KTOO reports that rain storms, virtually unheard of in Juneau before the Clinton administration, are making mud in local creek beds. Thankfully, a local non-profit is finding ways of paying its employees more than a half a million dollars per year from this tragedy.
KTOO’s Anna Canny recently reported on breaking news that rain is making mud and erosion that is affecting walking trails around Juneau. Luckily, the paid employees at a local non-profit are on the job and pointing out the problem, so that volunteers can come fix it for free. We decided to dig down on this important story.
“I remember when Juneau was a desert” said H’Yah”n’al N^b”A’aaA’ya, an energetic L’ingit elder who comes across much younger than her 94 years. “When he wasn’t beating us, my stepfather used to shoot dice in town in order to get the money we needed to buy ice and water. As kids, we didn’t know what mud was. My grandmother used to tell us stories of our ancestors dying of thirst on Douglas Island.”
Suddenly, shortly before Al Gore was cheated out of the 2000 election, things changed. The same people calling themselves climate scientists who had confidently predicted an imminent Ice Age throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, flip-flopped and started predicting increasing global temperatures. Sure enough, over the next 30 years, the average global temperature has soared by almost a single degree (although the temperature data is too inconsistent and incomplete to positively establish this rise in temperature using scientific methods). But it was then that the rain started falling in Juneau. Next came the mud and the erosion.
H’Yah”n’al are her family were aghast at the sight of mud. “My family bought a place in Maui after the settlement in the 70’s, so I wasn’t here in Juneau during the beginning of the climate change flooding, but after moved back here in 2007 when my money ran out, and I was shocked to see it actually raining for days at a time in Juneau. While I haven’t walked on the trails myself, I have heard that when it rains like that, they get literally covered in mud. I actually saw mud myself next to the parking lot at Freddie’s. It was real creepy.”
Mud is just part of a much more complicated problem when it comes to explaining erosion in Juneau’s system of trails. According to Professor Henry Bloom of the Soils Center in the Life Sciences Department of the University of Southeast Alaska, what laymen call “mud” is actually a complicated mixture of dirt and moisture. “Mud varies greatly in consistency, depending on the dirt/moisture ratio” he said. “Many people think ‘mud is mud,’ but they’re aren’t looking at the problem scientifically.” The problem with mud, Bloom says, is that takes on a fluid-like characteristic that lets it become washed away by rain water. “It isn’t the rain itself that is problem,” Bloom continued. “It isn’t just the mud, either. The problem arises when dirt on a trail comes into contact with rainwater to make mud and then washes away, actually reducing the amount of dirt on the trails This leaves less dirt on the trail and what dirt remains is very often converted to mud.” Bloom says two years of grant-funded research scientifically confirmed this surprising result. “My conclusions have been published in eight peer-reviewed journals, and three teams of soil scientists are in the process of replicating my results, so I am pretty confident in them,” Bloom concluded.
Scientists universally agree that humans, specifically alt-right capitalists, have created and continue to exacerbate Juneau’s mud problem by poisoning the air with carbon dioxide (CO2). “While there is technically no connection between CO2 and rainfall in the data, and while there is no accepted theory that links increasing atmospheric CO2 to increased rainfall, we are humans before we are scientists,” Bloom explained. “We need to look past the science and the data to address the problem” said Bloom. “The capitalist drive for profits is poisoning our planet. We really should act to stop it now!” he said, angrily. Steeling himself back into his role as a dispassionate scientist, Bloom lamented “but it’s probably all pointless. At the predicted rates of erosion, we won’t need to worry about our walking trails because in 15 years, the mountains will be scrubbed to sea level.”
Enter Trail Mix, Inc, a local non-profit charging itself with a mission in the interim to suck down grant money, to pay its employees more than half a million dollars per year in salaries and to point out the messes on Juneau’s trails to other people so that unpaid volunteers can come clean them up.
Sunny Williams, 18, bends over to pick up a fallen branch that covers a particularly muddy patch on Stalking Bear Trail. “Some people don’t think it’s fair that the Trail Mix office employees get paid so much, while we do all the work” she said. “But I don’t mind too bad because I need the community service to get the meth charge dropped, or I won’t get my food stamps. Plus I can smoke weed out here on the trail while I clean up the mud, so it works out for me in the end.”
A current Trail Mix, Inc. employee, speaking with us on the condition of anonymity, said that while Trail Mix, Inc. does a decent job of pointing out mud problems to the volunteers, it does not fare so well in treating its employees fairly. “As a gender queer, gender fluid, non-binary, non-conforming vari-sexual being, my pronouns change regularly, but they aren’t always respected. At a recent meeting, the assistant director of mud removal addressed me by pronouns I hadn’t used in days. I don’t think it was intentional, but it sure was careless and hurtful. I was so depressed that I had to spend all morning lying on the couch in the conference room. Also, they used to have a coffee pot in the kitchen, but now we have to bring in our own coffee.” When asked about the mud problem, the employee said “I hear a lot about the mud, though I haven’t been on any of the trails myself. But I’ve only been here three years, so I’m not an expert. I’ll send out an alert to the volunteers and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
According to its IRS filings, Trail Mix Inc. is non-profit that received nearly 90% of its funding from public sources. It takes in about $1.8 million per year and spends about a third of that on salaries. Some have criticized Trail Mix, Inc. by noting that all it does is suck down mostly tax money to get volunteers to do all the work, while the employees enjoy cushy jobs in a swank office near Costco and Home Depot.
Executives from Trail Mix, Inc. declined to speak with us, citing their need to prepare for the non-profit’s semi-annual three-week corporate retreat to Puerto Vallarta.
Jean Shrimple, Director of Compliance Monitoring for the Alaska State Corporation Commission’s Office of Ethics and Conduct proved to be a good source of information. “Essentially, a non-profit organization is a great way to funnel money from taxpayers to the non-profit’s employees” she said. “We see it all the time and there is certainly nothing illegal or wrong about it.” She noted that all charitable non-profits are required to document their income and expenses and that appears that Trail Mix, Inc. has done so. “We don’t get too many complaints about companies like Trail Mix, that take in mostly grant money and dole it out to their employees,” Shrimple said. “The ones we hear about are the non-profits who solicit money from private donors and then pad their employee’s paychecks. For some reason people get mad when their own money gets wasted like that, but when it’s their tax money being wasted, they calm down.”
We decided to put the issue to a random pedestrian In Downtown Juneau. Dave Murphy is 56 and he works for the cruise industry. “I don’t know what we would do without Trail Mix employees pointing out the mud patches to the volunteers,” he said. “I mean, I suppose it could be possible to communicate directly with the volunteers over a phone, if you happen to know the number or if you just happen to have it in your contacts. And I guess the volunteers could just communicate among themselves. Or do a similar thing over an app. Or on Facebook. Or X. Or by email. Or maybe even with a sign-up sheet at the library. Or something else along those lines. But short of anything complicated like that, how else would people know when to come out together to clean up the trails for free?” Pausing, he added, “and of course it isn’t realistic to expect highly paid employees to clean up mud. I think Trail Mix is a necessary link in the mud removal process. Somebody has to open the mail in order to cash the grant checks, after all and you don’t want mud all all over the office space. I’ve been there. It’s a really nice office.”
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