SPORTS A3
SPORTS A5
14 Baker wrestlers qualify for state
Baker swimmer heads to two state events
IN THIS EDITION: LOCAL • HOME & LIVING • SPORTS
Serving Baker County since 1870 • bakercityherald.com
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2022 • $1.50
COVID cases
drop 63.9%
in 3 weeks
QUICK HITS
—————
Good Day Wish
To A Subscriber
A special good day to
Herald subscriber Cindy
Carpenter of Baker City.
BRIEFING
—————
‘Night at Old Auburn’
scheduled Feb. 26
The Baker Heritage Muse-
um is bringing back its an-
nual “A Night at Old Auburn”
fundraiser on Saturday, Feb.
26 at the Baker Elks Lodge,
1896 Second St.
Dinner begins at 6 p.m.,
followed by gambling games
and bingo at 7 p.m. Tickets
for dinner are $40. En-
trance tickets (no dinner)
are $15. Tickets are avail-
able until Feb. 18 at the
Baker Heritage Museum,
2480 Grove St., Monday
through Friday, 10 a.m.-3
p.m. These can also be
purchased online at www.
friendsofbakerheritagemu-
seum.com.
Those who wish to support
the museum but not attend
the event can purchase
dinner tickets and pick up the
meal that night.
Brooklyn School Taco
Tuesday fundraiser
continues
Throughout February, D&J
Taco Shop, El Erradero, De-
licioso Mexican Restaurant,
and MC Taco Bus will donate
a percentage of proceeds
on Tuesdays to Brooklyn
Primary School.
WEATHER
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Today
37/19
Mostly sunny
Wednesday
39/13
Mostly cloudy
Full forecast on the back
of the B section.
The space below is for a postage label
for issues that are mailed.
BY JAYSON JACOBY
jjacoby@bakercityherald.com
Lindianne Sarno/Contributed Photo
Art Roamers (Susan and Jeff Jentzsch, left) and Snake River Music Gardens (Arthur Sappington and Lindianne Sarno,
right) are working to strengthen the connection between Baker County and Uganda.
Baker’s Uganda connection
BY LISA BRITTON
lbritton@bakercityherald.com
T
wo organizations with ties to
Baker County are extending
their reach to Africa.
The most visible is Art Roamers,
owned by Jeff and Susan Jentzsch,
which brings metal animal sculp-
tures created by African artists to
the sidewalks of Baker City every
summer. By bringing the artwork
— which is for sale — to the United
States, Art Roamers makes it acces-
sible to a wider audience.
The other nonprofit is Snake
River Music Gardens, founded by
Art Sappington and his wife and
colleague, music educator Lindi-
anne Sarno.
Snake River Music Gardens has
supported His Grace Children’s
Home, an orphanage in Uganda,
for about two years.
Sarno said she was talking about
the orphanage at church when a
friend mentioned Art Roamers.
“I took that as divine guidance
so I got in touch with them,” she
said.
With their shared connection to
Uganda, these two organizations
are spreading the word about how
Baker County can help the African
country.
Sarno and Sappington will join
the Art Roamers’ First Friday event
on March 4, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Art Roamers is at 1902 Main St.,
with the entrance on the north side
of Court Plaza.
100 Families
To gain more support for His
Grace Children’s Home, Sarno
launched the 100 Families Cam-
paign to find sponsors for the 35
The number of new COVID-19 cases in
Baker County continues to decline, and the
trend is accelerating.
The county reported 66 cases for the
most recent week, Feb. 6-12.
That’s a 42.6% drop from the previous
week, and the third straight week with
fewer cases.
Since the county set a record high with
183 cases from Jan. 16-22, the weekly totals
have dropped to 165 (9.8% weekly drop)
and to 115 (30.3%).
Over the three-week pe-
riod, cases have dropped
by 63.9%.
“We are seeing less
cases,” Nancy Staten, di-
rector of the Baker County
Health Department, said
on Monday morning, Feb.
Staten
14. “We’ll take it.”
The most recent weekly total of 66 was
the fewest in a week since Dec. 26-Jan. 1,
when there were 29 cases.
That’s just before the surge caused by the
highly contagious omicron variant began
to spread across Oregon, resulting in re-
cord numbers of cases statewide.
But as has been seen in other countries
where omicron spread earlier, as well as in
the eastern part of the U.S., cases plummet
after the omicron wave peaks.
Oregon’s trends prompted the Oregon
Health Authority (OHA) to announce last
week that the state’s mask mandate for indoor
public spaces will end by March 31, and po-
tentially earlier if the number of COVID-19
patients in hospitals dips below 400.
See, COVID/Page A2
Lindianne Sarno/Contributed Photo
Waiswa John Billy is the director of Youth in Act-Uganda, which includes His
Grace Children’s Home.
orphans who live at the orphanage.
“At this point we have 15 fami-
lies helping us,” Sarno said. “Our
support program is unique because
100% of donations go right to the
orphanage. Snake River Music
Gardens covers all processing fees.”
Sarno is in frequent contact with
Waiswa John Billy, who is director
of the orphanage.
