Alix Soliman

A private beach in Gustavus known as the Beach Meadows is now protected by a conservation easement the owners signed with the Southeast Alaska Land Trust, or SEALT.

Bailey Williams is an outreach and development specialist at SEALT. She said the temporary easement will protect the land for up to five years.

“We are using that time to secure funding for the permanent conservation easement,” Williams said.

She says it will cost around $800,000.

The easement covers 187 acres of coastal meadow that rose out of the ocean in the last century or so as melting glaciers shed weight from the land. Williams said it’s important habitat for migratory birds, moose, wolves, bears and other animals, and a great place to forage for berries and seaweed.

The land is owned by the DeBoer family, which started a homestead there in the 1950s. The family did not respond to a request for comment.

Mike Taylor is a Gustavus city council member and chair of the Conservation Lands Advisory Committee. He said the current owner has continued his family’s legacy of providing public access.

“He has kept it open, though, and encouraged people to enjoy hiking and picnicking, skiing, birding, berry picking and so forth on it, as his father and grandfather had,” Taylor said.

Taylor said he wanted to formalize that arrangement.

“With their spectacular views of Icy Strait and the Fairweather Range behind, the property could, in the future, be a prime target for development,” he said.

He said this is the first step toward ensuring that doesn’t happen and the land remains accessible to everyone in the community. 

Correction: A previous version of this story included an incorrect estimate provided by SEALT of the permanent easement cost.

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Although voting for Fat Bear Week in Katmai National Park closed last month, Juneau’s black bears are packing on the pounds to keep from starving during hibernation, and they’re going for whatever they can find.

At about 9 p.m. on a mid-October evening at the Triangle Club, the bartender and patrons dashed outside at the sight of a hefty black bear in the alleyway across the street. The bear sniffed at a row of garbage cans that are bear-resistant, but not bear-proof. 

People banged their fists on a metal trash can and yelled at the bear to go away, for its own sake. 

After glancing back at the row of people standing on the sidewalk, the bear heeded the warning and sauntered up the stairs. 

According to downtown residents, this scene has replayed most nights this month. That’s because autumn is a time when bears in Alaska enter hyperphagia, which is a period of gluttony driven by insatiable hunger. 

Carl Koch, Juneau’s wildlife management biologist at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, said that the season’s change, marked by a decrease in daylight and drop in temperature, triggers bears to devour massive amounts of food so they can survive the winter. But their usual diet is not as abundant.

“I mean, there may be still some salmon around, but they’re rapidly running out of natural foods,” he said.

The grasses they eat tend to be more nutritious in the spring and berry season has ended. So Koch said he’s been getting calls about bears rummaging through trash. He expects that to slow down in November and December, when bears head uphill to hibernate.

During hyperphagia, black bears’ heart rates can double and they tend to venture farther to find a meal. They spend almost all day, every day eating. It amounts to around 20,000 calories per day — double what they typically eat during the summer — and they can put on around a third of their body weight. 

Koch says the availability of resources, including trash, might make them stay out longer.

“They can delay hibernation if there’s food out,” he said. 

He says he received a report of people feeding a young bear downtown, which is illegal in Alaska and could dangerously train the local bears to associate humans with food. The department euthanized two bears last year that had become aggressive around trash bins on South Franklin Street.

Koch recommends keeping food out of vehicles, bringing bird feeders indoors until winter and keeping trash in secured bins. And he says to follow the city ordinance to put garbage out for pick-up no earlier than 4 a.m. on trash day.

Volunteers in Juneau are offering free lunches for federal employees who were furloughed when the government shut down on Oct. 1. So far, more volunteers than furloughed workers have attended.

On Thursday afternoon, half a dozen volunteers laid out sandwich fixings, bags of chips, muffins and homemade pumpkin bread at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers building downtown.  

Chad Millen prepared a turkey and cheese sandwich and sat down at a foldout table with his two young daughters. He was furloughed from NOAA Fisheries, where he works as an IT specialist on a system that tracks commercial fishing catches. 

Millen said he saw the shutdown coming. 

