Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 14, 2016)
10A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2016 Adventurer: Nelson will take next year off Warrenton: Mayor Continued from Page 1A “Really good days on the water, I’ve been doing up to 40” miles, he said. “And really bad days when it’s too windy or whatever, then I’ve had to take a few days off completely.” By the end of July, Nelson had reached the source of the Missouri River in Three Forks, Montana, and begun a 500- mile hike through the Rocky Mountains. On Aug. 6, Nel- son reached Lemhi Pass and the Continental Divide on the Ida- ho-Montana border. “I looked down into Idaho and the Columbia watershed,” Nelson wrote on his adven- ture blog the day of his arrival. “This was a huge landmark for Lewis and Clark, and for me as well, one I’d been imagining for many months.” Nelson hiked north along the Continental Divide, before crossing Lolo Pass into Idaho. He relaunched his kayak into the Clearwater River in Oroino, Idaho, Aug. 23, and began his downstream journey. He reached the Snake River Aug. 24, and the Columbia River Sept. 3. Colter Nelson pulled into the Port of Astoria’s East End Mooring Basin in his kayak around noon Tuesday, less than six months after starting his journey. The Corps of Discovery, which reached the Paciic on Nov. 15, 1805, took 18 months. After having a “river angel” pick up his kayak, Nelson took after a member of the Corps of Discovery and the irst Euro- pean to explore the region of Yellowstone National Park and the Teton Mountain Range. “I had just inished a book about John Colter from the Lewis and Clark expedition,” Nelson said. “I knew he was an admirable person, so I chose that name for myself.” Particularly enamoring to Nelson was a decision by Col- ter while the Corps of Discov- ery was returning east to join frontiersmen Forest Hancock and Joseph Dickson in North Dakota. Colter asked to be hon- orably discharged so he could guide Hancock and Dickson on their search for furs in the upper Missouri River the Corps had already explored. Life of adventure Bruce Nelson/Submitted Photo Bruce “Buck” Nelson reached the headwaters of the Missouri River, the longest in the U.S. at more than 2,300 miles, by the end of July while retracing the Lewis and Clark Nation- al Historic Trail. off on foot, reaching Fort Clat- sop Tuesday before inishing his journey to the Paciic on the Fort to Sea Trail. About 15 years ago, when he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Nelson said he was trying to decide on a trail name, a com- mon practice among long-dis- tance hikers. He eventually decided to call himself Colter, Nelson, 58, caught the adventure bug early while growing up on a dairy farm in Minnesota. “I think people are kind of wired a certain way, and when I was a little kid … my brother and I, we used to go out in the woods and goof around,” Nel- son said. “We would go out for two or three days on a week- end, and just not bring any food and live off the land. So yeah, I think it’s just kind of the way I’m wired.” The biggest adventure of his life, he said, was as a smoke jumper for the federal Bureau of Land Management from 1981 to 2008. He retired in Alaska, where he still lives in a 16-by-20-foot cabin northeast of Fairbanks, with an oil-burning stove and no running water. One of Nelson’s irst big treks was a 700-mile solo cari- bou hunt by foot and raft in the wilds of Alaska in 2000. He would subsequently trek solo across the Alaskan wilderness, and write a book — “Alone in the Fortress of the Bears” — about surviving off the land on Admiralty Island, home to more than 1,600 Alaskan brown bears. He has climbed the 20,000- foot Denali, the highest moun- tain in North America; Argen- tina’s Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside Asia at 22,838 feet; and Tanzania’s 19,300-foot Kilimanjaro, the highest moun- tain in Africa. In 2001, Nelson completed his irst hike from south to north across the U.S. on the Appa- lachian Trail. A week later, he began a 2,300-mile canoe trip down the Mississippi River. Since then, Nelson has also completed the Paciic Crest, Continental Divide and Desert trails from Mexico to Canada. “I like big, epic, outdoor challenges,” he said. “It’s just really satisfying. You get to see a lot of things you wouldn’t nor- mally see. “Some people will try to walk around the globe,” Nel- son said. “And that is one that wouldn’t interest me personally. “The Lewis and Clark Trail had a great personal interest to me, and it was something that is hardly ever done.” Nelson said he will take the next year off before any more epic adventures. Blob: La Niña is shaping up to be weak Continued from Page 1A enormous zone of overall warmth extending west from the coasts of Washington state and Oregon, north to Alaska. Less of an SOB? So far at least, this “Son of a Blob” isn’t shaping up to be as much of a bad boy as its old man. Washington State Climatol- ogist Nick Bond said Monday that, “Indeed the blob is getting kind of reinvigorated. … I doubt whether the magnitude of the anomalies will approach those that we observed during the last couple of years. It does stack the deck slightly for warmer weather during the next cou- ple of seasons, but not to a great extent.” Bond said he thinks our upcoming winter will not be “quite as toasty as the last two,” in part because an “upwelling favorable wind the past summer cooled off the water to normal or even slightly cooler than normal right near the coast.” La Niña prospects fade The Son of a Blob arrives just as climate experts have ofi- cially declared this will not be a La Niña winter. The lip side of more-famous El Niño condi- tions that inluenced the warm winter of 2015-16, La Niña is a pattern of unusually cold surface waters in the equatorial Paciic Ocean. It tends to bring wetter and cooler winter conditions to the Paciic Northwest. “Because La Niña is shaping up to be a weak sister, my hopes for a cold winter seem unlikely to be fulilled,” Bond said. On Sept. 