Alix Soliman

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Over Thanksgiving weekend, Centennial Hall in downtown Juneau was bustling with people browsing for holiday gifts fashioned by around 175 vendors. 

Juneau Public Market ramped up the holiday shopping season with hundreds of people buying handmade art, jewelry, clothes and other goods. Vendors from near and far said it’s one of the most meaningful markets of the year for them. 

One ceramicist has been selling her kitchen wares at Juneau Public Market for more than 40 years. Betty Bell lives in Milton, Washington. She travels for the market and to see her daughter and grandkids, who live in Juneau. She said this annual visit is meaningful for her family. 

“It’s allowed me to get to know my grandchildren,” Bell said. 

Bell said market sales pay for her plane ticket every year. Now that she’s 91 years old, she sells her pottery almost exclusively at this market, but it used to make up about a quarter of her annual sales when she was throwing more clay. 

“Juneau has embraced me and supported me over the years, and I’ve kind of become your local, out-of-town potter,” she said. 

That sense of community connection is what brings many artisans back year after year. Vendors pay between $250 and $1,200 for a booth space, and many say they rake in a large portion of their annual sales from this market alone. 

Carley Thayer is an Aleut jewelry maker. Her business, Bering Sea Designs, features sharp lines, soft fur and colors of the ocean — inspired by the coastal cliffs of Unalaska, where she spent her early years.

“I make sea otter fur and metal jewelry,” she said. “So I’ve got earrings and bracelets and necklaces, some big pieces, like this body piece here that was on the Alaska Fashion Week runway.”

She said that selling her jewelry at Juneau Public Market makes up about half of her annual sales. But it’s about more than just the money for her.

“Growing up here, you know everybody, so it’s like a family reunion,” Thayer said. “It’s fantastic. We love Public Market.”

A woman wearing a pair of her earrings she’d purchased from Thayer in the past briefly stopped by the booth. 

“It’s really incredible to see your art walking around,” Thayer said after greeting her.

It was Bailey Mccallson’s first time as a vendor at the market with his business, Tuskworthy Premiums LLC. He’s a Yupik artist who traveled from Fairbanks to sell his earrings and sculptures made of carved walrus ivory. He said selling art through markets and online is important, “especially for Native people in communities where job security is hard.”

Mccallson has been a full-time artist for six years. Beyond the income, he said it’s allowed him and other Native artists to maintain their way of life. 

“They can stay in their homes rather than moving into the cities and be there for the elders so that apa doesn’t lose his grandchildren who pull the nets for him while they’re fishing and just to keep those cultural values strong and held together,” he said. 

Camille Jones owns Treetop Tees, a shop in downtown Juneau with shirts featuring locally-inspired designs. One of her favorites right now is an Eaglecrest chairlift, packed with cartoon animals representing each lift.

“Porcupine, black bear, hooter and ptarmigan — especially with black bear closing — I was like, we need to commemorate all four ski lifts,” she said. 

She said the market is important for business, particularly in the winter when tourists aren’t strolling into her storefront. 

“This is our biggest weekend of the year,” Jones said. 

Juneau resident Peter Metcalfe started hosting Juneau Public Market in 1983. He said vendors make somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 on average over the three-day weekend. He said Black Friday this year was one for the books. 

“A couple of my longtime vendors said they did more in two hours than they’d done in all three days of previous events,” Metcalfe said. 

He said most makers are based in Alaska, and a little more than half are Juneau locals. 

“I can’t put a figure on how important this is for Juneau’s cottage industries, but I know many people who participate — it means a lot to their annual incomes, and it keeps them in the game,” he said. 

Artisans said it’s a warm and welcoming space that brings the art community together during the holiday season.  

Metcalfe said he generates revenue from the $10 per person entrance tickets, while most of the vendor fees pay what it costs to put on the event, including rental space and staffing.

Metcalfe is 74 years old. After he had a heart attack while running on Brotherhood Bridge Trail in 2021, he says people have been asking him about the market’s future.

