My Page: Gina Knudson

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youth hockey

The National Hockey League’s New Year’s Day Winter Classic is bringing a certain nostalgia back to the sport. This year’s game pitted the Washington Capitals against the Pittsburgh Penguins with 68,000 spectators in Heinz Field in Pittsburgh and 4.5 million viewers across the country.

Messy, ice-eating rain delayed the game scheduled for afternoon until evening. When the puck finally dropped, announcers sounded as much like Weather Channel anchors as sports action commentators.

Missing from the Winter Classic: a climate controlled arena, perfect sheet of ice and predictable pattern of the puck. Talk of “old school hockey” was omnipresent. Even in Kalispell, Montana.

My daughter and I had traveled north for our third annual girls Winter Classic at the Kalispell Flames’ outdoor rink that once served as the town’s public swimming pool. Teams traveled from Idaho Falls, Salmon, Boise, Missoula and Canada to play.

Resort Review

Skiing Soldier Mountain near Fairfield, Idaho, feels sort of like a guilty pleasure. The economy in the tank, it’s no doubt wrong to celebrate parking next to the lodge and zero lift-line wait time. But great snow, meticulously groomed runs and bright sunshine are reasons to celebrate any ski experience, and Soldier delivers in spades.

Situated less than an hour southwest of Sun Valley, Soldier has all of the famous resort’s Central Idaho scenery, but none of Sun Valley’s shi-shi-la-la. No reason to hurt yourself rubber-necking at glamorous movie stars – the Humvee limos don’t bother traveling through the countryside to get to this modest resort.

Instead, the mountain that opened in 1948 draws mainly from the small surrounding agricultural communities and residents of nearby Mountain Home and Mountain Home Air Force Base, thanks to a deep discount for military members.

Even without a military discount, Peggy Freisinger is gripping her credit card receipt with a big grin. A resident of Albuquerque, Freisinger is visiting Idaho relatives for the holidays. “I just bought lift tickets for all three kids for 57 bucks,” she beams, marveling at the half-day youth prices. The Freisingers typically ski at Taos, where the bill for the family tops $400, she says.

Christmas Memories

We’re not big Santa fans in my family. At one time, there was a series of “Weeping on Santa’s Lap” photos to prove it.

I have my theories about why Kris Kringle never held much allure at our house. 1) When my brother and I were young enough to give a damn, our parents didn’t have much of a budget. I doubt they were all that anxious to attribute much Christmas loot to the phantom Santa. 2) Our main interaction with Santa was at our church Christmas party, where the heavy-set choir director jingle jangled down to the church basement every year clad in a red shag suit, asked each of us what we wanted and then proceeded to give us a brown paper sack of oranges, nuts with the shells still on, and sticky, hard candy.

So, while my parents were getting credit for my new Malibu Ken and Barbie, Santa was giving me groceries.

NEW WEST FEATURE

Dave Atkins is a long-time U.S. Forest Service employee and a champion of the agency’s Fuels for Schools program that funds wood-fired boilers to provide heating for schools. Atkins says communities get tied up in a chicken-and-egg dilemma about supply and demand in regard to a fuel-source like wood pellets. In reality, even in communities dominated by forested lands, the issue is dicey if only one facility is making the switch to wood. “If one entity needs 20 tons of pellets per year, that’s not nearly as advantageous as a community that has 10 entities each needing 20 tons of pellets per year. That’s obviously going to make things less expensive,” Atkins tutored.

At the end of the day, the group agrees that while talk about climate change is now all but irrelevant with Congress, advancing the merits of energy independence, clean energy, and job creation is the rural ticket to success. The non-partisan coalition is well-positioned to help decision-makers take off their “carbon goggles” and look at not just the potential ecological benefits of expanding woody biomass as a renewable energy, but the sidecar of other benefits, like more people working in the woods near rural communities.

NEW WEST FEATURE

Enzer looks at my numb-mind expression after the four consecutive sessions and is apologetic, in a direct, East Coaster unapologetic way. “I know, it’s messy and it’s real,” she tells me, tossing a bundle of her auburn, zig-zaggy hair over her shoulder. “This is the sausage-making part of RVCC and it’s kind of gross.” Before I can agree with what feels like a slow western drawl, Enzer continues, “It’s really hard to engage people in democracy. If we didn’t go through this tedious process, people don’t feel like it’s theirs.”

