Alaska Public Media

A ruckus erupted on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday afternoon. For many, it may have been the last gasp of an effort to nominate someone other than Donald Trump, but some Alaska delegates had another motivation.

“There was a lot of yelling and enthusiasm from Texas, Colorado, Virginia, Alaska, Wyoming. And our group was right in the middle of it,” said Alaska GOP chairman Tuckerman Babcock. “And Alaskans have no hesitation in making their voices heard.”

Babcock said for the Alaskans, the passion seemed to be about procedure. He said delegates Fred Brown, Dave Donley and Doyle Holmes circulated a petition calling for roll call votes, and a majority of the 28 Alaska delegates signed.

“I didn’t agree with them, but I’m not the kind of chairman who shuts them down,” Babcock said.

A majority of eight other delegations signed the petition, too. That could have forced a series of roll call votes.

For some delegates in the room, the goal was to unbind delegates so they could vote for candidates other than Trump. Delegate Dave Donley, a former state senator from Anchorage, said he was fighting for the integrity of the convention process and trying to correct what he saw as a problem at the last convention, four years ago. That year, supporters of candidate Ron Paul felt they were getting railroaded and complained that the rules were used to shut them up.

Donley pointed out that at conventions, thousands of guests and observers crowd the floor.

“So if you hold a voice vote, you don’t know who’s voting, right? So it was just a procedural thing. It had nothing to do with the candidates, either way,” Donley said.

In any event, the whole effort fell flat when people started withdrawing their names from the petition.

Early Tuesday, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning effective until 10 p.m. in Anchorage, highlighting higher risk for wildfires.

The warning came as a result of low humidity and high winds in addition to hot temperatures in the mid 60s to lower 70s. The weather service noted that temperatures will be hottest and winds will be gustiest during the late afternoon going into the evening.

The Republican National Convention opens in Cleveland on Monday and Alaska U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has won a spot on the schedule. His spokesman said Sullivan will take the stage Tuesday evening, with nine other Republican senators.

As for the main business of the convention – nominating  Donald Trump for president – state party chairman Tuckerman Babcock said the Alaska delegates are coming around.

“There were a lot of different people supporting a lot of different candidates, some of them really strongly, and it’s been hard for them to give up the ghost,” Babcock said. “But the reality is, it’s going to be Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And if you’re a Republican, that’s your team.”

A move to stop Trump fizzled in the convention rules committee late last week. Alaska delegate Kristie Babcock, Tuckerman’s wife, said over the weekend she could sense a change in the mood.

“There’s almost like a little bit of relief that it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a big fight this week,” she said. “People just seem to be just gaining enthusiasm. Maybe especially because of what’s happening in the world, they just seem like, ‘OK, let’s go toward winning now.’”

Trump finished second in Alaska’s Republican straw poll in March. Mike Tauriainen, a delegate from Sterling, said Trump wasn’t his first choice. Or his second. Tauriainen said he’s not sure of Trump’s bedrock positions on social matters, like abortion and transgender bathroom use.

“Yeah, I have some reservation about that. I’m very strong on conservative issues,” he said.

But Tauriainen said he likes Tump’s pick for vice president, Mike Pence, and he believes Trump can be a good president by listening to his advisers.

“I probably won’t have a Trump sign in my yard (but) I’ll be a supporter,” he said.

At the convention, the Alaska delegates probably won’t have any big decisions to make. State party rules bind them to their assigned candidates for two rounds of voting, and Trump will likely have the nomination before they become unbound.

A 25-acre wildfire is spreading across McHugh Creek about three-quarters of a mile from the Seward Highway south of Anchorage. According to the Department of Forestry, the fire was reported to the Anchorage Fire Department at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday.

Camp volunteer Mike DeCenso was the first to spot the fire and call 911.

“The smoke was coming up through the canyons there, so I watched it and figured out it was a real fire on the ground, so I called 911 and got the fire dispatch and they sent out about eight equipment engines,” DeCenso said late Sunday morning, as he and reporters scanned the hilltop, where billows of smoke indicated the location of the blaze.

