Alix Soliman

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Officials say to be prepared as Juneau is expected to see frigid temperatures this week and stretching into the next couple of weeks.

The National Weather Service issued a cold weather advisory and a high wind warning starting Thursday evening.  

The forecast shows that a Taku wind event could start as early as Thursday evening. The strongest gusts of 60 miles per hour or more are predicted to blow Saturday. Wind chill temperatures could reach as low as negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Without wind chill, temperatures are expected to range from the teens to negative 3 degrees Fahrenheit through Monday.

“We could see some periods, especially where we have the higher winds, that frostbite is going to be a real danger, and that’s where dressing in layers, covering up is important,” said Jeff Garmon, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Juneau.

He said the wind could also whip up freezing ocean spray, which can cover boats in ice and make maritime travel dangerous.

Garmon said this December is on track to break weather records.

“It’s looking like the numbers are shaping up for this to be the coldest we’ve seen in over 30 years in Southeast Alaska,” he said. “It’s a little unusual to go through like a two to almost three week period and be as cold as we are.”

Garmon said cold snaps in Juneau typically last just a few days, instead of weeks. He said this one is caused by a consistent flow of strong polar air moving in from interior Alaska and Canada.

Some locals might have seen a social media post from the NOAA NWS Climate Prediction Center warning that dangerous temperatures as low as negative 40 could hit Southeast later this month and into January. The post has been deleted, and Garmon said it looks like it was an error.

“I think what happened there was somebody in Washington (D.C.) got their wires crossed,” he said.

Garmon said such low, arctic temperatures are unlikely in most of Southeast. But he said that farther north — in exposed, high elevation spots like the Klondike Highway — it’s possible to see wind chill temperatures even lower.

The National Weather Service’s extreme cold warning for Skagway and White Pass says wind chill temperatures as low as negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit are expected. But Garmon said areas near sea level would probably see somewhere around negative 10 at the coldest.

In dangerous conditions, officials say it’s important to be prepared in case utilities fail. There’s been a string of power outages in Juneau this month.

Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the emergency programs manager for the City and Borough of Juneau, said to stock up on non-perishable foods, drinking water, blankets, flashlights and batteries in case the power goes out.

“It’s really important to be careful using candles for light and to heat your home — that can pretty quickly turn into a fire hazard,” he said.

To prevent pipes from freezing and bursting, he said to keep taps dripping. And he suggests keeping extra blankets and warm clothes in the car, in case it breaks down.

O’Shaughnessy urges residents to sign up for the city’s emergency alerts. He said just under 3,000 people are signed up.

Vulnerable populations will be the most susceptible to harsh conditions. Juneau’s emergency warming shelter in Thane is open each night. Transportation is available to the Glory Hall, Juneau’s homeless shelter, which offers meals and allows people to stay warm during the day.

The city is asking those with boats docked at the harbors to check and make sure everything is secure and working properly.

Garmon said a possible snowstorm could come through Juneau around Christmas and may bring warmer, maritime air that could pull temperatures out of the negatives. But he said it’s still too far out to be confident.

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A U.S. Forest Service plan to revamp the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center to accommodate more tourists could be upended by a lawsuit brought by a nearby homeowner. 

Katharine Miller has lived in the Dredge Lake area near the visitor center for about 22 years. 

“It’s my backyard,” she said. “I do spend quite a bit of time there.”

Last July, she sued the Forest Service, claiming the agency violated the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, when it designed its visitor center improvement plan. The plan expands facilities and increases the cap on the number of visitors allowed to come through commercial tour operators. 

Miller’s lawsuit argued that the Forest Service planned the project to accommodate more tourism without considering other options, which it’s legally required to do. In September, a federal court agreed and ruled in her favor.

Now, she’s requesting that the U.S. District Court for Alaska throw out the improvement plan altogether. The Forest Service is asking the court to leave the plan in place, arguing there’s a serious possibility the agency would reach the same decision to deal with existing overcrowding, and that revisions can be made instead. 

But Miller said it matters how the federal government arrives at decisions.

“Federal agencies like the Forest Service manage resources on behalf of the U.S. public,” she said. “They’re public resources, and I think it’s important to hold agencies accountable to include us in that process in a realistic way.”

Miller said she had objected to the agency’s process before the plan was finalized, but felt ignored.

