Homer Alaska - News -

If anything connects NRCS projects, it's water, whether water for cattle or water to run Homer's local power supply. We soared over Grewingk Glacier and past pale-blue icefields hanging down mountain sides. In a stream valley near Nuka Glacier, we set down by what looks like a big blue upside-down umbrella a snow survey site. The umbrella collects snow, and instruments measure and then transmit data on snow depth and accumulation, as well as rainfall. Under a contract with the Alaska Energy Authority, NRCS runs the site. In the grand calculus of hydropower, snow equals water equals power, and how much water the Bradley Lake Hydroelectric Project can use determines how much of up to 120 megawatts can be generated for the Southcentral Alaska power grid.

From the Kenai Mountains snow pack, water flows along a 610-foot tunnel from Bradley Lake to the business end of a giant nozzle at the hydroelectric plant. There, Homer Electric Association power plant superintendent Mike Teinert showed us how all that water spins a Pelton wheel a finely engineered water wheel designed to most efficiently use the power of flowing water. Two turbines spin generators at a steady 300 RPMs and with a carbon footprint of almost zero.

"By and large these machines are pretty durable," Teinert said. "It's a sweet rig. It's a clean, beautiful plant."

The power project lies across the Fox River Flats from the Russian Old Believer villages at the end of East End Road and the homesteads of cattlemen like Rainwater and Bruce Willard. We hopped over to a herd of Willard's cattle, at first looking like a moose hunter's dream, almost 200 animals spread across grasslands at the edge of a new spruce forest between the Fox and Sheep rivers. Under grazing leases monitored by NRCS, the Fox River Cattlemen's Association runs its herds on almost 17,000 acres in the Fox River Flats and Kachemak Bay critical habitat areas. A barbed-wire exclosure keeps cattle out of a patch of vegetation so NRCS scientists can compare natural versus grazed land. The grassland looks healthy, but an advancing spruce forest worried Rainwater, for with time the forest could take over the flats a broad river delta that sank in the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake.

Photo by Michael Armstrong Bradley Lake power plant superintendent Mike Teinert explains how a Pelton wheel is spun by water to generate power.

Back in the helicopter, we followed the cattle trails up to Willard's spread, one of the earliest homesteads on Kachemak Bay. Tight bales of rolled hay laid among freshly mowed hay hay that Willard hadn't baled during a short window of sunny weather because a part broke on his baling machine. "Make hay while the sun shines" isn't just a saying among ranchers. Ranchers also are farmers, raising the hay to feed their cattle through the winter.

Willard and his two grandsons greeted our tour as we landed by his hay barn, McMansion-sized among small cabins and sheds. The Willard family homesteaded in 1946, and Bruce Willard staked his land in 1958. We ate lunch in Willard's old cabin. A radio played 24-7 to keep bears and squirrels away, Willard said. He wore a ball cap that reads "Agriculture Counts" and has a smile as broad as his land.

Around late September, Willard and other ranchers drive their cattle up to their ranches on the hills on the north side of Kachemak Bay. Most people don't mind the cattle grazing on the flats, and the only whining Willard hears are when cattle block trails and roads on the drives.

"You get a couple hundred head of cattle (on the road), people complain," Willard said.

Photo by Michael Armstrong Arlen Lancaster, far left, Chief of the U.S. National Resources Conservation Service, talks with Robert Jones, State Conservationist for the National Resources Conservation Service, second from left, Mark Kinney, District Conservationist, NRCS, and Bruce Willard, far right, of the Kachemak Bay Cattlemen's Association, at Willard's rance at the end of East End Road. Lancaster was on a tour of NRCS project areas at the head of Kachemak Bay and visited Willard's grazing lease on the Fox River Flats and his homestead and ranch.

"This was just a devastated area," Kinney said. "Look at the old trails that are healing up."

Back in Washington, D.C., a week later, Lancaster had time to absorb his tour of Kachemak Bay, St. Lawrence Island, Nome, Palmer and other places he visited in Alaska and what he'd learned about NRCS projects here.

"The producers I met there, they're all people who have a very strong conservation ethic," he said.

"They do have an impact on the land, and they want to make it a positive one."