“It’s like the game of chicken, and you’ve got the two cars driving towards each other,” he said, referring to the two political parties in a gridlock. “They’re both acting crazy, expecting the other side to yield, and we’re passengers in the car, and so that’s what it feels like, is, you know, it’s not really about you, but you’re in the middle of it.”

Millen said his division at NOAA recently joined the National Federation of Federal Employees, or NFFE. Coming to lunch is a good opportunity to learn more about the labor union. 

Millen was one of just two furloughed workers who attended lunch Thursday. 

Eric Antrim is the recording secretary for NFFE Local 251 and one of the free lunch volunteers. He was furloughed from the U.S. Forest Service, where he manages bridge inspections across the Tongass and Chugach National Forests. He said his last paycheck came on Oct. 10. 

“We’ve got a lot of members that are paycheck to paycheck,” Antrim said. “This next paycheck that we’re going to miss, I think that’s when, you know, maybe a baloney sandwich starts to sound a little bit better than it did last Monday.”

Antrim said they hosted one other lunch so far this year, last Monday, but only a few furloughed workers came. 

NFFE Local 251 represents nearly 500 U.S. Forest Service employees across Alaska. Antrim said that 330 of its members are furloughed, according to data he obtained from human resources. 

He said the volunteers plan to keep providing lunch and a space to gather for federal workers on Mondays and Thursdays until the shutdown ends. 

Correction: Eric Antrim manages bridge inspections across both national forests in Alaska, not just the Tongass.

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Mendenhall Glacier is melting in ways that affect the size of glacial outburst floods in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley. In a crowded lecture hall at Egan Library on Friday, scientists presented new preliminary data on how the ice contributed to this summer’s record-breaking flood, and shared their ideas about how that could change in the future. 

Juneau’s glacial outburst flood in August broke more than one record. Eran Hood is an environmental scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast. He said the Mendenhall River rose quicker than ever this year. 

“It was a fast release — the fastest release we’ve seen in terms of just the rate at which the amount of water in the river was increasing hour over hour,” Hood said. 

There was also more water than in years past, both from heavy rain in the days leading up to the flood and because the capacity of Suicide Basin — the source of Juneau’s outburst flood — has grown. The basin is an immense pool that formed when Suicide Glacier receded. Steep rock faces make up all but one of its walls. Billions of gallons of water are held back by one wall that’s an ever-changing ice dam formed by Mendenhall Glacier.

The outburst flood happens when rain and meltwater rise to the top of the ice dam and pressure builds up enough for the water to tunnel through the glacier and drain out of the basin all at once, sending a torrent through Mendenhall Valley.

The flood has been growing, but the researchers say it will reach a peak one day and then start getting smaller. Hood said they aren’t sure when exactly the basin will deliver its largest flood. 

“Hopefully we’re up near the top of the curve,” he said. “We don’t know yet.”

Jason Amundson, a glaciologist at UAS, said calculating the shifting volume of Suicide Basin is key to understanding how the melting glacier influences the size of the flood.

“I would say at this point, we have a really good grasp of the basin volume and how it’s changing over time,” he said.

The researchers flew drones over the basin that captured thousands of high-resolution photos. Stitched together, the images help the team measure how much water it can hold. 

In the presentation on Friday, Amundson broke down the math he did to calculate the change in water capacity over the past five years. He presented the volume in acre-feet — for reference, one acre-foot is equal to a football field covered in a foot of water. 

First, Suicide Basin is expanding into the side of the glacier. That means it’s getting wider. Amundson said the basin cut into the glacier by roughly 100 meters, adding about 6,400 acre-feet of storage capacity. But he said this is the hardest variable to follow because the ice is constantly moving. It calves and stretches, repeatedly pressing into the basin and retreating. 

Second, the researchers reported that Mendenhall Glacier has thinned somewhere between 15 and 20 meters due to climate change. That means the basin’s ice dam is getting shorter. Amundson said this has reduced water capacity by roughly 8,500 acre-feet. 