Upon the firefighter’s arrival, the fire was about 3 to 5 acres. Forestry firefighters were initially unable to combat the fire due to hazardous terrain, so helicopters and an air tanker began dropping water on the flame Sunday morning.

Chugach State Park ranger Tom Crockett spoke just before noon, standing at the entrance to McHugh Creek parking lot, which was closed to the public and used as a staging point for fire operations.

“..and (the fire) is being actively suppressed by two forestry helos that are doing bucket drops with salt water from the Inlet. A hand crew is being ordered up from Palmer forestry and should be on site in the next hour or so. They will also bring with them some pumps so they can use the water from McHugh Creek to actively work the flanks of the fire.”

The fire is actively burning in beetle-killed spruce, much of which is dead and blown down. This combined with the steep terrain had made access to the fire very difficult.

The helicopters put on quite a show for travelers on the Seward highway, and traffic slowed as passersby stopped for photos of the operation. By early afternoon, an air tanker dispatched from Fairbanks dropped retardant on the blaze.

Crockett said the fire does not threaten homes or structures. As to the cause of the blaze:

“Unknown,” Crockett said. “Haven’t checked the site yet, and I can’t speculate until we actually get up and take a look at the point of origin.”

Alaska Public Media’s Ellen Lockyer contributed to this report. This story has been updated and expanded. 

From the Aleutian chain, to the Tongass National Forest, to the base of Denali, Alaska is filled with pocket monsters.

Since last week, the new Pokemon Go game has exploded in popularity, and Alaska is no exception.

In Anchorage, crowds of people float around parks and city streets at all hours, their eyes glued to their phones as they try to collect creatures.

The game draws on nostalgia for a craze that started almost two decades ago. And it has caught on in places one might not expect at first. Like a military base.

“Almost everybody in my platoon has it,” said Pfc. Dylan Carter, standing outside the soldier’s chapel at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, phone in hand. Carter is 23, and like a lot of people downloading the new game, he first got into Pokemon when he was a kid. Now, he and his wife, who recently gave birth, have been playing it on long walks.

Carter is in an airborne Army unit. When asked, he denied there’s any contradiction between jumping out of a low-flying plane, and a video game that basically turns you into a sci-fi animal catcher. One could be enthusiastic about both.

“Everybody’s got to be a man to do the job,” Carter said of airborne work. “But in all reality, it goes back to the nostalgia thing. I mean, I have a Pokeball tattoo. There’s a kid in everybody.”

But the game’s popularity hardly ends in Anchorage. This raises a few interesting questions about how Alaskans in totally different corners of the state, with totally different internet infrastructure, are dealing with the new technology.

So we checked in with reporters from across the Alaska Public Media network to find out what issues are being raised.

Pokemon Go gets players off the couch by overlaying features from the game over the real world. Downtown Talkeetna, for example, has about 10 “Pokestops,” areas where players gather supplies to use in the game, set up around parks, monuments, and buildings — including the KTNA radio station. But there are plenty outside of town, too.

“Where we work there’s about five or six of them just in a small little area,” said aspiring Pokemaster Jason, who was in the downtown area on a recent evening with his girlfriend, trying to find Pokemon.

Pokestops and similar location-based features were chosen by the game’s developer, Niantic, Inc. They mirror the spots built into an earlier game released by Niantic a few years ago called Ingress that used the same augmented reality structure.

Once players gather supplies like Poke Balls from spots, Jason showed off how to use them for capturing the actual Pokemon, like a winged creature named Pidgey floating across a smartphone screen.

“There’s an aiming reticle on there, too, so depending on how well you aim, you have a higher chance of catching it,” he explained. A few flicks of the thumb later and the Pidgey was imprisoned inside a red and white orb.

The game is integrated with Google Maps and uses the GPS coordinates on a player’s phone to alert him or her if there are any digital monsters nearby. That can mean walking around for stretches of time, hunting.

“It’ll come up and tell you if anything’s nearby, and you just kind of wander around until it appears on your map,” Jason explained.

Jason’s girlfriend and hunting partner Jasmine sees it as a major benefit that the game coaxes people outdoors for fun physical exercise.

