Former outdoor educator marks 50 years in Alaska with mountain summit. 

By Delcenia Cosman

Homer Independent Press

On July 6, retired educator Hal Neace celebrated 50 years of Alaska residency by climbing a mountain. 

Neace was no stranger to this mountain; in fact, he gave it its name. Years ago, when he taught science to grades 7-12 and led an outdoor education program at Susan B. English School in Seldovia, he started a tradition of leading the seniors in his outdoor education class on a hike to the mountain’s summit on graduation day. Today, that mountain is called Graduation Peak.

Neace first climbed the then-nameless mountain in 1977. He introduced Project Adventure, a nationally validated program begun in Massachusetts in 1971, to Seldovia in 1982. He taught at Susan B. English School until 1986, then moved to Homer, where he taught until 2009. 

For Neace, Project Adventure was “where the world of nature and the Alaskan wilderness became our classroom, teaching us valuable life lessons of leadership, resilience, teamwork, natural history and stewardship.” 

In addition to outdoor excursions, students in the program kept a journal to document their experiences and complete follow-up activities, combining multiple disciplines for a “total learning environment.” Neace credited several local educators for helping ensure the program’s success: former Susan B. English School principal Cliff Koivisto, who allowed Neace to start the program in the first place and made Susan B. English a “magnet school,” drawing students from the Lower 48 to Seldovia to participate in Project Adventure; former Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Fred Pomeroy, who supported the program and ascended Graduation Peak with the 1986 senior class, later going on to climb the highest peak in each of the 50 states; and former Homer Middle School principal Peter Larson, who in 1987 started a three-week experiential education program called Cross-Curricular that allowed Neace to recreate a version of Project Adventure in Homer that ran for 10 years. 

In an interview with the Homer Independent Press, Neace described how he and his students would start hiking up Graduation Peak in the small hours of the morning — as early as 3 a.m. — to make the summit and descend in time for the commencement ceremony in the evening. 

Last month, Neace and accompanying family members — his two daughters, sons-in-law and three grandchildren — still needed to make it down the mountain in time to catch the outgoing ferry back to Homer, but that didn’t call for a 3 a.m. kickoff. Neace, along with his younger daughter, Heather Rosfeld, and her husband, Jason, got a head start on the trail at 6 a.m. Neace’s older daughter, Sally Drescher, and her family followed an hour later. 

The climb was Sally and Heather’s idea, Neace said, in celebration of multiple family milestones. When Neace brought his family to Alaska in 1976, his oldest daughter, Sally, was three months old. She celebrated her 50th birthday this spring. Neace’s oldest grandson, Luke, graduated from high school in June. Neace himself turned 80 this year.

The trip also doubled as a community and class reunion; after disembarking from the Tustumena, Neace met several old friends and former students for dinner at the Linwood Bar and Grill, including Seldovia artist Valisa Higman, who was once in Heather’s kindergarten class and in July guided members of the party up to the Graduation Peak summit. 

The trail they climbed was new, built about two years ago by the nonprofit Ground Truth Alaska, which was founded by Seldovia native Bretwood “Hig” Higman and his wife, Erin McKittrick. According to McKittrick, it’s a 5.3-mile climb to the summit, with about a 3,800-foot change in elevation. The climbing party made it to the top after about five hours; the descent took only four.

In a narrative written after the climb and shared with the Homer Independent Press, Neace described the new trail as “the perfect challenge for pushing one’s limits.”

“My hiking poles were indispensable in getting me up the terrain without great difficulty, as was Heather and Jason’s encouragement and support all along the way,” he wrote. “The trail work itself was first class and professionally done…. Hats off to Hig and Erin and Ground Truth Alaska and the many volunteers who put this trail in. What an awesome achievement.”

Over the years, hikers have traversed a number of informal routes to reach the summit of Graduation Peak, but no formal trail existed until Ground Truth Alaska built one. McKittrick described one unofficial trail that “started 3 miles out the road (and) goes through all kinds of wet swampy areas that grow into giant mud pits — not where you want to route a trail if you’re actually designing it.”

When Neace led his students up Graduation Peak in the 1980s, he said, they followed a route on the north side of the mountain up to the TV tower, then bushwhacked their way across the long plateau and open tundra to the main ridgeline. According to McKittrick and Higman, the new trailhead is accessible from town, and the route is built entirely on publicly accessible land. 

For Neace and Sally Drescher, who accompanied her father to the summit in 1997 as a female chaperone for a Homer Middle School outdoor class expedition, the climb was a homecoming experience.

“The weather was spectacular, as was the view I have always known, with the deep sparkling waters of Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay leading the gaze to the majestic summits of Mt. Douglas, Mt. Iliamna, Mt. Augustine and Mt. Redoubt to the north and the mighty Kenai Mountains flowing from us east and west,” Neace wrote. “But most intimately was the scene below us of the close-knit and enchanting and charming community of Seldovia, where it all began for me 50 years ago in August 1976.”

For the rest of the climbing party, especially Neace’s grandchildren, it was the experience of a lifetime.

Neace wrote that his daughter, Heather, and son-in-law Jason Rosfeld had returned from the Austrian Alps a few weeks prior, and for the full duration of the hike up the ridge, Jason extolled “how much the view, the dramatic scenery and the grandeur of this landscape moved him more than the European Alps.”

“…we reached the open tundra where the wildflowers were in full bloom. The beautiful mountain heather, white anemones, wild geraniums and bluish purple lupine and alpine daisies kept my mind off any soreness and discomfort along the way,” he wrote. “I told Jason I would unofficially name this part of the Kenai Range the ‘Seldovia Alps’ in his honor.”

Neace’s grandchildren caught up with him on the trail, and his youngest grandson, Nate, was the first to reach the summit and “waved triumphantly from the top to us below.” Once everyone reached the peak, the group reenacted old traditions from the climbs Neace led as an educator. Heather had made a commemorative flag for the occasion, which all members of the party signed with animal names and a favorite quote: “Keep on climbing,” Hal Hooting Owl; “The mountains are calling,” Sally the Sea Otter; “Today is a great day to be great!” Luke the Legendary Lion. 

Luke had brought his graduation cap and gown, and Neace captured a photo of him “on the namesake peak to keep the name active and the tradition going.”

At the top of Graduation Peak, Neace let the sense of collective accomplishment wash over him.

“With everyone on top of the mountain, we took the ceremonial photos and then the emotions of what we had just done together began flooding through me,” he wrote.

On the return to Homer, as the ferry left Seldovia Harbor, Neace and his family looked back at the summit of Graduation Peak where they had been standing just five hours earlier.

“It seemed both stunningly surreal and unbelievably satisfying. Words are hard to find that convey how powerfully the wilderness experience can touch the human spirit,” Neace wrote. “We had all finally come home.”

When asked whether he would climb Graduation Peak again in the future, Neace said, “Who knows?”

“Check back with me in 10 years, when I’m 90, and we’ll see how the quads are working!” he said. 

In the meantime, on clear days Neace has a view of Graduation Peak from his sunroom window in Homer. Looking across the bay, he’s reminded of a poem by Li Bai, a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, entitled “Alone Looking at the Mountain”:

All the birds have flown up and gone;

A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. 

We never tire of looking at each other — 

Only the mountain and I.