To celebrate UCC’s upcoming 60-year anniversary, President Pokrant reached out to Jason Heald, director of music, to write a fight song for the school. 

Fight songs have been around since the 20th century mostly stemming from sports teams as a way to boost morale, encouraging the team to reach victory.

Heald did extensive research on previously successful fight songs before creating “Riverhawk Squawk” highlighting the inclusive spirit and “call-and-response” from the crowd. A Call and response is a musical technique where the singer will call out a phrase and the audience will respond with a phrase back.

Heald directed the Umpqua Singers in performing the fight song first on the center stage and then invited the crowd to join in at parts during a second round of singing. 

Besides working on writing new music, Heald has also been busy on field trip duty, taking the Umpqua Singers group he advises to Alaska over the spring break to perform in several shows across the state. The group sang songs from jazz, acapella, and pop genres, as well as classic Alaskan songs including the state song. Alaska was chosen since it was close enough for the short spring break and Heald is from Alaska, so the trip was easy to put together based on his previous experiences. This small functional group also travels together to perform at many local and state venues throughout the year and they have previously traveled overseas in the past years to places such as Hong Kong, Spain, and Ireland. 

Heald, who came to UCC in 1998, directs the Umpqua Singers group of eight to 12 students typically in an amplified style, which includes each member having a microphone due to the constantly changing environments in which they perform. 

Before working at UCC, Heald was a musician living and working in Portland. 

Joining the Umpqua Singers is a year-long commitment and requires students to have a flexible schedule as the Singers perform 45 to 50 times per year. Merit awards are available for students helping them get some relief from tuition costs. 

Students can also enroll in the Music Studies program that prepares students for transfer to four-year universities, offering comprehensive training in music theory, history, technology, and performance. The Music Studies program has two pathways: an Associate of Arts Oregon Transfer degree and an Associate of Applied Science degree.

According to UCC’s website, this program is approved for “liberal arts and education programs at most four-year colleges and universities.” The program includes award-winning performance groups in choir, band, and orchestra, with specialized classes in jazz and classical music.

Contact me at:
UCCMainstream@yahoo.com

For more articles by Jace Boyd, please click here.

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A software glitch caused a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide.

On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii departing six minutes apart experienced a tail strike.

The pilots of each flight felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at the back of the cabin heard a scraping noise. As the noses of both Boeing 737s lifted skyward on takeoff, their tails had scraped the runway.

Both planes circled back immediately and landed again at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The incident grounded both flights and forced a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide.

Horrifyingly, investigators have now discovered that a software glitch was responsible for the incident. According to the Seattle Times, the tailstrikes occurred largely as the result of a bug in a program sold by a Swedish firm called DynamicSource.

The program is supposed to deliver “crucial weight and balance data” that pilots enter into their flight computers to help determine stuff like “how much thrust the engines will provide and at what speed the jet will be ready to lift off.”

The data [delivered] was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light. With the total weight of those jets at 150,000 to 170,000 pounds, the error was enough to skew the engine thrust and speed settings.

Both planes headed down the runway with less power and at lower speed than they should have. And with the jets judged lighter than they actually were, the pilots rotated too early.

A longtime New York forest ranger and trans advocate was killed Thursday night after falling more than 1,000 feet while attempting to climb a steep cliff in Alaska, officials said.

Robbi Mecus, 52, of Keene Valley and her climbing partner both fell while ice climbing an especially treacherous part of Mount Johnson in Denali National Park known as “the Escalator,” according to the National Park Service.

Mecus, a transgender woman, died in the fall. Her climbing partner, a 30-year-old woman from California, survived with “serious traumatic injuries.”

Another climbing party witnessed the tragic drop and called for help around 10:45 p.m., but it took until 7 a.m. the following morning for the survivor to be airlifted to a hospital.

Mecus’s body wasn’t recovered until Saturday morning following deteriorating weather conditions the evening prior.

The outdoors enthusiast had been a forest ranger for the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Adirondack region for 25 years after joining in 1999 at the age of 27, the agency said.

“I join the Department of Environmental Conservation family in mourning the sudden and tragic passing of Forest Ranger Robbi Mecus,” interim DEC Commissioner Sean Mahar said in a statement Saturday.

Mahar said Mecus “exemplified the Forest Rangers’ high standard of professional excellence,” emphasizing her rescue efforts, her work on complex searches and her deployments to out-of-state wildfire response missions.

The interim commissioner also commended Mecus’s work in “advancing diversity, inclusion, and LGBTQ belonging throughout the agency.”

Mecus was also a leader in the queer community in the Adirondacks, NCPR reported.

She told the outlet in 2021 that she struggled through her teenage years to come to terms with her gender identity. She ultimately waited until she was in her 40s to transition: “I was scared and afraid and I didn’t know how I was going to live my life.”

That hard time is when she discovered her love of rock and ice climbing, and opened her up to a community that didn’t include many queer people, allowing her the opportunity to become a leader.

“There are many reasons I didn’t come out until I was 44, but one of them was because I didn’t see anybody else doing the things that I still wanted to do and I didn’t think I could do them,” said Mecus in 2021. “I didn’t see any queer rangers. I didn’t see any trans climbers.”

According to her social media channels, Mecus had visited Alaska several times for expeditions over the years.

She even successfully made it up “the Escalator” last year.

It’s not clear what went wrong with her final climb, but park officials warn the path to Mt. Johnson’s 8,400-foot peak is among the most dangerous.

“The approximately 5,000-foot route involves navigating a mix of steep rock, ice, and snow,” the National Park Service said.

Mecus is survived by her daughter and former wife, who live in the Keene Valley community.

Denali National Park and Preserve is about 240 miles north of Anchorage.