“It’s definitely a nerdy FitBit,” she said.

The game takes for granted that your phone can get online while you’re out and about. But for huge sections of Alaska with little to no network coverage, that’s not always available.

In Unalaska, for example, the internet is slow – think dial-up speeds.  If you’re lucky you might be able to watch YouTube. But you’ll have to wait for it to buffer.

But that’s not stopping 17-year old Faizar Cayron from playing. He’s got an AT&T phone with mobile data, a rarity on the island. He’s even getting up four hours earlier than normal to take advantage of better playing conditions.

“So then the bad weather won’t catch up to me,” he laughed. “It’s just the better weather in the morning, and you can go around where it’s not like wet grass and it’s going to be hard to catch Pokémon there.”

Although Cayron prefers the morning, there are kids playing all day long. But many of them don’t have data, and instead are using an island wide network of Wi-Fi hotspots provided by another company, Optimera. Which can be expensive. Just ask Felica Tungul whose daughter plays.

“In a matter of a day she used up 3 gigabytes of our internet,” Felicia Tungul said of a recent Poke-spree by her daughter. “It’s a lot. It’s almost $80 worth of internet.”

Now, here’s the catch: The Pokemon Go app doesn’t actually use that much data, around 10 megabytes in a half hour of play. A lot less than an app like Facebook, which racks up about 2 megabytes a minute. But according to Optimera CEO Emmet Fitch, your gaming costs could come down to how your smartphone is configured.

“Most phones, by default, are set up to automatically download updates for all the applications that you are running while you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network because everywhere else in the Lower 48 Wi-Fi is essentially free,” Fitch explained.

Users can adjust those settings to stop unnecessary downloads. And Tungul is laying down the law with her daughter, insisting she turn off the app when she’s not playing. But that’s really the only restriction.

“It keeps her active. It’s get all the kids everywhere. If you see a kid running in the street they’re chasing Pokemon,” Tungul said.

But what about trying to reign in gaming in a more formal, educational setting? Because the game’s release coincided with summer vacation, there are only a few places where school is in session. One is the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, which is getting a preview of how educators are responding to a game students can’t seem to put down.

Autumn McCumiskey is SFAC’s director of students, and says the explosion in phone use is a problem, because phones generally aren’t allowed during class time.

“Every time I went into the counseling office, it was ‘Pokemon this,’ and, ‘Wiggly hoo-haa is doing this thing.’ It just felt like it was something that was taking over every conversation,” McCumiskey said.

“It felt like instead of talking about, ‘What did you paint today?’ Or ‘How did your dance class go?’ Or ‘Did you finally stick that mount in partner acrobatics?’ It was, ‘Have you seen that Orthodox Church Gym? Isn’t that funny?’”

The other issue popping up is when students walk across town from campus to the Performing Arts Center every night, sending hundreds of young people weaving in and out of traffic.

“It was mostly a safety concern,” said Cecilia Wehde, a counselor who had to start confiscating devices. “Everyone wanted to have their phone out to catch Pokemon and Pokestops and hatch eggs. A lot more yelling at them to put their phones away.”

Wehde thinks this might have been because last weekend was still the “high school” camp, which is a bit more relaxed. And that hasn’t been the case this past week during the intensive musical theater session.

According to student Jack Hale, everyone is buckling down for the camp-wide production of Guys and Dolls.

“I downloaded it, and it took, like, an hour,” Hale said. “There’s been a lot of opportunity to play it, but then again you’re constantly in rehearsal, doing stuff.”

Hale explained that when it comes to musical theater at the Sitka camp, everyone feels a sense of devotion. “You don’t want to waste time on your phone.”

But the kids aren’t the only ones trying to strike a balance between responsibilities and summer fun.

“I’ve seen a few teachers playing it,” Hale said. “Everyone sort of knows what it is, and when they recognize what you’re doing, a light bulb clicks.”

Whether the Pokemon craze will last through the summer and linger into the school year remains to be seen.

KTNA’s Phillip Manning, KUCB’s Zoe Sobel and KCAW’s Katherine Rose contributed to this story.