“I do have a succession plan, and they introduce themselves as the heir and the spare,” he said with a chuckle. 

They’re his nephews. 

“So this will continue on within the Metcalfe family,” he said. 

Shoppers can continue gathering gifts locally at Juneau’s Gallery Walk this Friday. 

Some Southeast residents put up Christmas decorations over Thanksgiving weekend. The centerpiece, of course, is the tree.

The U.S. Forest Service allows each household to cut down one Christmas tree from the Tongass National Forest per year. Julia Spofford is the assistant director at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. No permit is required, but she said residents should follow a few key guidelines to protect ecosystems.

“We don’t want to do any trees within, you know, 330 feet of bald eagle nests, or 100 feet of salmon streams or 100 feet of roads or trails,” she said.

She said to only take a tree that’s seven inches in diameter or smaller, and to cut as low to the ground as possible.

“We ask that you avoid muskeg as well, just because the regeneration in those areas is difficult for trees to establish,” Spofford said.

Some helpful things to bring are a hand saw, sled, cord to wrap the tree and a tape measure.

Tree harvesters will see a lot of western hemlock and Sitka spruce. Spofford explains the difference in terms of Christmas-tree quality.

“Hemlocks are really soft, but they also have kind of very flexible branches,” she said. “So if you’ve got a lot of heavy ornaments — might not be a good choice — but if you’re likely to brush into your tree a lot or have small kids, it might be a nicer option, since it’s softer versus the Sitka spruce. Spruce has those spikier needles, but often have a little more conical of (a) shape.”

Spofford said it’s important to check Forest Service maps.

People can find Christmas trees by hiking out on the trails, but there are also a couple of accessible spots just off of Juneau’s road system. The first is along Glacier Highway between mile post 29 and 33. The second is up Fish Creek Road toward Eaglecrest Ski Area.

The Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area, Auke Recreation Area and Lena Beach are off-limits.

The City and Borough of Juneau also allows Christmas tree harvest on designated areas of city-owned land, including off of North Douglas Highway near Fritz Cove and False Outer Point, and off of Glacier Highway near Bridget Cove.

The city’s regulations differ slightly from the Forest Service policy. Harvesters must still avoid muskeg and cut the tree at its base. But discarded branches must be scattered and trees must be cut more than 50 feet from a hiking trail and more than 25 feet from any body of water.

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For the first time, Juneau’s famous Mendenhall Glacier is not touching Mendenhall Lake, which was hidden beneath a thick sheet of glacial ice only a couple of hundred years ago. Scientists say this means the glacier has entered a new phase of its retreat.

Jason Amundson, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Southeast who’s been studying the Mendenhall Glacier for years, said the glacier is the symbol of Juneau. 

“There’s several glaciers around, but when someone says ‘the glacier,’ they’re definitely talking about Mendenhall,” Amundson said. 

The inside of Juneau’s City Hall features a panoramic image of the glacier. It’s the most striking part of the landscape that travelers see when they fly into Juneau International Airport. It’s the capital city’s top tourist attraction, with more than 700,000 visitors each year. 

For generations, the glacier fanned out across the lake that it carved out. But it’s been rapidly retreating out of the lake over the past two decades. Now, scientists say it’s separated from the water completely. 

Amundson flew over the scene in a helicopter about two weeks ago. 

“That was the first time I had really thought, ‘Oh, it doesn’t look like it’s touching the lake anymore,’” he said, adding that photos posted on Facebook by local photographers confirmed it.  

But he said glacial ice and water will probably touch again for brief periods over the coming seasons. Rainfall and snowmelt could cause the lake level to rise enough to meet the ice. Also, the glacier still pushes toward the lake a fraction in the winter, when gravity pulls on the added mass of the snowpack. 

Eran Hood, an environmental scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast, said that despite these expected seasonal meet-ups, the Mendenhall is “functionally” no longer a lake-terminating glacier.

“It’s clear there’s a lot of shallow sediments through there that it’s kind of sitting on, or even perched up above,” Hood said. “There’s just not much chance at this point that it would really have meaningful interactions with the lake anymore.”