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will issue its new 30- and 90-day long-range forecasts, and will try to deter- mine how the Son of a Blob will inluence our weather in a win- ter with neutral conditions — neither El Niño nor La Niña. The original Blob A result of a persistent zone of high atmospheric pressure in our part of the Paciic, the original Blob created “highly unusual weather,” Bond said at the 2016 Paciic County Marine Science Conference in Long Beach in May. Ocean conditions made their way onto dry land in the form of drought and record tempera- tures — “2015 was by far the warmest year we’ve had in the Cascades” and “Oct. 1, 2014 through September 2015 (was a time of) record warmth in much of the Northwest.” Wide- spread forest ires and possibly the largest documented seabird mortality event in world his- tory were linked to the 2013- 15 Blob. Weather and sea life mal in a wide band along the coast, as a group.” At this spring’s science con- ference, Bond predicted the Blob would come back, but didn’t expect it to do so this soon. Asked about this Monday, Bond said, “Whether I am sur- prised or not is a good question. I have been surprised at how strong and persistent the tem- perature anomalies have been, in both the ocean and atmo- sphere, and so it takes a lot to startle me at this point.” Kujala said regulations are meant to be preemptive Continued from Page 1A “If things need to be tweaked, we can tweak it,” Urling said. In addition, Seaside also has a set of “Good Neighbor Rules” — a ban on excessive noise, for example — so rent- ers “are aware that they need to behave themselves,” Url- ing said. “And I don’t think those are particularly draco- nian. It’s just wanting them to be considerate.” A complaint procedure for aggrieved neighbors will be part of Warrenton’s regu- lation package, Urling said, though he doesn’t anticipate a raft of problems. “If it’s once in a blue moon, it’s probably some- thing the neighbors learn to live with. But if it becomes a chronic problem, then there is a remedy, at least for them to get notice to the city that this is a constant problem,” he said. “And at that point, the city can step in and talk with the owner of the vaca- tion rental.” Preemptive measures Police Chief Mathew Workman said it would be helpful if his department could collect phone numbers for responsible parties at the rental locations in case some- thing untoward goes down. Keeping tabs on an ever-changing contact list could be dificult, espe- cially if the rentals turn over weekly, he said. But as long as property managers can be contacted and advised of problems — or at least can put oficers in touch with renters — enforcement should be doable, he said. The police department already deals with responsi- ble parties listed on RV per- mits in a similar fashion, he added. City Commissioner Henry Balensifer asked if the city has the manpower to enforce new code requirements. “It’s going to be a func- tion of how many vacation rental applications we get,” Urling replied. “If we get half a dozen a year, yeah. If we get 60, no.” Mayor Mark Kujala said the proposed regulations are meant to be preemptive. “We don’t have a lot of these (vacation rentals) in existence, and we have none that are oficial, and now we’re having a mechanism in order to process those,” he said. Paciic Seafood In other business Tues- day night, the City Com- mission approved a proposal from Kennedy/Jenks Con- sultants, an engineering irm, to develop an agreement between the city and Paciic Seafood Group regarding the seafood company’s future use of wastewater. Paciic Seafood Group — whose Warrenton plant burned down in 2013 — has decided to rebuild. But irst the company must estimate start-up and operating costs. The agreement will pro- vide information about a rate structure that covers the city’s costs associated with treating the Paciic Seafood Group’s wastewater. The company will use the infor- mation to determine the fea- sibility of various rebuilding plans, according to the staff report. The commission’s approval for the pro- posal, however, hinges on whether the city can secure grant funding through the state Infrastructure Finance Authority. The commission- ers committed to a 15 percent cash match for funding Ken- nedy/Jenks Consultants’ pro- posed engineering study. Paciic Seafood Group aims to inish construction in spring 2017, Kujala said. “That’s ambitious, but we are going to be support- ive of that, and nothing that we do will be delaying that,” he said. “We’re making sure that they have everything to move forward.” Mass said Sunday that experimental modeling he con- ducted found a modest 1 to 2 degrees increase in land tem- peratures from the original Blob. But even that amount of addi- tional warmth can have a notice- able inluence on snowpack and other terrestrial conditions in the Paciic Northwest. In terms of its impacts, the new Son of a Blob “proba- bly is more meaningful to the marine ecosystem, particu- larly if the models used for sea- sonal weather prediction are on the right track,” Bond said this week. “They are showing water being something like 1 to 1.5 C (1.8 to 2.7 degrees F) above nor- Making Healthcare Work for You Get the tools you need to navigate the healthcare system better. Join us for a community health literacy fair for all ages! September 19, 2016 2-5pm, Astoria Senior Center (1111 Exchange Street, Astoria, OR) Get tools for: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Talking with your doctor. Getting the most out of your insurance. Managing your medical costs. Reading your bill and insurance statement. Making end-of-life decisions. Finding community assistance. Schedule of events: 2pm Opening Remarks, City Councilor Zetty Nemlowill 3pm “Making the Most of Your Medical Appointment” by Foot & Ankle Surgeon Dr. Michael Murdock 4pm “Health Coaching: Put your plans into action” by Venus Fromwiller, Health Coach 2111 Exchange St., Astoria, Oregon • 503-325-4321 www.columbiamemorial.org • A Planetree-Designated Hospital
