Heather Bryant

One of the finalists to be Bartlett Regional Hospital’s new CEO says she has declined a job offer from the Juneau medical facility.

Liz Woodyard says the Bartlett job sounded like an opportunity she didn’t want to miss. But for now she plans to continue as CEO at Petersburg Medical Center, where she’s been for nearly a year.

“Professionally for my career I thought it would be a good opportunity. It’s a great job and really good people, but when all is said and done I have a great job here and I have a lot of great opportunities,” Woodyard said. “We’re doing good things at the hospital and I really wanna see it through the things we’ve started.”

Woodyard was one of three finalists for the Bartlett job – and the only in-state candidate. One applicant, William Comer, withdrew his name from consideration before the final assessment center interview earlier this month. The only remaining finalist, Christine Harff, currently serves as CEO of Sanford Medical Center in Thief River Falls, Minnesota.

The Bartlett Board of Directors has not named its top candidate, citing the need to keep personnel and financial matters private. Board President Bob Storer declined to say whether Woodyard was offered the job.

“I’m just not prepared to discuss the process until the process is completed,” Storer said.

Storer said the board continues to have “very positive discussions” with its top candidate. But he stopped short of saying an announcement would be made at a board meeting Wednesday night.

“If in fact we have an announcement to make on who the candidate is at that point, I think everybody would be happy. But I’m not prepared to say that it’ll be finalized by that point,” Storer said.

Bartlett is the largest hospital in northern Southeast Alaska. It’s owned by the City and Borough of Juneau, and its board members are appointed by the CBJ Assembly. The board late last year decided to hire its own CEO after more than two decades of an outside management company running the hospital.

Anchorage is one of the few North American cities that depend on a glacier for most of their drinking water. The Eklutna glacier also provides some of the city’s electricity, through hydro power. So a team of researchers is working to answer a very important question: How long will the glacier’s water supply last?

To get that answer, those researchers have to shovel a lot of snow. “It gets to be the consistency of really strong Styrofoam once you get down, maybe six or eight feet,” glaciologist Louis Sass says as he flings pristine snow out of a growing hole in the glacier.

It may be a tough job, but it comes with a stunning view. The white glacier sprawls out around Sass, who has spent years researching the Eklutna glacier. It looks a little like a huge lake, covered by a giant, fluffy marshmallow and rimmed with sharp peaks.

Mike Loso, who leads the project, says workers at the water-treatment plant brag that they have the best job in the world. “If you look around, you understand why,” Loso says. “The guys here just have to turn this into drinking water; they just have to figure out how not to screw it up.”

The Anchorage utilities want to know how much meltwater they can expect the glacier to feed into the reservoir they draw from in the years ahead. So six years ago, Loso, an earth sciences professor at Alaska Pacific University, started bringing his students into the field to study the problem.

They spend three weeks each May camping on the glacier, skiing to several research plots to gather data. On a recent afternoon, that means weighing cake-sized pieces of snow sliced from the wall of the snow pit.

A student slides the snow into a plastic bag to weigh it on a portable scale. The precise measurements will help the team determine how much snow accumulated on the glacier last winter. The students are learning how to gather data in the field and stay safe on the glacier.

Haley Williams, a college junior, says she wants to be a scientist.

“I have a fascination with glaciers and volcanoes, and I’m trying to figure out which I like better,” she said. “So I figured I’d come out here, see if I have what it takes to be a glaciologist.”

The students determined that the Eklutna glacier has been shrinking rapidly since the 1950s. The Anchorage utilities are in good shape now because the glacier is actually supplying extra water as it melts, and that should last for at least the next few decades.

Loso can’t predict precisely when the water will start to slow, but he says it’s something Anchorage and its nearly 300,000 residents should think about.

“Does that mean we don’t have electricity, and no water comes out of the tap? No,” he says. “But it does mean that an exceptional source of super clean, really cheap water is going to have to be augmented by what are likely to be more expensive sources of water and electricity.”

Loso says that hit to Anchorage residents’ pocketbooks will seep in slowly, over several decades.

As Loso’s team prepares to leave the site, they insert a 20-foot steel stake in the glacier. When they come back later this fall, they’ll be able to calculate how much snow has melted by measuring how much of the stake is exposed. Loso says he personally would like a hot summer, but he knows that’s not what’s best for the Eklutna glacier.

The first thing you see at Alaska’s Eklutna Cemetery is a tidy white church, with copper-colored onion domes that are topped by the three-barred Russian Orthodox cross.

The church is a reminder of the days when Alaska was claimed by imperial Russia. But it hardly prepares you for the unique combination of Native American and Russian Orthodox influences in the graveyard beyond.

Our guide is Aaron Leggett, who waits patiently under a light but steady rain to explain his community’s burial traditions.

Eklutna is a Dena’ina Native village, just off the highway about 25 miles north of Anchorage.

According to Leggett, an anthropologist and curator at the Anchorage Museum, the Dena’ina are an Athabascan people, who have occupied Alaska’s south-central Cook Inlet area for more than 1,000 years. Athabascans are part of a vast Native American language group that stretches into Canada and Mexico. They are linguistically related to Apaches and Navajos.

Before they encountered the Russian fur traders and priests who began coming to the coast in the early 1700s, the Dena’ina cremated their dead.

Leggett says the ashes were usually put into a birch-bark basket and placed in a tree or by a riverbank, in the belief that would free the spirits to make their final journey to what the Dena’ina call “the High Country.”

The Dena’ina began to convert to Russian Orthodoxy around 1836, Leggett says, after a smallpox epidemic wiped out half their population.

