"History Blown to Smithereens"

The well-protected Cliff House, November 1966.

HISTORY BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS

MARCH 2009

Alaskans may be accustomed to the idea of fireworks on Independence Day, but about 30 years ago Miles Dean got a little more “bang for his buck” than he had bargained for.

The problem actually began in June 1978, when John Swanson decided to install propane in his cabin called the Cliff House on upper Tustumena Lake. Swanson, the owner of Peninsula Building Supply who in 1960 had become the new City of Kenai’s first mayor, wanted gas-powered lights and a gas-powered cookstove in his place. But the installation was not error free.

According to Swanson’s son-in-law, David Letzring of Kasilof, Dave Donald went up on the lake in late June and discovered a leak in the system. Donald turned off the valve on the propane tanks and returned to Kenai to notify Swanson of the problem. A short time later, Letzring himself went up on the lake with Swanson’s son, Ron, and they, too, tested the system and found it in need of repair.

“We went in there, and yeah, you could smell the propane,” said Letzring. “We turned it off. And I told John about it, too. John says, ‘I’ll go up there and fix it up.’ This was June-something, and Dean went up there on the Fourth of July. And he goes in and turns the gas on and lights the lights, and he built a fire in the woodstove. And then he got in his boat and went over to Clear Creek to fish. And the Cliff House ceased to exist. The metal roof was almost to the glacial flat. Pieces of the place were in the lake. It was all over. There was nothing left. It blew up. It was just like a little bomb.”

The Cliff House had disappeared. And in the wake of its destruction, a piece of Kenai Peninsula history that may have dated back as far as 1910 vanished, too.

Both Gary Titus, a historian for the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and George Pollard, who has lived in the Tustumena area since the late 1930s, agree that the original builder of the Cliff House was August “Gust” Ness. The first historical mention of the structure can be found in a 1921 entry in the diary of big-game guide Andrew Berg, who lived on Tustumena Lake in the early 1900s.

Ness selected an ideal location for his log structure: near the back end of Devils Bay, on a small point of sandy land just below a set of cliffs that inspired the name and provided shelter from glacial winds. Protected also by a stand of spruce along the northern and eastern sides, the cabin was a safe haven in nearly all bad weather. According to Pollard, it was

Cliff House on Tustumena Lake, November 1966.

vulnerable only to a strong wind out of the southwest.

The cabin door faced roughly west toward the cliffs, near the entrance of a trail to Tustumena Glacier. The picture window faced in a southerly direction, and Pollard recalls sitting at the table by the window to watch brown bears feeding on spawning sockeye on Clear Creek less than a quarter-mile away.

By the 1960s a steep metal roof, with a long gable over the front porch, provided protection from the rain and easily shed the snow. In the open, empty space between roof and ceiling boards had been dumped loads of sand as insulation. Letzring remembers that after a night in the Cliff House, he needed to brush off his sleeping bag because sand continually sifted through the boards.



Big-game trophies decorated the exterior walls
 of the Cliff House in the early 1970s.

By the 1970s, the southern exterior wall was draped with several sets of moose antlers. The eastern wall, too, featured an array of trophies, including at least two bear hides.

When Ness died of a heart attack in 1937, the cabin passed into the possession of Tony Johansen, whom Titus, Pollard and Letzring believe was either Ness’s nephew or his son. According to Alaska’s No. 1 Guide by Titus and Catherine Cassidy, Johansen, via his mother’s first marriage, was the son of Mary Ness. The book also states that when Mary wed Gust in about 1924, she was known as Mary Demidoff Johansen, suggesting that perhaps in this union Gust became Tony’s step-father.

Tony Johansen hung onto the Cliff House until 1951, the year (according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service records) that Swanson reported that he purchased the cabin. According to Once Upon the Kenai, Swanson moved to Kenai in 1952, but he was in Kodiak for many years, and later in Anchorage, prior to the move and may have made the purchase then.

The Cliff House was considered Swanson’s property for most of three decades, and, at the time of the explosion, no one was living permanently on the lake any longer. When Tustumena Lake passed from being part of the Chugach National Forest to part of the Kenai National Moose Range in 1941, federal officials allowed individuals living on the lake to stay in homes on unpatented land until their deaths. No new cabins were allowed on refuge land, however, and many of the old cabins either deteriorated badly or became the temporary shelters for hunters traveling up into the hills for big game.

Gold miner Joe Secora was the last of the numerous old-timers who once could be found living year-round on the lake, and his death in a plane crash in 1972 signaled an end to an era.

But the obliteration of the Cliff House was not the end of this particular story, at least according to Letzring. He said that Swanson came to him to August 1978 and told him that he had unwritten permission from the refuge to rebuild the cabin. “He says we can rebuild it, but we gotta get it done right now, this year,” Letzring said.

Titus is skeptical of Swanson’s claim. To allow a single instance of building, or rebuilding, a private cabin on the refuge, he said, is to “open a can of worms.”

“I don’t think so,” Titus said. “If that would have been done, it would have been illegal because that was federal land. If you give one person permission to do that, you’d have to give everyone permission.”



John Swanson, with friends George Calvin and Joe Megargel, poses
at the front of the Cliff House in August 1975.

When Bob Richey, who was the assistant manager of the moose range at the time, learned recently of Swanson’s claim, he said, “I have never heard that. I can’t believe that is likely, and I think I would remember.”

Whether Swanson truly had permission to rebuild, he moved forward with his plans to do so, Letzring said. Swanson and a handful of his friends—most notably George Calvin and Chuck Raymond of Kasilof—began gathering materials and storing them in Raymond’s Quonset hut on the Tustumena Lake road. Letzring said they were waiting for winter snow and freeze-up so they could use snowmobiles to haul in the materials over the ice.

Late that year, however, Swanson was diagnosed with liver cancer and traveled Outside for treatment. Without his leadership, Letzring said, the heart went out of the rebuilding effort. “The spark plug wasn’t there,” he said.

Swanson died in 1982, and to this day the small sandy point remains devoid of a cabin, which is how the federal government plans to keep it. According to Richey, who said he spent many nights at the Cliff House in his 26 years with USFWS, the greatest loss in the destruction of the cabin was not the structure itself, but the log book inside that was also destroyed. That book, he said, contained a wealth of names and histories that can never be fully recovered.

Although some of that lost history has been forgotten, the fireworks on that particular Fourth of July were something to remember.