Third, icebergs in Suicide Basin are melting rapidly. That adds water capacity, because floating ice displaces water. Amundson said iceberg loss has added about 12,000 acre-feet of storage to the basin. 

Altogether, Suicide Basin can now hold about 9,900 acre-feet or 3.2 billion gallons more water than it could in 2020. The numbers presented are still rough estimates based on preliminary data that hasn’t been finalized yet.

“In the last five years, the storage capacity has increased by something like 20% — little bit scary to think about it continuing to increase … 10,000 acre feet every five years,” Amundson said. “But I think the thing that should give you at least a little bit of comfort is that there’s not a lot of floating ice left in the basin.”

He said melting icebergs added the most water capacity, but now there’s only about 6,000 acre-feet left to melt. 

The theory is that the largest outburst flood should happen when there are no icebergs left in the basin. So Hood said this could be good news.  

“Theoretically, that’s kind of a good sign that we could be nearing the peak,” Hood said.

But he said reality is never as clean as theory. The changing ice dam, high tide or an atmospheric river could make the Valley’s largest flood come sometime before or after all of the icebergs melt. 

The research team is also using ice-penetrating radar that hangs from a helicopter, pings down to the bedrock and produces maps of the glacier’s underside. Those maps will help them measure how thick the ice is, predict the lifespan of the floods from Suicide Basin and investigate other potential basins that might release floods down the line. 

Amundson said that at first glance, the next potential basin further up the glacier, which is still covered in ice, doesn’t seem deep enough to create a big outburst flood.

“I’m a little bit skeptical that it could be a big basin,” he said. “We’re not sure yet, because we haven’t fully processed the data.”

He said more potential basins will be analyzed over the next few months.

Learn more about Juneau’s glacial outburst flood by visiting our ktoo.org/flood and listening to the Outburst podcast.

A power outage hit all of Juneau on Tuesday just after 11 a.m. Alaska Electric Light & Power switched on diesel back-up generation about an hour later and restored regular hydropower by 2 p.m.

Debbie Driscoll is the vice president of AEL&P.  She said the outage occurred on a transmission line south of the city, between the west terminal near Taku Inlet and the Thane substation.  

She said staff patrolled the area and couldn’t identify the cause, but the transmission line wasn’t damaged.

“It’s possible, when we’ve had situations like that, that a tree branch comes into contact with the line and clears or wildlife comes in contact with the line and clears the line,” Driscoll said. 

She said other recent power disruptions are unrelated to Tuesday’s. North Douglas has had a string of outages in the past month caused by a squirrel, a tree, and an equipment issue.

Driscoll said that power outages are more common in the fall, when storms take down more trees that hit above-ground transmission lines. 

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Some Alaskans are fired up about water pollution from heavy fuel oil burned on large cruise ships. At a panel discussion in Juneau on Wednesday, members of tribes and conservation organizations said there’s a solution: using cleaner fuel.

Heavy fuel oil is the stuff from the bottom of the barrel — the waste product at the end of the oil refining process. It’s cheaper than distillate fuels and is used widely by most of the large cruise ships that travel along Alaska’s coastline every year. 

When it’s burned, heavy fuel oil exhaust releases sulfur oxide into the air, which can cause heart and lung disease and lead to acid rain. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization, or IMO, required ships that burn heavy fuel oil to use scrubbers, which filter the exhaust through seawater. 

Aaron Brakel is a clean water campaigner at the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, which organized the panel. He said scrubbers didn’t solve the pollution problem — they just moved it into the ocean. 

“They spray the water, transferring pollutants from the air into the water from the exhaust,” he said. “Most of the scrubbers worldwide, most of the ones here in Alaska, are open-loop systems.”

That means they pump seawater infused with toxic exhaust back into the ocean instead of storing it and disposing of it at an onshore facility.

Nearly 80% of the cruise trips made in Alaska last year burned heavy fuel oil through open-loop or hybrid systems. Hybrid scrubbers can switch between dumping the effluent or storing it, depending on discharge regulations in the waters the ship is passing through.

