new ski program, according to Rardon. Then Benson, “knowing the potential for skiing, included in the start-up (some) money for a double-track, single-ski alpine snowmachine for grading trails,” Boraas said. If Benson had not recruited Miller or arranged to fund the grooming equipment, contended Boraas, “we might not have the trails today.”

Although Homer and Seward high schools had ski teams, they were the lone representatives of the sport on the Kenai. If Miller hoped to popularize the sport on the central peninsula, he had his work cut out for him.

Fortunately, he had been thinking about the possibilities for a few months. In the previous autumn, according to a 1997 Anchorage Daily News article by Gus Guenther, Miller and Boraas had gone together to the Skyview campus, eyeballed the forested hills to the north, and mulled the opportunities they saw there. After Miller was brought on board at Skyview, Boraas became his assistant ski coach.

The vision for the trails may have originally been Boraas’s, but he attributes the lion’s share of program building to Miller. “I do not now have, nor have I ever had, the charisma (exhibited by Miller),” Boraas said. “I give him total credit for that, and for the energy he brought to it—and he brought a lot of energy.”

He remembers Miller recruiting prospective runners and skiers to help build the trail—encouraging them to enjoy following the bulldozer, picking up sticks and rocks, and using hatchets to chop through the many tree roots protruding from the exposed earth.

Boraas also illustrated Miller’s motivational enthusiasm with this story, quoted here from Rardon’s article: “I can remember the first year we had the ski program, and I was coming down to the intersection behind the tennis courts. I came around and heard singing, and the sun was just going down. I looked out over the field, and there’s Allan with seven or eight skiers behind him, singing Christmas carols. Of course, they were skiing better than they were singing. But it was amazing to me, the way he could motivate these kids. When they get older, they might not remember that specific instance, but they will remember sharing the outdoors of Alaska with a coach they admired.”

As a result of the expertise and inspiration Miller brought to his running and skiing programs, Skyview’s teams became almost immediately successful. The Panthers won their first region ski title in their second year of existence, and the success at Skyview made it easier for Boraas and Miller to encourage the start-up of similar programs at SoHi, KCHS and Nikiski.

But the focus of all this activity and success was the trail system. And all of the planning and dreaming, all the flagging and re-flagging of routes, culminated in late summer or early fall of 1990 with the actual beginning of trail construction.

First on the agenda was the nearly one-kilometer Green Loop, with Skyview vocational instructor Hans Bilben operating a rented Cat and “putting together a root-infested trail,” Boraas said. Next came the three-kilometer Blue Loop, as they worked to stay ahead of the weather and finish the core of the planned system before the ski season began.

“We finished the (two-kilometer) Red Loop when snow was coming down.” Boraas said. “It was Bilben again on the Cat. And all the kids from the ski team were out there. Hans is roughing it out. I’m walking a hundred yards ahead, flagging, and Allan’s back with the guys, going “This is great! This is fun!’”

Trail building.

For the more difficult, more finely tuned work, Boraas and Miller relied on the volunteer efforts of retired Kasilof bulldozer operator, Don Jones, who had purchased a John Deere 450c and was eager to assist with the trail-making project.

By the time of Guenther’s 1997 article, Jones had put more than 100 hours of work into building more trails and shoring up the existing ones. “I just wanted to help the kids,” Jones said in the article. “I think people ought to help out. They’re all pretty nice people out there.”

Although Skyview’s first cross-country running team had had to use only the trails on the hillside on the edge of campus, plus the soccer fields, for its racing and training, the first Skyview ski team had the use of the actual early trail system.

Ski team member Holly Quick wrote about that inaugural season in the first Skyview yearbook: “Every day, rain or shine, the Skyview Nordic ski team goes to practice. They started out the season with no snow and would run on what now is the ski trail. Then they went out with their skis and slid across the frozen grass. But the snow soon came, and after the trails were groomed and clearly marked out, the ski team was off, and there was no stopping them….”

Boraas and Miller had built it—the trail system and the ski program—and the best was yet to come.

 

The Guru of Tsalteshi Trails

Bill Holt, the primary groomer and caretaker for the Tsalteshi Trails, remembers how his role with the trail system intensified in the mid-1990s:

Bill Holt, master groomer at Tsalteshi.

“Back in the dark ages,” Holt said, “Alan Boraas was digging out one of the old Ski-Do Alpine snowmachines, and I was rubbernecking nearby and asked if he needed some help. We got it dug out, and he asked if I wanted to help him groom. I said sure. Alan took off, made it to the top of the hill and got stuck. Lots of blue smoke and blue language. I went up to help, and the next thing I knew I was spending more and more time on a snowmachine following him around. Alan puts a lot of thought into everything he does, and he instilled that scientific approach into grooming the trails. I think I have inherited that. We have gone through lots of equipment modifications, but it still comes down to having a certain amount of snow sense—when to groom, when to wait, how to make things better and not worse.”

