Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891
Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891
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Twenty-five years ago, Al Dunlop started drawing the plans for the steam sternwheeler, Cheng-tze. Stephen Morrison fell in love with steam engines in the north of England almost 40 years ago and bought the Linda J in 2002. Both members of the NW Steam Society travel many miles to visit with friends and share their boats—Dunlop comes from Spokane and Morrison from Tucson, Arizona. Morrison fell in love with steam engines in the early 1970’s. He was looking for good bike parts in the north of England for the bicycle shop he ran, when he s...
Got Steam? The Northwest Steam Society bumper sticker says it all. The group--home to a steam donkey, a calliope, remote controlled model steam boats, and vessels of all configurations--held its annual meet at the Elochoman Marina last weekend. The club has 275 members, most from Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. The group rotates annual meets throughout the region. Lew Parsons of Hoodsport brought a larger than life steam donkey, permanently mounted to a lowboy trailer. It sat in the parking lot at the marina drawing loggers and others...
Cathlamet Mayor George Wehrfritz gave his predecessor, Mayor Dick Swart, credit for success in funding a new wastewater treatment plant for Cathlamet during a celebration Tuesday marking receipt of a $7,483,000 check, representing an approximately $2.5 million grant and $5 million loan package from United States Department of Agriculture. Wehrfritz read a message from the former mayor who was at the dentist in Astoria during the presentation. The sewer plant will move onto land purchased from the Wahkiakum School District across SR 4 and will...
Melissa Wong will soon be leaving the community garden in Cathlamet’s Erickson Park to study Culinary Arts in Portland, but the work she’s begun to engage children should continue to bear fruit. Wong, who is 23, attended the University of California at Davis and has a degree in Food Science and Sustainable Agriculture. “I surround myself with food,” she said, laughing. “As soon as I saw the job (in Cathlamet) I was interested,” Wong said. She is an Americorps volunteer working 32-hours a week to increase healthy food consumption among Women...
The Wahkiakum Public Utility District board of commissioners met briefly Tuesday for updates on Bonneville Power Administration wholesale power rates and current projects before they held an executive session to discuss litigation. The board authorized General Manager David Tramblie to call for bids for the transformer needed at the new Wahkiakum Substation. Construction is expected to start next summer. Tramblie said engineers expect the project to cost about $2.8 million. Tramblie reported the leak that has been plaguing the Westend Water Sys...
The Wahkiakum Chinook wedge that a Portland couple found in 2008 is a welcome addition to the Friends of Skamokawa’s collection, said FOS archivist Keith Hoofnagle. The seven-inch long wedge shows the chipping that formed it. Native tribes made wedges of varying sizes from wood, often yew, or from antler. European immigrants used wedges to split logs also, according to local historian Irene Martin. Chinook wooden wedges were wrapped at the top with a cedar withe to keep them from splitting when hammered by stone mauls. “That was their nyl...
The Wahkiakum Public Utility District board of commissioners adopted a code of conduct for board members at its meeting July 19. While the resolution does not contain penalties, board members are required to conduct themselves ethically and lawfully, and with proper decorum. The board also passed a resolution reducing required reserves of the Western Wahkiakum Water system to $20,000 from $40,000 for the next three years. The water system required an updated comprehensive plan expected to cost $21,500 and requires expensive work to fix a leak...
The Wahkiakum County Board of Equalization this week is presenting a plan for handling property assessments from Puget Island. Board Chair Nick Nikkala, Deep River, and Clerk Colleen Haley, Grays River, reviewed progress on Puget Island appeals at the Tuesday meeting of the board of county commissioners. Nikkala reported that Haley had put in hundreds of hours and about 200 hours or work still remain. Nikkala said the board had established classifications for parcels on Puget Island, verified sales data from 2006-2010, and made a trending...