On top of increasing the number of visitors tour companies can bring to the area, the improvement plan includes building a new welcome center and five new cabins, improving the existing visitor center, paving more parking lots and expanding trails. According to the court decision, the improvements are based on an assumption that tourism will grow 2% per year and the agency’s position that it should strive to meet the demand. 

In its ruling, the U.S. District Court for Alaska found the agency’s options for improving the facilities were all narrowly focused on facilitating more tourism. None focused on restricting the number of visitors.

Miller said the Forest Service should have considered a wider range of options beyond supporting tourism growth. 

“Because this isn’t something that’s necessary, it’s something that you want to do,” she said in reference to the Forest Service. “So you need to explain, you know, why that’s better than figuring out a better carrying capacity.”

The annual visitor capacity for the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center is a little more than half a million. The improvement plan allows for nearly double that — bringing the cap to 999,000 — with 87% allowed to be allocated to commercial use.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s brief on behalf of the Forest Service argues the agency can delay raising the capacity and revise parts of the plan that mention the 2% projected tourism growth. 

Despite citing significant congestion, the Forest Service doesn’t have a system for consistently tracking exactly how many people go to the visitor center each year, according to Paul Robbins, a spokesperson for the Tongass National Forest. He said a safe estimate is probably around 700,000 per year. He wrote in an email to KTOO that an estimated million or so people visit the wider Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area annually.

According to a court file the Forest Service submitted, the area’s busiest days over the summer of 2025 ranged from 3,849 to 6,257 visitors.

Robbins declined to comment on the status of the improvement plan due to the ongoing lawsuit. He said agency staff plan to address deferred maintenance at the visitor center in the fall of 2026, work that was supposed to happen this year. It includes things like lighting, HVAC, flooring and painting. He said this maintenance is not part of the improvement project.

It’s unclear when the court will decide whether to throw out the improvement plan as Miller wants, or choose a different way to address the Forest Service’s violation. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has landed on a solution to put an end to glacial outburst floods that have grown more destructive in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods over the past few summers. 

The agency will pursue something called a ‘lake tap.’ It’s essentially a tunnel through Bullard Mountain on the east side of the glacier that’s meant to steadily drain Suicide Basin so it can’t fill to the point of bursting and send some 16 billion gallons of water through the Valley. 

Denise Koch, the director of engineering & public works at the City and Borough of Juneau, explained it with a metaphor on Friday. 

“I just think about Suicide Basin as a proverbial bathtub,” she said. “What the lake tap is, is just leaving the drain open.” 

She said the drain will empty the water from Suicide Basin into Mendenhall Lake through a conduit somewhere between the face of Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls.

The decision comes after a three-day, closed-door meeting the Army Corps held with federal agencies, local officials and researchers in Juneau this week. Their main task was to discuss five options to prevent homes from flooding in the future. The Army Corps initially planned to host press briefings each day, but cancelled them on Tuesday. 

The city announced today that city leaders, along with the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, support the lake tap option, aligning with many of the public comments the Army Corps received last month.

Besides a lake tap, the options discussed at the meeting were a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake, a permanent levee, a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain and relocating impacted residents from the Valley. 

Koch said the group weighed the options based on risk to downstream residents, how quickly they could be built and the overall cost. 

“Ultimately, a lake tap was seen to reduce risk the most while being able to be constructed the most quickly, for the lowest amount of cost, with the least complex and least costly operation and maintenance,” Koch said. 

Koch said the tunnel could take as long as six years to excavate — the most conservative estimate. She said it could cost somewhere between $613 million and $1 billion, but that all estimates are very rough at this stage.

The Army Corps aims to finish its technical report for the lake tap in May. That will include a preliminary design, a more detailed cost estimate and a draft environmental review. There will be another public comment period once it’s complete.

To implement the solution, the Army Corps will need authorization and funding from Congress. 

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that a full draft environmental impact statement is unlikely to be drafted in the technical report.

Juneau saw a snowfall record during a winter storm over the weekend, and now, freezing temperatures and clear skies are expected to stretch through most of this week. 

Juneau received 13.6 inches of snow this past weekend, measured at the Juneau International Airport. The majority, 9.6 inches, fell on Saturday, Dec. 6, breaking the record for that day in history, according to the National Weather Service. The previous record for Dec. 6 was 7.2 inches, set in 1975. 

“It was a fairly common setup for a heavy snow pattern in Juneau,” said Nathan Compton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau. 

He said the winter storm was caused by cold, dry air flowing south from interior Canada and moving under warmer, moist air traveling north, turning what would have been rain into snow. 

