A dozen teenagers heave on a skinny line of paracord stretched tight over the edge of a boardwalk in the center of Bethel. At the other end of the line, the rusted hulk of a Honda dirt bike dangles from a small grappling hook.
Finally, the group’s efforts pay off and the dirt bike crashes down on the boardwalk over Brown’s Slough to an outpouring of cheers.
“We started at 12. What is it now, one o’clock, one, one thirty? We’re just getting started,” high school senior Corin Pike said.
It’s the third weekend in a row that Pike and some of his fellow classmates have spent on the boardwalk tossing an assortment of magnets, hooks, and lines into the murky waterway. Pike said that they have already pulled around 50 bikes out of the slough that winds its way through the tundra and eventually empties into the Kuskokwim River. But those aren’t the group’s only catches.
“There’s been scissors, shotgun shells, power tools, bikes, the motorcycle today, chains, some metal scrap, screws, nails, fish hooks too. There’s pike in here, [that] sometimes people fish,” Pike said.
All of the students who scramble around the boardwalk are enrolled in the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program (ANSEP). It’s an accelerated program launched by the University of Alaska Anchorage made up predominantly of, but not limited to, Alaska Native students. It gives them the opportunity to simultaneously earn high school and college credits.
Every semester, students in the Bethel-based chapter of ANSEP, currently hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Kuskokwim Campus, need to rack up at least 25 hours of volunteer work in the community to maintain certain privileges – like the ability to leave campus during the day to get a coffee or go to the local fitness center.
“Kids can volunteer and work anywhere. This could be the food shelter, Bethel Friends of Canines, as long as they’re doing something for the community, that’s how they get their minimum hours,” Pike said.
Pike said that his interest in magnet fishing started small, but that he quickly saw its potential for cleaning up Bethel’s waterways.
“I was just in Bethel, bored in my room during the summer, and I kept seeing those videos online about magnet fishing, and I never heard anyone trying to in Bethel,” Pike said. “So one day I just decided, you know, let me just order a little magnet online. I came out here and caught 10 bikes and lost that magnet. I knew, like, holy cow, there’s just lots of stuff in there,” Pike said.
Getting super magnets sent to Bethel is tricky, given heavy restrictions on the packaging required to send them by air, but Pike said that he had no problem ordering through Chinese e-commerce platform Temu. In total, he said that he spent less than $50 for a setup that includes a magnet with a pulling force of 600 pounds, a much smaller assist magnet, and the grappling hook that held firm to the dirt bike pulled from the slough.
“You order ‘em from China and they come cheap, and well, as you can see, all the stuff performed today,” Pike said.
Pike has been posting pictures of all the group’s finds on a popular Bethel community Facebook page. Some items have gone to the landfill, or have been salvaged by nearby residents. Pike said that multiple people have also been reunited with bikes tossed off the boardwalk over the years.
One of these people is ANSEP 10th-grader Rei Merrill, who said they didn’t expect to find their own small, green bike among those pulled up on the afternoon of Sept. 8.
“So when I was younger, I had a bike that looked exactly like this one, down to, like, the patterns. And my neighbor stole it, and they said that they threw it over the thing,” Merrill said. “But I’m pretty sure this was my bike. She was not lying.”
Every couple of minutes, the magnets latch onto something new to flurries of excitement from the students. Just as a large “Caution” sign is pulled from the slough, Rei comes up with a catch of their own on the smaller magnet: live ammunition.
“I got a shotgun shell!” Merrill yells across the boardwalk as Pike and the other ANSEP students run to check out the catch.
Ultimately, the shotgun the students had hoped for – and that local law enforcement would likely also be interested in knowing about – never appeared. But the group’s enthusiasm was by no means dampened.
“I thought this was going to be our last day, but looks like no, because we’re still pulling up all kinds of stuff that have been here over the years,” Pike said.
But the clock is ticking for the Bethel magnet fishers. In a matter of weeks, the winter freeze-up will come, leaving the bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, shotguns, and all the stories they have to tell, once again locked up under the ice.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct Rei Merrill’s pronouns.