Wahkiakum County Commissioners Dan Cothren, Blair Brady and Lisa Marsyla, who participated by phone from her vacation in California, discussed Indian Jack Slough habitat restoration, a deteriorating culvert on the Elochoman River, and handled other business during their meeting Tuesday. Dan Friesz leads Columbia Land Trust’s habitat restoration project for the 185 acre property at SR 4 opposite the Julia Butler Hansen Refuge, called the Indian Jack Slough property. The Columbia Land Trust’s plan will result in the filling of nearly 3,500 fee...
Skamokawa Vista Park, one of Wahkiakum County’s treasures, is the result of three local Grangers’ efforts to cash in on federal government development funds. Years after Wahkiakum Port District 2 was formed, the port bought the site that would become Skamokawa Vista Park. The 75-acre park that now features camping, yurts, RV sites, day use and picnic areas and baseball and tennis courts, along with beaches, a boat ramp and stunning views downriver, began when Carlton Appelo of Rosburg, Robert Larson of Grays River and Ture Oman of Puget Isl...
The heart of the Appelo Archive Center in Naselle is hundreds of feet of video tape recording the lives of people in western Wahkiakum County and eastern Pacific County, but the Center is multi-faceted and still growing. On the first floor, the former Appelo grocery store houses Bobbi Caton’s Creative Flair Flower Shop as well as the archive’s gift shop and visitor center, with a Grays River covered bridge exhibit on display. Upstairs, where Santa once visited children when the grocery operated, there is an elevator-sized display of local wom...
Bob Jungers is proud of Elochoman Millwork, a Cathlamet company whose primary market is the highest of high end homes in Hawaii. The business produces doors and does custom millwork for residential and commercial facilities like hotels, condominiums and time-shares. Bob and Dawn Jungers began the business in 1984, which currently has 15 employees, some of whom are family. Jungers handles sales, bidding and purchasing, his nephew, Robert (Roman) Jungers is the chief engineer who works with computer assisted machines and scheduling. Jungers’ w...
In a short meeting on Wednesday, the Wahkiakum school board approved the state legislature’s 1.9 percent cut to teacher salaries, even though they may find a way to reimburse staff for their losses. Directors Tony Boyce, Michelle Budd and Lee Tischer voted unanimously to approve the salary schedule; Mike Quigley and Tina Schubert were absent. The board also adopted a new $27,000 elementary school math curriculum for the elementary school. Wahkiakum Public Utility District commission appointee, Gene Healy from Puget Island, introduced himself t...
Hoping to piggy back on teaching methods that keep Singapore’s students ranked high in math proficiency, the Wahkiakum School District’s board followed elementary school teachers’ recommendations to adopt Math in Focus, a new curriculum for $27,000 at its June meeting. First grade teacher Jamie Cothren described her students breaking numbers into parts and doing sums such as 47 plus 23, easily with the strategy. “The curriculum has a strong emphasis on problem solving with a focus on in-depth understanding of essential math skills,” Leitz said....
A Wahkiakum Community Network grant of $1500 has prompted an infusion of youthful energy into the Blanche Bradley Public Library. Under the grant, Keisha Harris, a recent Wahkiakum High School graduate, sophomore Paris Cothren and junior Brittaney Martin interned at the library, handed out 31 new library cards, visited other libraries for youth-friendly ideas and best practices, queried their peers, and came up with a list of books they’d like to see in the library. The youth worked with Town librarian Connie Christopher and volunteer Toni Hard...
When Toni Robinson, local a real estate broker, saw the butcher block table sitting in the basement of John Ackerman’s farm, she knew she wanted it. “Butcher block is something I’ve always been attracted to,” she said, in her Puget Island kitchen, proudly displaying the newly refurbished butcher block table. “My father hunted. That’s what we ate. He took deer and elk to be cut and wrapped by Mel Coates at his meat cutting plant and cold storage on Broadway in Cathlamet. This is the table that was used to butcher that meat,” she said. The tab...
