Money for Kenai trail sent south

ANCHORAGE - The dream of the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Huts Association for 30 miles of new backcountry trail connecting four shelters on the Kenai Peninsula appears to have gone up in the smoke of Western forest fires this summer.

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Alaska officials with the U.S. Forest Service say the entire $500,000 that U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, earmarked for construction of new trail and the huts in the Paradise Valley area of the Chugach National Forest near Seward went south to help pay for firefighting.

Volunteers who have spent five futile years trying to create a hut-to-hut hiking opportunity in the 49th state are frustrated.

"I'm disappointed," said John Wolfe, chairman of the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Huts Association. "As it stretches out and stretches out, this volunteer organization is spread thin. ... Nobody in this organization anticipated this years-long planning."

Hut proponents thought they had succeeded in the summer of 2002. They had come up with a detailed plan - including technical and financial studies - for resurrecting an old trail system in Paradise Valley, an area east of the Seward Highway about 10 miles north of that Resurrection Bay community, and Stevens had come through with funding.

A member of Stevens' staff read about the association's hut proposal and liked the idea. A funding recommendation was made to the senator, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. He slipped a $500,000 appropriation for the plan into a $19 billion federal spending bill.

But the Forest Service decided that an environmental assessment was needed before the project could proceed. Before that was done, the West caught fire.

By August, with the West in flames, Washington officials ordered the Alaska region to come up with $13.7 million as its contribution to help fund firefighting efforts, Forest Service regional spokesman Ray Massey said. That amounted to more than 11 percent of the region's $117 million annual budget.

Not only was the bite big, Massey said, but it came late in the year - after significant parts of the budget had already been spent.

The money for the huts system was particularly ripe for the picking because it hadn't been allocated. It was simply sitting in the budget waiting to be spent once the environmental assessment was done, and it hadn't yet begun.

Wolfe said conversations with Stevens office convinced him the senator is behind the project and the money will be replenished in next year's budget.

Wolfe said he still thinks the Chugach National Forest offers the best opportunity a for hut-to-hut hiking system in Alaska. The forest already boasts a series of public-use cabins along the Resurrection Pass Trail that provide a similar experience - or could if they were more readily available.

Those cabins are usually booked by individuals for anywhere from several days to a week most of the summer, rendering them unusable by the average hiker.

Unlike these public-use cabins, huts would house 12 to 20 people and be available on a day-to-day basis. Huts are intended only to aid people traveling hiking routes, while the Forest Service administers the cabins as small, wild-country retreats for families or groups.

Some other countries and states have hut-to-hut hiking or ski routes. They are particularly popular in Europe and help support hikers along the Appalachian Trail.

The Mountaineering Club of Alaska maintains what could be considered a hut-to-hut system for glacier skiing. The club huts are popular but accessible only to people with mountaineering skills.

The hut system wasn't the only high-profile Alaska program to get hit. The Forest Service also had to sacrifice "some money for a helicopter EIS (environmental impact statement) we were supposed to help out the city of Juneau with," Massey said.