Climate change has accelerated the glacier’s retreat. Between 1941 and 2020, the local mean temperature rose by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit. 

In recent years, Amundson said that glacial ice on the lake has quickly disappeared. 

“There was pretty rapid retreat that occurred because there was this shallow, pretty thin area of the glacier that was in the lake and that broke apart— like where the ice caves used to be,” he said. 

According to a previously unpublished report shared with KTOO and written by Hood, Amundson and their colleagues, the Mendenhall Glacier retreated fastest between 2007 and 2011 — losing roughly a football field per year — because icebergs were calving off at a high rate as the glacier’s terminus moved through the deepest part of Mendenhall Lake. 

Amundson said that’s because of the way that ice interacts with water. 

“When you have a glacier that’s in deep water, there’s a lot of pressure at the bottom, so the glacier tends to flow faster,” he said. “Then, if it’s flowing faster, it can break apart.”

Now that the ice isn’t touching the water, Amundson said the Mendenhall’s retreat could slow down. In the report, the researchers found parts of the glacier that terminated on rock retreated substantially slower than parts that terminated on the lake. Between 1998 and 2020, the ice attached to bedrock receded about 56 feet per year, while ice on the lake vanished at more than two-and-a-half times that speed, at roughly 148 feet per year.

“So once you get out of the lake, it’s harder for the glacier to retreat as quickly as it has over the last 5, 10, 15 years,” Amundson said.

But the glacier is still receding. Using ice-penetrating radar, the research team is currently trying to predict when it will pull into another lake of unknown size, shape and location that’s currently hidden beneath the ice. That could speed up the glacier’s retreat again.

Losing a scenic view

One day in the not-so-distant future, scientists say Juneau’s symbol will disappear from the vantage point of the U.S Forest Service visitor center that was built to feature its scenic vista.

Hood said he thinks that will happen sometime around 2050. 

Alix Pierce, the visitor industry director for the City and Borough of Juneau, said that losing sight of Juneau’s most accessible glacier could change how the city markets itself as a tourist destination. Although, she suspects many cruise ship passengers will probably still come to see the Mendenhall. 

“But we’re going to need to be creative about how it changes, what it looks like, how we adapt,” Pierce said. 

A few years ago, the Forest Service looked at several different options for how to address that foreseeable future. 

“Some of those options were things like boating people across the lake to a satellite visitor center where they’d be able to see the glacier for longer,” Pierce said. “Those things weren’t ultimately selected in their final plan.”

Hood said the visitor center at Portage Glacier in Chugach National Forest could be a cautionary tale. In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people traveled there. But since that glacier pulled out of view, visitation has plummeted.

Paul Robbins, a spokesperson for Tongass National Forest, did not comment on how the agency might try to maintain scenic access once the current view of the glacier is lost. 

“Our current plans are focused on improving access and increasing visitor capacity, safety and enjoyment through the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Facilities Improvement project,” Robbins wrote in an email to KTOO. “The project adds a Welcome Center, an outdoor plaza, enlargement of parking areas, additional restroom facilities, three new trailhead parking lots, and improvements to the existing facility.”

But Pierce said those improvements don’t address the decline of the glacier.

“Things like that, that are vital and necessary for managing the traffic flow that we have out there today, but aren’t necessarily looking into the future for how we adapt to climate-related changes to how people use the area,” she said.

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Juneau’s sole electricity provider, Alaska Electric Light & Power, is appealing the Regulatory Commission of Alaska’s decision to approve Juneau Hydropower as a new public utility. Last week, AEL&P requested that the Superior Court of Alaska consolidate two separate cases involving disputes between the hydroelectric companies.

The appeal follows more than a decade of disputes between AEL&P and Juneau Hydropower — a company that plans to increase the borough’s hydroelectric capacity by nearly 20%. The company plans to shuttle power to rural parts of Juneau in the next few years through its Sweetheart Lake Hydroelectric project. This summer, the commission ordered AEL&P to facilitate Juneau Hydropower’s connection with its existing electricity infrastructure and the two utilities hashed out agreements to make that happen.

