By Michael Armstrong
Homer Independent Press

Stand anywhere with a view of the Homer Spit, and like an arrow pointing at the Kenai Mountains, the Spit directs your sight to one of the more prominent mountains across the bay: Poot Peak.

In the rough draft of our website, the place holder logo had a mountain and little waves indicating an ocean. That would have been fine for a generic image, but we wanted something unique to Homer. 

With its chocolate drop shape — a name some people use for Poot Peak — and little knob on the north flank, Poot Peak stands out. In the winter when snow falls on the mountain, contrasting with patches of forest, another image emerges, the Poot Peak Panda.

Using the panda adds another layer of meaning. You have to live here in the winter to see the panda. If you visit Homer after mid-May when the snow melts, you won’t see it. It’s a winter wonder showing that we’re not just a fair-weather paper.

Poot Peak gets its name from a nearby geographic feature, China Poot Bay, named after Henry “China” Poot. In her book, “A History of Kachemak Bay: the Country, the Communities” (Homer Society of Natural History, 1987), Janet Klein, citing Clem Tillion, writes that Henry Poot hung around with Chinese workers who’d come to the area to pack salmon and thus got the nickname. Tillion told Klein that China Poot Bay also was Poot’s hunting country. 

According to Peter Kalifornsky, the Dena’ina name for China Poot Bay is “Tsayehq’at,” meaning “hole in cliff,” as Klein notes. In the 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Poot is listed with his family as being a Seldovia town resident and identified as “Indian,” what would be called Alaska Native or Indigenous today. In his “Dictionary of Alaska Place Names,” Donald J. Orth writes that the name of China Poot Bay is “a local name reported in 1911 by G. C. Martin.” 

Once the founders of the Homer Independent Press chose Poot Peak as our logo’s main image, we had to find a graphic artist to create it. I queried a few people and got no replies — and then I ran into Abigail Kokai at the Homer Council on the Arts Nutcracker Fair. Abigail had a booth selling her popular Homer Whales stuffed animals and other creations. 

“Do you do graphic design?” I asked her. She said she did, and we commissioned her to create our logo. I sent her a photograph of Poot Peak and within a week we had the logo you see on our masthead.

Michael Armstrong is the editor of the Homer Independent Press. Reach him at michael@homerindependentpress.com.