The campaign, she said, will help
“stabilize the orphanage budget
and find sponsors and grandpar-
ents for the 35 children.”
“It’s not just the money,” Sarno
said. “It’s the love, and the feeling
that he can rely on us.”
Experts needed
Sarno said another way to help
is to share expertise, especially for
agricultural practices.
For instance, Sappington is
helping the orphanage become
food self-reliant with gardens,
a permaculture food forest, and
beehives.
A capital project at the orphan-
age is to finish a building as an
office for Joseph Mulopi, an agri-
culturist who took a permaculture
design course through Oregon
State University.
Haines city
councilor runs
for governor
Peter Hall is seeking the
Democratic nomination
BY JAYSON JACOBY
jjacoby@bakercityherald.com
Peter Hall is a Democrat
running for Oregon gov-
ernor who wants to dis-
tinguish himself not only
from Republicans in the
race, but also from candi-
dates from his own party.
Hall, 69, has lived in
Hall
Haines since 2004 and is a
member of the Haines City Council.
See, Uganda/Page A2
See, Hall/Page A2
Season for stubborn inversion waning
BY JAYSON JACOBY
jjacoby@bakercityherald.com
Jay Breidenbach aug-
ments the traditional sym-
bols of Valentine’s Day with
something you won’t find a
card for, or printed on one
of those molar-crunching
candy hearts.
But it’s a celebration that
many Baker County residents
likely would appreciate, and
perhaps as much as a flower
bouquet or box of chocolates.
“Valentine’s Day is what we
like to call the end of the in-
version season,” said Breiden-
bach, the warning coordi-
nation meteorologist at the
National Weather Service’s
Boise office.
And what an inversion sea-
son it has been for Baker Val-
ley and some other valleys in
Baker and southern Union
counties.
An inversion, as its name
implies, inverts — which is to
say, reverses — the usual at-
mospheric situation in which
TODAY
Issue 116
12 pages
the air gets colder as you gain
elevation.
Typically the tempera-
ture drops by 3.5 to 5 degrees
for every 1,000 vertical feet.
Which explains why it’s gener-
ally chillier at Anthony Lakes,
elevation 7,100 feet, than at the
Baker City Airport, 3,373 feet.
But when certain ingredi-
ents come together — snow
on the ground, clear skies,
light winds and no significant
storms rolling inland from the
Pacific — inversions can form
in the mountain valleys of
Eastern Oregon and Western
Idaho, Breidenbach said.
And the weather is most
likely to whip up that recipe
between Thanksgiving and
Valentine’s Day, those two hol-
idays serving as bookends for
the unofficial inversion season.
Inversions can form earlier
and later, he said.
But one of the ingredients
— solid snow cover — isn’t
common in valleys earlier in
autumn, and after Valentine’s
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Day cold fronts that bring
strong winds usually are
more frequent.
The gusty winds that both
precede and follow late win-
ter and spring storms prevent
cold, dense air from pooling in
the valleys, Breidenbach said.
During midwinter weather
doldrums, however, when a
ridge of high pressure some-
times loiters over the North-
west, those scouring winds
tend to be absent, he said.
That ridge has been atypi-
cally persistent since the sec-
ond week of January, Breiden-
bach said.
After Jan. 7, when the high
temperature was 47 at the
Baker City Airport, it didn’t
get as warm as 40 for the rest
of January.
February has brought only
slight relief from the omni-
present chill.
The high at the airport on
Feb. 9 was 41, starting a run
of four days in five with tem-
peratures of 40 or higher. The
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peak, as of Feb. 13, was 45 de-
grees on Feb. 11.
But even with that modest
respite, Baker Valley was no-
tably colder than most of the
rest of Eastern Oregon, includ-
ing places, such as Burns and
La Grande, that typically have
comparable temperatures over
an extended period.
For the first 13 days of Feb-
ruary, the average high tem-
perature at the Baker City Air-
port was 33.4 degrees.
At the Burns Airport the av-
erage high was 48.9 degrees.
The high temperature was 49
or higher on nine straight days,
Feb. 5-13, topping out at an
April-like 62 on Feb. 10.
The difference in night-
time lows was similarly dra-
matic — 7.6 degrees at Baker
City, 21.2 at Burns.
So why did Burns bask in
spring warmth while Baker
City continued to shiver?
Breidenbach said the chief
factor likely was snow —
Baker had (and has) it, while
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much of the snow around
Burns melted earlier.
Without widespread snow
cover, the ground in the Burns
area could absorb more heat,
Breidenbach said.
That prevented a thin, dense
layer of chilly air from forming
near the ground — a key as-
pect in an inversion, he said.
In Baker Valley, meanwhile,
the persistent snow cover re-
flected much of the sun’s heat,
and at night, with mostly clear
skies, what little heat there
was easily and quickly radi-
ated back into the atmosphere,
Breidenbach said.
This fortified the inver-
sion here, he said, while the
lack of snow, and the resulting
warmer temperatures in the
Burns area, prevented the in-
version from forming there.
The prospect for relief ar-
rived, appropriately enough,
on Valentine’s Day in the form
of the strongest cold front
in more than a month that
should dissipate the inversion.
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