The head groomer since 2004, the tall, bearded Holt has become one of the individuals most closely associated with the trail system. His presence is nearly ubiquitous at Tsalteshi, logging hundreds of hours each year on trail planning, building and maintenance, and equipment and lighting.

“Bill has become a premiere groomer,” Boraas said. “He knows the equipment. He knows when you should and shouldn’t groom.”

Of course, by the time Holt appeared as a volunteer on the scene in 1995, the trail system was already well on its way to becoming a fixture on the Kenai Peninsula and in Southcentral Alaska. The initial plan called for the creation of a core trail or loop that could be skied by advanced beginners without too much trouble. “Then, off of that, sort of like a flower’s petals, are trails of higher levels of difficulty,” Boraas said. “The whole idea was to create this complex that you could ski a number of different ways, so each ski was different.”

From that basic beginning, the “complex” has evolved into more than 15 kilometers of trails over sometimes widely varying terrain, enough to keep Holt and the other groomers and volunteers extremely busy.

The evolution of the trail system initially included a biathlon range just off the Purple Loop—a second, more official range was created closer to the school for the Arctic Winter Games in March 2006—and then a five-kilometer lighting system originally intended for AWG events and also to improve nighttime skiing. Discussions about lighting the trails had been in progress for many years prior to the games, but AWG-related funding and enthusiasm allowed the ideas to take shape.

In addition to money needed to purchase and install all this lighting, Tsalteshi’s involvement in the AWG brought on the association’s first flush of federal dollars. Tsalteshi received a $150,000 HUD grant and a $30,000 Recreation Trail Grant—allowing for a widening of the trails, plus the purchase of five Yellowstone Ginzu drags, two four-wheelers on tracks, a new snowmachine, 50 HID lights and wiring, timing equipment, and miscellaneous racing supplies—and still a tremendous volume of volunteer labor was required to put everything into place and in working order in time for the games.

Lighting installation by Bill Holt--not necessarily OSHA approved.

For instance, the Homer Electric Association donated 50 poles and the labor of several volunteer employees. The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, an oil field supply contractor, donated engineering plans for the lighting, and IBEW volunteers helped install and bury the wiring.

Manufacturing delays and poor weather made much of the work more problematic than it might otherwise have been:

“I was a wet year, and this project was a goopy mess,” Holt said. “We only got about 30 lights installed for the Arctic Winter Games. This was the lighting needed for the night events (biathlon, primarily). We finished the lighting installation on the other trail sections after the games. We had to climb the poles to install the lights because we did not actually have (the lights) available when we installed the poles and wiring. I think the first light that was turned on was the one at Moose (Green Loop) corner near the Skyline subdivision.”

Since then, with the financial assistance from a $100,000 Alaska Trails Initiative grant, the lighting system has continued to expand and improve. One money-saving improvement has been the installation of LED lights in place of the original metal-halide lamps. Also part of the improvements and changes at Tsalteshi in the last few years was the creation of a second trail-system entrance and parking area off Kalifornsky Beach Road.

When the Wolverine Trail—the lowest-elevation trail in the system—was being designed, Holt and Boraas were careful to hide its location from the traffic of snowmachines and four-wheelers. Originally, they received permission from the City of Soldotna to use a nearby gravel pad that paralleled K-Beach; skiers then had to walk or ski a narrow trail across a small swamp to the trailhead.

After Tsalteshi received only partial funding of a grant request to build a permanent parking lot by Wolverine, further assistance arrived in the form of the Department of Transportation, which advised Tsalteshi in the driveway permitting process and facilitated the acquisition of gravel donated to the cause by Wilder Construction.

“This has made a huge difference in our trail usage, and has provided a community-friendly trail entrance,” Holt said. “We also now have a way to host races and still have a trail set aside for recreational use. I think it is just as significant as the lights in the evolution of the trail system.”

Meanwhile, the trails continue to evolve and expand. On the trail-work schedule is a continuation and completion of the new Squirrel Trail at the southern edge of the system; the construction of the Fox Trail between the subdivision on Skyline and the western edge of the Wolf Trail; and the Porcupine Trail to the east of the Wolverine Trail.

Under discussion as well is an underpass that would allow skiers to travel safely beneath the Sterling Highway and join up with the old trail system of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s also important to note, said Boraas, that no user fees are associated with Tsalteshi Trails. “We don’t spend much public money—hardly any—and we provide literally a world-class facility. And we encourage memberships, but no one has to pay. That’s another part of the whole thing: to create something where you didn’t have to pay every time. That level of facility, you would have to pay $10 to $20 every time you skied at an Outside place.”