JoAnn Prestegard is putting away her hair cutting scissors after 50 years as a hair stylist. “First we were beauticians, then we were hair stylists or cosmetologists; the words change,” but Prestegard said she’s always loved her customers. A month ago Prestegard sold her business, The Cutting Edge to Sarah Jackman, who returned to Cathlamet after living in Montana. The business is now located near the Shell Station on State Route 4. Jackman expects to keep the hours, Tuesday through Saturday from 8 to 5 p.m. Prestegard is telling her custo...
The three artists exhibiting at Redmen Hall are at varied points in their careers and use different mediums. Exhibit curator Jill Hatier said she was struck by the ways the artists are interpreting the world and called the exhibit Explorations. Martie Vavoudis calls herself a ceramicist. She said, “I’ve been engaged with ceramics for the past thirty years, and hope I’ll be doing it for the next thirty.” The show includes ceramic objects including a life-size bust of a fellow art student. She is also exploring a new direction...
High water in the Columbia River kept the Columbia River Yacht Club home on Memorial Day, costing the Elochoman Slough Marina anticipated revenue, port manager Jackie Lea told Port District No. 1 commissioners at the regular meeting Thursday. The river is at flood stage and full of debris. Yacht club members feared they’d be traveling with what they called “submarine-sized debris” and that it would take a long time to get home, Lea said. While she said she’s always concerned that revenues are less than anticipated, the rest of the busines...
The local impacts of the 2011-2013 biennial budget cuts to the State Department of Health aren’t clear yet, Health and Human Services Director Judy Bright said. Information released by the Washington Department of Health describes cuts to programs, but Bright said she still has not seen the specific amounts that the county will lose. “We have no fulltime people at this time. It will be really hard to offer services with further cuts,” she said. Some services such as family planning and oral health have already been discontinued. State...
Over the past three years, Rose Rendler has been a one-woman bookmobile to residents at Cathlamet’s Columbia View Care Center. Rendler greets residents and gets an update on health concerns. She knows who’s still able to read and who prefers Danielle Steele. She shakes hands with residents who may not be able to articulate a sentence but who have a big smile. She’s learned about residents’ taste in books and has found that few want blood and gore. She brings Westerns, romance and mystery. Some like to read about pioneer women, she said. R...
PUD commissioners Bob Jungers, Dennis Reid and Gene Healy learned Tuesday that they must soon make funding decisions for the new substation on Jacobsen Road. The district has about $2 million in reserve, General Manager Tramblie said, and the board will need to borrow to complete the $2.9 million project. “It’s bad timing,” said Tramblie. Bonneville Power Administration will raise rates this October and the PUD’s engineering firm expects to award bids in early October for the remaining $2.8 million the project will cost. “The substatio...
Although Sarah Phillips, Wahkiakum High School valedictorian, and salutatorian Brandon Fudge share a deep affection for their classmates, their history with the school is different. Phillips came to Cathlamet and entered the school district as a freshman, while Fudge has been here from the beginning. Each has good things to say about being in a small school in a small community. “You have to work at it. But you can have 150 close friends,” Phillips said. “I can’t imagine a better place to raise kids,” Fudge said. The two agreed that it was im...
Naselle High School valedictorian Taylor Wasmundt and salutatorian Haleigh See are passionate about their prospective careers in health care, their love of sports-- volleyball, basketball, track and softball--and the 22 people in their graduating class, 12 of whom have been together since preschool. “We are really close,” they both say. “We’re not divided into academic nerds, sports and drama groups,” See said. “We all have to work together.” Both students have had a strong desire to excel academically, and both balance that with a desire to b...
The results of the Healthy Youth Survey administered to Wahkiakum School District students in October of 2010, reflect both strengths and concerns for local students. The results, released in March and reviewed at the Wahkiakum school board meeting in May, confirmed students’ concern about marijuana use in fall of 2010, which resulted in a new optional drug-testing policy to address the problem of substance abuse at school. Students were physically active at least 60 minutes a day, with all grades almost doubling statewide averages. The s...