Brakel probed into U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records and found that between 2023 and 2024, 17 ships using open-loop scrubber systems reported more than 700 water quality violations off the coast of Alaska, as Alaska Public Media reported last month. But the data doesn’t show exactly where the violations happened.

Kay Brown is the Arctic policy director at Pacific Environment, an advocacy nonprofit. Last year, she and her colleagues published a literature review of studies around the world on the negative effects of scrubbers.

“The big takeaway here is that scrubber pollution is toxic to marine life at very low concentrations,” Brown said. 

One study found scrubber wastewater at a concentration of 5% killed tiny crustaceans called copepods within one day, and called the wastewater a “witch’s cauldron” of toxic compounds. Another study found that exposure to scrubber discharge affected the reproduction success of some mussel and sea urchin species at even lower concentrations.

Several Southeast tribes have passed resolutions calling for cleaner fuel, including the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, the Organized Village of Kake, the Organized Village of Kasaan and the Ketchikan Indian Community.

Ilsxilee Stáng Gloria Burns is president of the Ketchikan Indian Community. She said she wants cruise lines to take initiative.

“This practice of fuel dumping makes the cruise ships an extractive industry,” she said.  

Burns said the onus is on the cruise industry to build a relationship of reciprocity instead. 

Linda Behnken is the executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and board president of Alaska’s Sustainable Fisheries Trust. She’s fished commercially for 40 years and says the statewide seafood marketing strategy is built on telling the story of Alaska’s healthy, pristine waters.

“To have this information, to me, where we know sort of that dirty secret, I feel like we’re being disingenuous by continuing to build our reputation on this,” she said. 

Behnken said Alaskans have a responsibility to protect the water from pollution. 

Cruise ships that burn heavy fuel oil are equipped to switch between fuel types.

Some regulations have already taken effect in U.S. waters. Last year, the IMO banned heavy fuel oil in Arctic waters, with some fuel tank exceptions. Scrubber discharge is restricted in Hawaii’s waters and banned within the Port of Seattle. California has long required ships to burn cleaner fuels upon entering its waters. 

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau, attended the panel. He said he’s concerned about water pollution from scrubbers, but hasn’t decided on a policy path yet.

He said he’s been meeting with a lot of people about it, including cruise companies. 

“We had some serious conversations and they presented some research, some of which I bought and some which I didn’t,” Kiehl said.

Cruise Lines International Association Alaska represents the cruise industry.

“There is no scientific basis to support a ban on [scrubbers],” CLIAA spokesperson Lanie Downs wrote in an email, adding that they “remain an important compliance option as the maritime sector continues to reduce air emissions.”

Alix Pierce, Juneau’s visitor industry director, said in an interview that there’s a long-standing voluntary commitment from the cruise lines to switch to marine gas oil when they’re in Gastineau Channel, while in Juneau’s cruise port and upon departure. 

“All we can do is make agreements and ask that they be followed, and even if we did have legislation, I don’t know what our compliance program would look like,” Pierce said. 

She said the city has no reason to believe ships aren’t honoring the commitment. But in 2019, Gov. Mike Dunleavy axed state funding for the Ocean Rangers program that had observers aboard cruise ships, so there is no longer oversight on oil slicks. The state’s wastewater permits and ship inspectors only address sewage and grey water, not scrubber wastewater dumping. 

Pierce said the city is working to help find alternative shipping fuels through a partnership between ports and cruise lines called the Pacific Northwest to Alaska green corridor project. 

“We’re excited to see how we can kind of continue to try to drive change in the alternative fuel space, because that’s really the future,” she said. 

She said the group will publish a report in the next few months looking at the feasibility of transitioning cruise ships to another fuel type called green methanol, which can be produced from municipal or agricultural waste. The IMO suggests it could cut carbon and sulfur oxide emissions. Pierce said the effort could move the needle beyond the scrubber problem and meet IMO’s goal to make shipping a net-zero emissions industry by 2050.

Juneau’s last cruise ship of the 2025 season will depart next Tuesday.

Correction: The panel discussion was on Wednesday.