Because of its inherent value, the trail system is essentially an institution now on the central peninsula, and only an extraordinary set of circumstances seems likely to threaten its existence.

“It would be political suicide (to try to eliminate the trails) because they are that entrenched,” Boraas said. “It’s a facility like the Sports Center is a facility. It’s well over a million-dollar facility.”

To Kenai Peninsula Borough land management officer Marcus Mueller, the borough’s liaison for the trail system, the value of Tsalteshi Trails is even more simple than that: “When I think about what the borough has done right with public lands,” he said, “I think of Tsalteshi as a shining star.”

Big meets are annual affairs at Tsalteshi.

Postscript: It Ain’t Shakespeare, but….

To Juliet, the name was not as important as the man who bore that name: “What’s in a name?” she asked. “That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet; so Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.”

The Tsalteshi Trails, too, without its name, would likely be the same—just as popular and just as integral to the central Kenai Peninsula. However, some would argue that the name “Tsalteshi” deepens and enhances its connection to the land upon which it sits and the heritage of the people who roamed this land before any Europeans or homesteaders set foot here.

Tsalteshi is a Dena’ina word meaning “Black Stone Axe Ridge,” and it is a good name because it is an ancient link to the land itself, not to some person who moved here from somewhere else, contends Alan Boraas, an anthropology professor at KPC.

The name came about in the mid-1990s after a third nonprofit organization, the Tsalteshi Trails Association, became the permit holder for the trail system.

In 1991, the year after the core trails (the Green, the Blue and the Red) were constructed, the Kenai Peninsula Triathlon Association, headed by Peter Ehrhardt, formed to be able to conduct triathlons on the trail system. In May 1994, members of a more ski-oriented group, including Boraas, merged with the triathlon group to form the Kenai Peninsula Aerobic Sports Association (KPASA). Then in April 1996, as the triathlon proponents began to run out of steam and skiing interest continued to flourish, the organization was renamed the Tsalteshi Trails Association, with Erin Lockwood as its first president.

The name Tsalteshi eliminated a connection to the rival cities of Soldotna and Kenai. It also eliminated a connection to any particular school. It was a more neutral choice that allowed the burgeoning trail system to stand on its own merit.

Simultaneously, said Boraas, who came up with the name, “What I was trying to do was help create a culture of the north, (which) means you have to embrace the landscape. And skiing, running and hiking do that, and other things as well—snowshoeing, canoeing, all of those things.”

So Boraas resisted naming the trail system, or even any of the trails, after individuals, although it is with some chagrin that he admits that that wasn’t his first impulse. After the trails had been in existence for only two or three years, Boraas, inspired by the naming of trail sections at Kincaid Park in Anchorage, decided to use the names of individuals to highlight and personalize parts of the trails at Skyview.

Because Skyview dominated the local skiing scene at that time, the names of Panther skiers also dominated the sections of trail, featuring such names as Collin’s Climb—one of the only original names still in common usage, though not on official maps.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t think that through very well,” Boraas said. “What that did was, it showed favoritism and was divisive. A lot of people put a lot of work into those trails. Some kids were slighted, and by now no one knows those people.”

Renaming the trails, then, was spurred on in part by a need to put signs out on the trails and help prevent skiers from getting lost. “I pushed for renaming the trails and giving them more neutral names, giving them animal names and then using the Dena’ina equivalents in keeping with the place,” Boraas said. Thus, the Green trail became the Moose (“Dnigi”), the Blue trail became the Wolf (“Tiqin“) and the Red trail became the Bear (“Ggagga“).

“There didn’t seem to be much resistance to it,” Boraas said. “By that time, everyone from that earlier crew (of skiers) had graduated, and people were still using the color names. And then we started naming intersections….”

One of the first intersections to be named—and still the best known—is Decision Point, which is formed where the Bear trail breaks off from the Wolf. In its earlier incarnation, the Bear was a particularly challenging downhill, followed by a long climb back up to Wolf. The intersection name was there to remind skiers what lay ahead of them if they chose Bear.

And by far the most well-known of the unofficial names on the course is Kill Bill Hill, applied lovingly and tongue-in-cheek to Tsalteshi’s main groomer, Bill Holt, who designed the hill.

Due to its steep descent—made necessary because the Rabbit trail had to be squeezed just inside a property line—Alan Boraas and Penny McClain applied the appellation after the first time they skied it. They meant it as a playful joke, but the name has stuck.

“Alan is strongly opposed to naming anything on the trails after people,” Holt said, “so I imagine he wishes he never would have thought this up.”