The tedious process is looking at national natural resources policy through rural goggles. RVCC attitude is like that of a friend of mine who for years sported a “No Crybabies” baseball cap. State your problem, for sure, but show up with a solution in hand. No Crybabies.

NEW WEST

The real effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act have been, are being, and will continue to be scrutinized as the nation struggles to pull itself out of the recessional quicksand. At this week’s Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition’s annual policy gathering in Troutdale, Ore., Susan Charnley of the Pacific Northwest Research Station provided hope that the approximately $1.15 billion in stimulus dollars for the United States Forest Service provided some comfort to communities throughout the country.

Charnley, a research social scientist, looked at eight case studies to determine how the agency spent the money and who benefitted, especially in rural counties experiencing what she termed “high economic distress.”

The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in southwest Oregon received one of the most generous helpings of ARRA funding – a $45 million blast for everything from hazardous fuels reduction to trail maintenance. The Forest Service used contracts – and lots of them – to get the money on the ground. Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy said giving districts the ability to break projects up into smaller jobs gave local contractors a chance to compete. Of the 53 contracts awarded to do jobs like wildfire reduction and forest health work, all but four went to local contractors.

Wildlife Watching

Hadley is a retired wildlife biologist and the most avid birder I know. He’s even written a book, “Birds of East Central Idaho.” He has big glasses and a nice laugh and reminds me of a wise old owl.

I asked him if he had seen the display and, of course, he had. He confirmed this in the same manner as though I had just asked the Pope if His Holiness was celebrating Easter Sunday. I asked Hadley if he knew where the snowgeese were heading.

Hadley explained that some of the lesser snowgeese who nested on Wrangel Island in Siberia migrated through Salmon on the way to California and even as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. He knew that because when he was spying on them a few years back at our city’s wastewater treatment plant, a snowgoose’s pink collar with tracking numbers gave the whole flock away as Ruskies.

Hockey

Come November, diehard hockey fans celebrate cold, especially when their ice rinks are uncovered and exposed to the elements. Unseasonably warm, sunny days are as unwelcome as a surprise appearance by your future mother-in-law at your bachelorette party.

Once the weeklong ritual of making ice at the Salmon hockey rink begins, sunshine makes the all-volunteer ice making team sweat. Sure, that’s partly because the team’s uniform— insulated Carhartt coveralls—is not well-suited to neotropical temperatures. Also, the go or no-go decision of when to start making ice is much debated within the local hockey community. Start too early and get struck by mild temperatures and that godforsaken sun and the refrigeration unit works nonstop, which drives power costs through the roof. Start too late and the youth hockey teams can’t practice. That means the David-versus-Goliath matchups between our teams and those from bigger towns become even more lopsided. 

Ice sports

I should mention we live in Salmon, Idaho. Missoula and Idaho Falls are about equidistant from Salmon at roughly 150 miles away. Sun Valley is a tad farther—a cool 350-mile roundtrip.  I’m hoping someone put Havre, Montana, on the schedule as a joke since that epic roundtrip journey would be a carbon busting 830 miles.

Salmon Hockey Association’s proudest achievement is our move to refrigerated ice. Since the refrigeration equipment is big enough to require its own building, I’m guessing that isn’t too tip-top for the planet, either. In our defense, we had to do something. Every winter seemed to be getting warmer and warmer and natural ice wasn’t very dependable.

No, the irony is not lost on me. 

Hunting and Fishing

Richness tends to get measured with a different yardstick here. This spring, as the national economy tried to eek out signs of life, my Central Idaho valley was experiencing irrational exuberance over the wet spring and the tall grass that prospered as a result.

We did our best not to make much of a fuss about a leaner morel mushroom season or a huckleberry crop that paled in comparison with last year’s loaded bushes. Unlike Wall Street traders, we inherently know that excess is the exception, not the rule.

It’s understandable, however, that encouraging steelhead numbers this fall caused a slight jump in inflation – mood inflation, that is. While we are by no means talking about the true abundance of our pre-dam past, it looks like steelhead will be 170 percent more plentiful than average annual returns than they have been since 2000. Wild steelhead returns are up more than 200 percent. 

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