Alec Mesdag, the CEO of AEL&P, disputes the commission’s decision to exempt Juneau Hydropower from a requirement to have at least 10 customers when it certified the company as a public utility. The company has one contracted customer: Coeur’s Kensington Mine.

Mesdag also has outstanding complaints about the agreements the commission ordered AEL&P to sign, which he hopes the Superior Court will help resolve. Namely, AEL&P is required to reserve 8.5 megawatts of transfer capacity in its system, even before Juneau Hydropower is up and running, without compensation. 

Mesdag said he worries he could incur additional costs if, in the meantime, AEL&P’s existing customers increase their power use enough to eat into that reserve. 

“Do I have to build upgrades to ensure that we can, you know, transfer another eight-and-a-half megawatts on top of that?” he said. 

But once operating, he says Juneau Hydropower has to pay AEL&P $1.2 million per year for using the system.  

Mesdag also disagrees with the commission’s decision to approve of Juneau Hydropower’s design of the interconnection point, where electricity generated at Sweetheart Lake will join AEL&P’s Snettisham power line to Juneau. 

“It is a bad precedent that any entity who disputes the utility’s position on what creates a safe and reliable interconnection that protects its customers can simply insist that their project will die if the commission does not order the utility to accommodate their every wish,” Mesdag said.

Duff Mitchell, the managing director at Juneau Hydropower, said the appeal is “frivolous.” The two utilities spent more than a week in hearings before five commissioners, who decided to approve Juneau Hydropower’s public utility certificate and the Sweetheart Lake project plan.  

“Basically, their case is, you know, we got our butt kicked in the hockey game five to zero, and now we’re a sore loser and we’re blaming the ref,” Mitchell said.

He called AEL&P’s disputes mere “quibbles” and said he’s “charging forward” with financing and building the new hydroelectric plant at Sweetheart Lake. 

“We’re proceeding with the lawful order we have, and we’re moving on to put this project into construction,” Mitchell said. “We’re bringing the power for Juneau’s prosperity.”

Mitchell said he plans to break ground next year. According to Juneau Hydropower’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license restrictions and commission certificate, construction must begin by September 8, 2026, and be completed three years later. 

The Regulatory Commission of Alaska declined to comment.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the cases were already consolidated.

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Two landslides took out Juneau’s popular Auke Lake Trail in September, causing the City and Borough of Juneau to close it to the public. Now, as trail workers repair it, they say it’s an example of climate impacts on local trails they’ve been seeing more frequently in recent years. 

On Monday, a trail coordinator used a chainsaw to rip through a fallen tree blocking the path along Auke Lake where landslides washed it out. The trail is flat and follows the contour of the lake next to the University of Alaska Southeast’s Juneau campus. The landslides occurred during an atmospheric river in late September and the trail has been closed since.

“We saw footsteps as we were going,” said Meghan Tabacek, the executive director of Trail Mix Inc. “People are already still using this trail.”

Trail Mix is a local nonprofit that maintains more than 200 miles of trails in Juneau, including those owned by the city. 

“So our goal is now to make it, one: fully reopen so we can get the trail closed signs down; and two: at least passable,” Tabacek said. “Our first step to passability is using these chainsaws right here to clear all the logs.”

Later, they’ll push those logs into the lake, where much of the debris fell naturally.

Nick Marinelli is a trail coordinator for Trail Mix. He paced the length of both landslides, which are about 50 feet apart at the trail level, and estimates that about 150 feet of the trail washed out altogether. The slides appear to reach up the slope roughly 400 feet, where they’ve scoured the soil down to bedrock.

He said he has noticed landslides affecting popular Juneau trails more frequently in recent years, including on Perseverance Trail and Montana Creek Trail. 

“It seems like with those heavier storm events that happen in September and October, there’s more material coming down,” Marinelli said. 