“But when we converted to Orthodoxy, the church forbid us from cremating human remains,” he says. “And as a result, we constructed these spirit houses, where the spirits would have a place to go — and not bother the living until they made that final journey.”

According to church traditions, the spirit would need as many as 40 days to make that passage from the grave site. In the Eklutna Cemetery, around 100 spirit houses cluster near the edge of the woods, sheltered by birch and alder trees.

Most of the houses are like long, low boxes built over the graves. They have peaked roofs, usually with a board like a cockscomb that runs along the ridge. The boards are cut into fancy patterns, like Victorian gingerbread.

Keeping with Dena’ina beliefs, the houses provide shelter for the spirit. And following the Orthodox tradition, the bodies are buried in the ground. But an Orthodox burial is a back-breaking process in a place that’s built on glacier-scoured rock.

“You couldn’t pick a place that is more inopportune to bury somebody,” Leggett says. “You go down about 3 inches, and you start running into these very large rocks. So it becomes back-breaking work, and you really have to have a team of people to be able to dig down enough to bury a person.”

Leggett would know. His family comes from Eklutna, and many family members are buried here.

Once a body has been buried, Leggett says, a blanket is spread over the stones that are mounded on the grave. “What that is, is symbolic of covering the person,” he says. “You’re wrapping them in warmth, and also, in many Native American cultures, wool blankets were a sign of trade and wealth, so it was just another way of showing respect.”

When they’re finished, the houses are placed on top of the blanket. Most are painted in primary colors: bright blues, reds and yellows.

Some have windows and porches — one even has a cupola — but they’re modest compared with a masterpiece that stands by itself, in a grove near the edge of the cemetery. It was built for Leggett’s grandmother, an important person in the community.

“My grandmother was Marie,” he says. “Her maiden name was Marie Ondola; her married name was Marie Rosenberg. And she passed away in 2003.”

Marie Rosenberg’s spirit house is a model of a two-story white clapboard building, with glass windows and a red tin roof that glistens in the rain.

“It’s actually based on the girl’s dormitory at the Eklutna Vocational School that was operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs here in Eklutna from 1925 to 1945,” Leggett says.

Built on a welded-steel frame by Leggett’s uncle Frank, the house stands about 4 feet high, surrounded by bouquets of artificial flowers. “A hundred years from now, that church may not be standing, but this spirit house will be,” Leggett says.

The rain beads up on the spirit house windows, where an icon of the Virgin Mary looks out, past the edge of the Eklutna Cemetery, and into the trees.

On average, it costs $10,615 to send a kid to public school for a year. That’s federal, state and local government spending combined according to the Census Bureau which released the reports today.

However, that one number masks a huge variation. Utah spends just over $6,000 per student; New York and the District of Columbia over $18,000.

Those reports show that average spending in Alaska is approximately $15,800 per student.

There are roughly 131,000 students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in Alaska.

Alaska is fourth in terms of states that spend the most per student. The District of Columbia is the most expensive at approximately$18,700 per student. New York and New Jersey are second and third.

Detailed figures and lots more data (including district-level spending) are available in a report the Census Bureau released today.

U.S. Senator Mark Begich sent a petition with signatures of more than 1,650 Alaskans and other U.S. residents opposing the relocation of an F-16 squadron from Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks to Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage.

Begich launched an on-line petition drive in April.  Those that signed their names believe the Air Force proposal lacks appropriate analysis and transparency.

While the formal petition drive process has ended, Begich says signatures that come in before the end of the month will also be delivered to the Air Force.

Update 10:30 a.m.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has decided to allow Southwest Alaska subsistence fishermen to catch chum and sockeye salmon on the lower Kuskokwim River starting Friday.

But the ban on catching king salmon remains in place until the end of the month.

Fish and Game Commissioner Cora Campbell said it appears that there is a low abundance of Chinook salmon. She says that is a concern given the importance of the subsistence fishery.

Original Story:

Subsistence fishing for salmon is happening on the Kuskokwim River even though closures are in place.

Several villages and dozens of boats participated Wednesday.

Yup’ik tribal elders have been meeting with village fishers and telling them that it they should fish for their families. A handful of tribes put out resolutions saying they have the right to fish as sovereign governments. The village of Napaskiak sent theirs all the way to D.C. to Ken Salazar, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.

That village had about a dozen boats out in the water yesterday afternoon.

In Akiak, about 30 miles upriver of Bethel, the peaceful fishing protest turned to war as one resident called it. Wildlife law enforcement officials arrived in a boat, and cited three fishers and seized their nets.

“Soon as I set, Troopers were waiting right there,” Sam Jackson said.

Jackson was one of those fishers. He was reached by cell phone in his boat.

“What I told them is that we’re not protest fishing but we’re fishing for our people,” Jackson said. “But they still, they would not budge.”

Jackson says one of the nets was cut up in front of them.

The community responded in force. Women and children filled boats and drifted along side fishers supporting their efforts. They held signs that read “feed your families, go fish.”

Sheila Williams, Akiak’s Tribal Administrator, talked with the officers.

“I spoke with them at length and they were asking us to hold off and I told them that at the directions. They’re going to go fishing,” Williams said.

“I’m at the mercy of my elders. The elders say to go fish, they’re going to go fish. And so they’re fishing.”

Law enforcement attempted to land a plane near Akiak, but Jackson said there were too many boats and they flew off. Residents were not sure if they would return, but fishers continued to fish anyway.

The Kuskokwim River has been closed to fishing for over a week in some areas. Fish managers say they plan to open fishing for 3 days, starting Friday for the lowest part of the river. And then they will close it again for an unspecified amount of time.