“That cold air came down from Lynn Canal and just undercut everything,” he said. “Right when that happens, that’s when we get the maximum lift. And so on Saturday, that’s why we got those very, very, very heavy snow rates, right at the beginning of the event.”

Elsewhere in the region, the heavy snow and wind caused the Klondike Highway to close over the weekend, and the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry M/V LeConte scheduled to leave Skagway Sunday was cancelled. That stranded the Juneau-Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé Nordic Ski Team in Whitehorse after a ski trip. 

Abby McAllister is the lead ski coach for the team, but wasn’t on the trip. She said 16 students and their coaches stayed an extra night in their AirBnB. 

They’re driving to Haines, where they’ll stay overnight at the local high school and then board the ferry M/V Columbia early Tuesday morning.

Instead of coming home Sunday night, the team is expected back Tuesday. McAllister said the kids know how to go with the flow. 

“You know, it’s Alaska, and these are Alaska kids, and they’ve just been all positive with the twists and turns,” she said. 

Now that the dry, cold air from the north has mostly wrung out the moist clouds hanging over Juneau, sunshine and low temperatures — ranging from the single digits to the teens — are expected to take hold through Friday. 

The state approved a contract on Monday agreeing to pay Juneau’s new hydroelectric utility $1.3 million to power the controversial Cascade Point Ferry Terminal — a project that has yet to be finalized.

That money will pay for a transformer and engineering for a submarine cable required to connect the Alaska Department of Transportation’s proposed ferry terminal to the Sweetheart Lake hydroelectric project that Juneau Hydropower plans to bring online in 2028. 

According to the contract, the state will pay Juneau Hydropower whether or not the ferry terminal project proceeds.

“If they live up to their part of the bargain, we would be responsible to pay for that,” said Christopher Goins, southcoast regional director at the department.

Goins said one major reason the state signed this contract now is because the cost would rise if the department decides to electrify later on, after Juneau Hydropower designs its system without this addition. 

Duff Mitchell, the managing director of Juneau Hydropower, said the other main reason is that the equipment takes a long time to get here. 

“We’re looking at between 52 weeks to over three years, depending on the manufacturer,” he said. 

Mitchell said the transformer wouldn’t be used for anything else if the ferry terminal project doesn’t get built. 

“If, in fact, it goes forward, then we would use it,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be sitting there waiting for the future.”

The department plans to break ground on the first phase of the ferry terminal project in the summer, which will establish an access road and staging area, but not the terminal itself. The state extended the public comment period on the proposed Cascade Point Ferry Terminal to Jan. 9. 

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that the funds will pay for engineering of the submarine cable, not the cable itself.

Next week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold a closed-door, three-day meeting in Juneau to discuss long-term solution options for glacial outburst floods in the Mendenhall Valley. Federal agencies, local officials and researchers will participate. 

During the meeting, the group will discuss the pros and cons of five options to prevent homes from flooding in the coming years. Those options are:

• a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake 
• a permanent levee 
• a lake tap or tunnel through the mountains to drain Suicide Basin 
• a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain
• relocating impacted residents from the Valley

The Army Corps will host the multi-day meeting, called a ‘charette’, at The Huddle in the Mendenhall Mall Dec. 9 through 11. 

Army Corps Spokesperson John Budnik wrote in an email to KTOO that the meeting will be closed to the public to “ensure open dialogue, idea and information sharing is achieved and uninhibited amongst the experts and stakeholders that will be there.”

Press briefings will be held at The Huddle after each day, and the Army Corps plans to publish a report summarizing the meeting for the public in January. 

The Army Corps solicited public input on potential solutions during a month-long public comment period that closed last week and received 34 comments. 

Two options received more attention in those comments than the others. The first is a lake tap or tunnel meant to drain Suicide Basin before it can fill to the point of bursting. The second is a dam or levee at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake. A few commenters favored a bypass channel through the floodplain. 

Some commented on the benefits and drawbacks of each solution, without necessarily favoring one. Others said they didn’t have enough information from the Army Corps about what each option would entail to weigh in. 

Many said that finding a solution is urgent for the hundreds of Valley residents who face annual flooding. The current levee, made of HESCO barriers, is temporary and protected homes from catastrophe by a slim margin during the most recent flood in August. 

The agency aims to recommend a long-term flood solution and design it by the end of May 2026. Budnik anticipates the public will have another opportunity to provide comments on the prospective solution in June 2026.