KCAW - Sitka

Stella Mahoskey looks like your typical golden retriever. At age 13, her muzzle has grayed, and her hips sway a little when she walks. She has a trove of stuffed toys, and she loves getting chunks of Tillamook cheese as a treat. If you look close, you’ll see a long scar across her belly and left leg. That’s one of the only clues Stella gives about her 65 days lost in the wilderness this summer.

On July 7 of this year, Stella was lounging on her back deck with her family – Sarah and Jerome Mahoskey, and kids Kai and Quinn, when a burst of fireworks sent Stella bolting into the woods. The family searched until dark, but they were certain Stella would be on the porch in the morning.

The next day, though, they started to get worried – especially when a neighbor shared some ominous news.

“They said, Did you hear that there was a bear that attacked a dog last night?” Sarah said. “We had the windows open in the back of the house and my wife heard this altercation that sent chills up her spine. And basically, I don’t think your dog could be alive.”

The Mahoskeys didn’t give up hope.

After Stella disappeared in July, Sarah and Jerome’s friends started hiking the trails around where she went missing. Community members reported possible sightings. The Mahoskeys investigated every report. After two months of this, Sarah told a friend, “I feel like there’s a 1% chance that she’s out there, and so I cannot let go.”

In early September, they got one final call – from Tim Eddy, a friend of Jerome’s who was working at the quarry that day.

“He said, do you have a golden retriever? And Jerome said, Well, we did have a golden retriever. And he says, Well, I think this is your golden retriever.”

Jerome called a friend to watch the kids, revved up his four-wheeler, and drove over. At first, he didn’t see anything except an expanse of rock.

“She was on this cliff side and it was basically this ash and rock that was the same exact color as her,” Sarah said. “She totally blended in. The fact that Tim saw her – I just kept saying to him, how did you see her?”

Stella likely hadn’t been at the rock pit long – there wasn’t much in terms of food and water – but the Mahoskeys say the sounds and smells of the quarry may have felt like home to Stella, who grew up around Jerome’s excavation business.

“She knows those sounds, and those sounds are safe to her,” Sarah said. “They sound like, you know, sounds she’s been around her entire life since she was four years old.”

Stella was down to 30 pounds, about half of her normal body weight. She had a wide gash across her left side. The Mahoskeys haven’t confirmed that the gash was from a bear, but they believe that’s the most likely explanation.

“We think she probably hunkered down for quite a while, and just probably wasn’t able to move a lot and knew that it needed to heal,” Sarah said. “She obviously found a safe space, because the fact that she was bleeding and wasn’t found by that bear or another bear again is quite a miracle.”

“Miracle” is not an exaggeration. The hazards for pets lost in Alaska under these circumstances are myriad. But Stella has a knack for surviving against the odds. In 2015, not long after the Mahoskeys adopted Stella from a couple in Port Alexander, she rode with Jerome to work on a rainy August morning.

Here’s former KCAW reporter Rachel Waldholz reading the news that morning:

“Heavy rains triggered what now appear to be at least six landslides in Sitka Tuesday morning, prompting the city to declare a state of emergency.”

The series of landslides that day killed three people and rocked the Sitka community. Jerome narrowly escaped the landslide, but the truck – with Stella inside – was crushed. He assumed the worst.

Then, just a few minutes before rescuers suspended their search due to unstable conditions, “rescuers did manage to pull a dog alive from the debris.”

Stella’s surviving a landslide in 2015 could be attributed to luck. Her recovery from the wild in 2023 was luck – and something more. Sarah says Stella likely survived by foraging.

“She has always picked her own berries when we are out hiking,” Sarah said. “And she loves dandelion roots.”

On the advice of her vet, Stella was on a strict diet for the first ten days after she was reunited with her family. Now, she’s eating well. She is up to 41 pounds, and she’s getting deliveries of venison bone broth and salmon from friends.

“Fried eggs with breakfast, whatever she wants,” Sarah said.

Stella isn’t revealing much about what happened during her time away, but she hasn’t changed much. The only difference, Sarah says as she cuts another chunk of cheese off of the block for Stella, is that she’s definitely a little hungrier than before.

