The president’s schedule for Dillingham changed a lot in the days leading up to the visit, Samuelsen said. When the possibility of a big community meeting for as many as 800 people was pulled off the table, Samuelsen was ready to quit the whole thing.
“You are coming to my town, my region and you are not giving people access to the president?” Samuelsen said. “I said ‘I’m not meeting the president. I’m done.’ ”
Then the White House team offered a compromise: a Yup’ik dance performance at the middle school gym with 300 people present, counting middle and high school students. The mother of some of the dancers -- who had taken part in a 4-H summer culture camp -- sat on one side of the president. Ralph Andersen, chief executive officer of Bristol Bay Native Association and another of the planners, sat on the other.
At the school, Obama was served a lunch of grilled sockeye salmon, salmon eggs, cod several different ways and even salmonberry akutaq, or Eskimo ice cream.
“When it first came online in March, the screens were freezing,” explains McCormick. “We had to bust ice off the screen. But that only happened one time.”
Soon, leaves will start falling in earnest, clogging the fine screen more quickly. The year ahead will be a learning experience as McCormick and the two other operators become familiar with the quirks and seasonal challenges of the hydro system. Even so, he expects it will be easier to manage than the diesel plant.
“You have to change the oil in the diesel engine every 250 hours of running,” explained McCormick. “That creates a lot of waste oil over time, because it takes five gallons of oil to change the engine.” Those gallons of used oil then have to be transported to a dump site and burned up -- more dirty work.
The hydroelectric system, on the other hand, requires just a dab of grease on the bearings every 1,000 hours. The attack came as a surprise. "I can assure you, this is going to be acted on in my lifetime," an angry Stevens told the Associated Press after one of his many failed attempts to end a congressional stalemate.
He was wrong on the timing. Five years after his death, the federal board has yet to take up the mountainous matter because a 40-year congressional impasse continues.
But President Barack Obama handed Stevens a posthumous victory last week over an equally stubborn and steadfast Ohio congressman who made it his life’s work to maintain the McKinley moniker.
Obama bypassed the bureaucratic deadlock in Congress that frustrated Stevens for decades by giving Interior Secretary Sally Jewell instructions to make the switch. This has Republicans in Ohio crying federal overreach, while the Alaska delegation and many other people in Alaska are saying, “Thanks, Obama” -- skipping the sarcasm this time around.
The deadlock in Congress began as a showdown between Stevens and Rep. Ralph Regula of Ohio, who stymied the Denali campaign on his own for decades. For years, he attached riders to the Interior Department spending bills. After Stevens blocked money for a coal gasification plant in Stark County, Ohio, in 1991, Regula changed tactics, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
Regula began to introduce a bill every two years that said McKinley should remain the name. Congress never paid attention to the bill, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, made up of federal employees from departments and agencies, had a policy against taking action as long as a bill was alive.
The loophole gave Regula veto power by simply recycling the same one-page bill. This did not sit well with Stevens.
"It's not a loophole, it's just an ostrich-type decision to stick their head in the sand every time a congressman breathes," Stevens said in 1991. "It means they really don't want to do their job."
Against someone else, Stevens might have had his way, but the breathing congressman was a powerful figure on the House Appropriations Committee.
Regula, who studied at the William McKinley School of Law, was a one-issue politician as far as the Interior Department was concerned. He vowed to defend the McKinley name to his last breath. Regula celebrated McKinley's birthday every Jan. 29 by handing out scarlet carnations, the state flower adopted in McKinley's memory -- to fellow lawmakers. He had no interest in a compromise on some other issue.
In the end, the two neutralized each other on the mountain name, a pattern that continues with the elected officials from Alaska and Ohio who followed Stevens and Regula to Congress.
In his 1914 book, "The Ascent of Denali," about the first successful climb to the mountain top, Hudson Stuck argued that the "immemorial Native name" be restored. He also objected to naming a mountain 14 miles from Denali after another Ohio politician, Sen. Joseph Foraker, saying "there they stand upon the maps, side by side, the two greatest peaks in the Alaska Range."
"And there they should stand no longer, since if there be right and reason in these matters, they should not have been placed there at all," Stuck wrote.
Stevens picked up the battle after a 1975 resolution by the Alaska Legislature recommended naming the mountain Denali. That resolution also suggested that Mount McKinley National Park remain the name of the park, but it became Denali as part of the 1980 Alaska Lands Act. In 2012, the troopers' Wildlife Investigation Unit got a tip from a local sportfishing guide in Craig that 73-year-old Stuart Merchant was taking paying clients on charter trips and avoiding halibut possession limits by not filling out saltwater charter logbooks, troopers said in an online dispatch Thursday.
Troopers said they launched an undercover investigation on a fishing trip with Tranquil Charters. It started on July 21, 2013, and lasted five days, troopers said.
"During the fishing trip numerous sport fish guiding violations were observed and documented by an undercover Investigator," troopers said.
Four Craig residents were charged in the investigation. All were licensed as Alaska sportfishing guides and associated with Tranquil Charters, according to troopers.
Troopers provided a summary of the four men's charges: