Best of the Voices: Teen nails hammer throw

You can’t blame Kelsey Wardsworth for wanting to throw things.

The high school student has overcome more than her share of challenges already. The kinds of challenges that make one want to throw things. Heavy things.

Things like, say, the hammer.

“I love throwing the hammer,” the University High School senior said. “You have to put everything you have into it. When I’m done with practice, I’m always so calm.”

She laughed. “I think I throw better when I’m a little mad going in.”

Wardsworth must have been a little mad during the Mooberry Relays recently at Whitworth University. In that meet, the only local competition to include her specialty, she broke her personal best by more than 5 feet with her winning throw of 98 feet, 3 1/4 inches.

That throw is the third best in the state this season, 5 feet and change out of second place.

Wardsworth is just glad to compete again. For a year she couldn’t.

“Kelsey had Graves’ disease,” said her mother, Liz Wardsworth, the Titan girls track and field coach. “It was diagnosed when she was in the eighth grade, and it got really bad.

“Thankfully it’s in remission now.”

Graves’ disease is a type of hyperthyroidism – a condition generally found in adults and rarely in children. The condition rapidly affected Wardsworth’s eyesight.

“She was going blind,” Liz Wardsworth said. “She lost her peripheral vision, and her eyesight was like looking through two tunnels.”

Doctors said they could let the disease run its course, or go with a radical course of treatment. “We opted for the treatment,” Liz Wardsworth said.

The mother still cringes recalling the weekly ordeal.

“They put me on steroids that made me gain a lot of weight,” Kelsey Wardsworth said. “The drugs made my heart race all the time. I would sit and be quiet and it would still beat at about 200 beats per minute. They were afraid to let me run or lift weights or anything strenuous like that for fear of a heart attack.”

The regimen worked. Her eyesight came back, and the disease went into remission. Wardsworth was again able to embrace her passion for art and photography.

“The thing that amazes me is that, since she got her sight back, Kelsey has an incredible vision as a photographer,” Liz Wardsworth said. “She sees things that the rest of us miss.”

Wardsworth is a staff photographer for The Spokesman-Review’s youth edition, The Vox. She wants to become a professional photographer.

Meanwhile, a means of reaching that dream opened up in the form of a little-known track and field event: the hammer throw.

“I loved it from the first time I did it,” Wardsworth said.

Wardsworth discovered at a meet in the Portland area that she’s on the radar of college track and field coaches.

“I had the coach from Mount Hood come up to me after the meet and congratulate me by name,” she said. “It was so cool that he knew who I was.”

Steve Christilaw

Council relaxes airport zoning

A divided Spokane Valley City Council agreed Tuesday to relax airport zoning restrictions they adopted in 2006 to protect Felts Field.

The regulations, based on state guidelines, were the most restrictive in Spokane County and essentially prohibited fill-in construction in residential areas close to the airport. Some property owners complained that they had paid for sewer and water stubs for houses they could no longer build.

Tuesday’s action was a compromise.

The council was poised March 24 to liberalize the entire “airport overlay zone,” which adds restrictions to standard zoning designations. But Carter Timmerman, an aviation planner in the Aviation Division of the state Department of Transportation, suggested limiting the liberalization to the area south of Utah Street and Rutter Avenue – or the railroad tracks that run between those roads.

The area north of the tracks is closest to the airport.

The council last week approved an amended motion that allows property owners north of the dividing line to build houses if they had already installed stub sewer or water lines.

Property owners south of the line will be allowed to build houses not only if they have existing sewer or water stubs, but if their land abuts other land with less restrictive underlying zoning or if their parcel already has more than one house – other than a mother-in-law cottage.

A staff analysis indicated 184 parcels south of the line had potential for further development, and the amendment could add 42 north of the line.

John Craig

Community garden to bloom in CdA

Downtown Coeur d’Alene’s Garden District is about to boast one more garden. A big one.

Three vacant lots at the corner of 10th Street and Foster Avenue will be transformed this spring into Coeur d’Alene’s first Shared Harvest Community Garden.

The garden project, a collaboration among the Garden District, the Community Roots Program of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance and property owner Marshall Mend, will bring gardening enthusiasts together in a place where they can rent plots to raise organic foods for their families and to donate to area food banks and soup kitchens, said Korrine Krielkamp, a garden organizer.

“The vision is that the Shared Harvest program becomes a catalyst for other giving,” she said.

Krielkamp, the Community Roots program coordinator who also is on the garden planning committee, did have one piece of bad news. All 30 of the plots for this growing season have been snapped up. But there are plenty of other ways for folks to get their hands dirty.

Two large plots will be dedicated to growing produce for area food-assistance agencies, and those plots will be tended by volunteers. People who love to maintain raised beds, care for plants and harvest fresh produce will be in demand. Also, she added, organizers plan to gather harvested food on a regular basis for distribution to area agencies. A bicycle route is being established to ferry food from garden to table, a project also manned by volunteers.

Other plans include construction of beds tall enough to be accessible to those who use wheelchairs. Another area will sport fragrant plants in a “sensory” garden designed for the visually impaired.

Mend, a Coeur d’Alene Realtor, bought the lots in the early 1990s with the idea of putting houses on them. But he ended up hanging onto them, hopeful that someday the lots might be worth more.

“I said, ‘I think I’m going to keep them,’ ” he said. “I knew they were going to be a lot more money than I paid for them.”

When garden organizers asked about using his lots, which had been untended for a couple of decades, Mend jumped on board. “It would be a benefit to the community,” he said, “and I think it would be a good idea to do other properties like that.”

He’s pledged to preserve the space for at least two years, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted 10 or 15 years,” he said. “I’m not in any rush to sell it.”

The shared garden is in need of volunteers and monetary donations, as well as materials such as two-by-fours, rocks, seeds and plants. For more information, call Kim Normand at (208) 664-0608.

Carolyn Lamberson