Finding workers in Alaska these days is tough. That’s because there are roughly two jobs open for everyone looking for work. This is 180-degrees from the historic job market in the early 2000s, where there were just over two job-seekers for every available job.

It all came to a head over the last couple of years, and there was a constant refrain: The Great Resignation.

Many analysts attributed the Great Resignation to a reset of sorts, a change in attitudes toward work. So many people lost jobs during the pandemic, they just weren’t ready to go back to their old unfulfilling work, we were told.

But something had started to change even before the pandemic, and it’s described in the latest issue of the state Department of Labor’s “Alaska Economic Trends.” All across the country, job openings had begun to rise, and labor shortages were occurring because Baby Boomers were aging out of the workforce. Demographers had seen it coming for a long time; that it happened in the middle of the first global pandemic in a century was coincidence.

State labor economist Dan Robinson authored the October issue of Trends. He writes, “The pandemic accelerated the imbalance by prompting many older workers to retire earlier than they otherwise would have.”

“The three examples that come to mind to me, most obviously, would be nurses, teachers, and flight attendants,” said Robinson. “I think how miserable some of that work became during COVID.”

And Robinson also makes another critical point: Although some economic trends are leveling out in the aftermath of the pandemic, this demographic trend likely won’t.

“I think employers are going to have to work hard to hire and retain until the Baby Boomers are all the way aged-out and we find some new stability,” said Robinson, “and that might mean some companies figuring out how to do the same business they used to do with fewer people.”

So now the question is, once an employer has found workers, how do you keep them? The October issue of Trends also looks at job turnover, and the data there are also telling. For example, although wages matter in retaining employees, wages aren’t everything. Some occupations with high compensation, like cell tower installers or highway maintenance workers, show exceptionally high rates of turnover, while other lower-paid occupations like bicycle mechanics and bartenders tend to hold onto workers. The data don’t account for tips, which likely throw bartenders into a higher earning tier than bike mechanics, but there is overlap in less quantifiable ways, like creativity and social interaction, and a dedication to a craft or purpose.

And what sends workers away from an employer? Sometimes it’s a desire to change jobs, or do the same job for someone else at higher pay. Alaska doesn’t have hard data in this area, but Robinson cites a national study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which concluded that a toxic work culture was three times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation. He writes, “Some of the attributes of a toxic culture include disrespectful treatment and unethical behavior.”

“It begs the question what workplace toxicity means,” said Robinson. “I was doing a presentation in Anchorage last week, and I mentioned that and – I swear – a tenth of the people in the audience were vigorously nodding.”

All of these factors are probably in play in the two occupations in Alaska with the highest and lowest rates of turnover. At the top of the list, with an annual turnover rate of 84-percent, are fast food cooks who earn an average of $16 an hour. And at the bottom, with a turnover rate of just 8-percent, and an hourly wage of about $50 an hour, are architects.

The City of Sitka has denied a citizen’s petition to put cruise limitations to voters in a special election this winter.

Larry Edwards received notice from the city on Sept. 29 that a petition he sponsored with more than 40 other Sitkans was denied. A letter from municipal clerk Sara Peterson said the proposed legislation would be unenforceable under the Alaska state constitution.

Edwards sought to limit the number of visitors arriving in Sitka by cruise ship next summer to 240,000 total, with weekly and daily limits. It also would have established a Sitka port district. In his recommendation to reject the petition, municipal attorney Brian Hanson wrote that the section describing how the limits would be enforced was “confusing, misleading and incomplete.” Hanson wrote that establishing a port district through a voter referendum would be “an inadmissible appropriation of a public asset,” since the assembly has authority over allocating public assets, including land. Hanson also said that the ordinance would usurp the assembly and planning commission’s authority over city zoning code.

In the letter, Hanson cautions that the ordinance could be unconstitutional at a federal level. In Bar Harbor Maine, citizens recently established a daily cruise passenger limit through a voter referendum, prompting a lawsuit against the city. A ruling in that case will likely come later this year.

In an email to KCAW, Edwards responded to the city’s denial, writing, “Sitkans need relief in 2024 from the excessive cruise tourism of 2022 and 2023. Not pursuing deep cuts for next year is not an option. A next step for that is being developed.”