Tabacek said that has factored into how Trail Mix plans maintenance. 

“Especially over the past five years, as climate-related disturbances to trails become a little more frequent, we’ve just started having to budget our time a little bit different,” she said.

She said that Trail Mix now sets aside five to eight weeks each year to handle this extra work. That work has included things like restabilizing a bridge on Black Bear Trail where Montana Creek widened sooner than expected, redirecting water and clearing landslide debris.

Once the workers clear away the logs, Tabacek said they’ll rebuild damaged sections of Auke Lake Trail this week. 

“A lot of that is just going to be pushing dirt around,” she said. 

Then they’ll layer some gravel on top and build retaining walls. In the spring, she said they’ll probably come back and add moss to the bare soil on the lake-side of the trail. They might also plant blueberry and devil’s club starts on the upward slope.

“But honestly, Southeast kind of takes care of the re-veg(etation) pretty, pretty fast every year,” Tabacek said. 

Although the slide chutes seem stable now, she said some trees are loosely attached and a storm could cause further slides. 

“Especially on days where you’re getting more than half an inch or a full inch of rain,” she said.

Marc Wheeler, the city’s director of parks and recreation, said residents should always consider the hazards when heading outdoors. 

“Like with all of our trails, we just have people use their best judgment,” Wheeler said. “You’re kind of using our trails at your own risk.”

Juneau recreators can fill out a damage report on the Trail Mix website if they encounter fallen trees or slides blocking trails. 

The city hopes to reopen Auke Lake Trail at the end of this week.

Clarification: A previous version of this story said Trail Mix hopes to reopen the trail. The City and Borough of Juneau owns Auke Lake Trail.

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The longest government shutdown in U.S. history ended last week, paving the way for federal employees to return to their posts, including many in Alaska’s capital city. But reopening is not necessarily a smooth process and some agency workers say they are frustrated.

After 43 days without work or pay, Don MacDougall got a text from his boss Wednesday evening telling him to come back to the office the next morning. Walking out of the federal building downtown on Friday afternoon, he said it felt strange to go without work for that long, knowing that eventually he’ll be paid for the lost time. 

“It seems kind of senseless,” MacDougall said. “Then when you come back, you’re overloaded with all the work that you didn’t get to do before you left and stuff that’s built up.”

He’s a program coordinator at the U.S. Forest Service. He works on projects involving workforce development, volunteers and recreation across Alaska. He said he has hundreds of emails to sift through.

“It’s just been a frustrating time,” MacDougall said.

Eric Antrim said reopening has been disorganized. He manages bridge inspections in Alaska’s national forests and he’s the recording secretary for his union, the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 251. 

He said some furloughed employees, not knowing how long the shutdown would last, left town and weren’t available to return on such short notice. But Antrim said leadership in his office is being flexible as workers come back. 

“People are everywhere,” he said. “One of my colleagues is in Antarctica right now.”

Antrim spent part of his unpaid furlough organizing free lunches for federal workers. Now, he said he’s expecting a paycheck within the next week. 

“Whenever that comes through, I should get one giant lump sum payment for, you know, three pay periods at the same time,” he said.

In 2019, Congress passed a law that guarantees back pay for federal workers as soon as possible after a government shutdown ends. The bill Congress passed Wednesday affirms that guarantee, despite comments that President Donald Trump made last month. 

Back at the federal building, as workers returned from lunch, Jaimie Rountree said she was mandated to work without pay during the shutdown. But she said that wasn’t the case for everyone in her department at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

“So there are a handful of us that weren’t getting paid while we were sitting in an office watching others get paid,” Rountree said. “Humiliating, disrespectful, unfair.”

She’s an agriculture specialist officer and said she had to stay at her post because it’s considered essential for national security. Rountree processes people coming in on mining barges, cruise ships and aircraft who intend to stay in the U.S. 

She said she feels unsure about the future. 

“You just don’t know,” Rountree said. “I mean, there’s things happening nowadays that you never thought would happen.”