For the past two summers, the number of cruise passengers visiting Sitka has far exceeded previous records. This summer the city hosted an estimated 560,000 visitors.

And for disclosure, the rejection letter from the city is co-addressed to Larry Edwards and John C. Stein, is a member of the KCAW board of directors. However,  Stein’s name is on the letter only as a alternate addressee to receive mail in the event Edwards were unavailable to receive it. Stein did not participate in drafting the ordinance language or circulating the petition.

Many Sitkans on Friday are joining an annual observance that began in Canada but has significant meaning for Alaskans.

Orange Shirt Day started as a day of remembrance for Indigenous children who were separated from their families and sent to residential schools in Canada, but the event now encompasses First Nations across the United States.

Lillian Young, with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, said Orange Shirt Day commemorates surprisingly recent history.

“In 1973, when Phyllis Jack Webstad was 6 years old, she was sent to the mission school near Williams Lake, British Columbia,” Young said. “Her first memory of her first day at the mission school was that of having her own clothes taken away, including a brand new orange shirt given to her by her grandmother.”

Young said Webstad attended a reunion of the St. Joseph Mission School in 2013 and shared this story, and Orange Shirt Day was born.

According to the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Cultural Survival, around 150,000 Indigenous children attended 130 boarding schools across Canada, the last of which closed only 27 years ago, in 1996.

From the 1800s to the 1960s, the United States operated more boarding schools than Canada, but with fewer students overall. Cultural Survival reports that 35,000 children attended boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and 15,000 attended BIA day schools.

Phyllis Jack Webstad’s story is now considered emblematic of the cultural erasure that took place in residential schools in both countries, along with other physical and emotional abuses — including the undocumented death and burial of students.

Lillian Young said the only way to learn from this history is to face it.

“As hard as it may be for some people to learn about residential schools and our shared colonial history, it’s critical to acknowledge and recognize these topics in a spirit of ongoing learning and reconciliation,” she said.

Orange Shirt Day is officially Saturday, Sept. 30, but Sitka observed it at noon on Friday with a parade through downtown. Organizers created a custom orange shirt for the event, which was distributed to the first 100 people who assemble for the parade.

Chuck Miller, cultural liaison with the Sitka Tribe, said the shirt has significance for the community. A local student designed the artwork. On the front, he said, they say X’atulitseen Haa Yatx’i, “We cherish our children,” and underneath that they say Haa Ani — “The Land of Our People, The Land of the Lingít.”

Alaska’s population is shrinking, so why does the housing market feel tighter than ever? At Southeast Conference on Thursday, a panel of housing specialists highlighted key problems in the Alaska housing market and specific strategies to fix those issues.

A housing shortage in Alaska is not really news, nor is it new.  Nolan Klouda leads the University of Alaska’s Center for Economic Development.

“I don’t think housing has ever been a particularly great spot in our economy, for a lot of reasons,” Klouda said. “You know, we’ve always had high costs and problems with availability.”

Klouda said that although Alaska’s population in most communities has declined slightly, housing demand has gone up about 9% since 2016. That’s because families are having fewer children, so average household size has decreased.

“When adults live together, you know, there are usually one or two of them in a household,” he said. “And so we have basically, more households, even though we have fewer people per household.”

Klouda said efforts to build more housing can be stalled by a variety of factors.

“Sometimes it’s topography, and sometimes it’s land ownership that doesn’t allow for it,” he said. “Anything that can be done to make land available is important, including the building of access or site infrastructure, which sometimes local governments have the ability to oversee.”

He zeroed in on growing short-term rental markets as another area of concern.

“Even if it’s not a big percent of your overall units at any point in time, it keeps growing,” he said. “And so it puts your community on sort of a collision course, you know, with housing availability and affordability.”

Jackie Pata is the president and CEO of Tlingit and Haida Regional Housing Authority, which provides housing assistance and financial support to communities across Southeast. Pata said that in addition to questions of infrastructure and regulation, she’s been focused on financial education for homebuyers and training for local build crews. That approach has seen some success. She pointed to several small communities in Southeast, including Yakutat and Angoon, that are constructing new housing at a per capita rate above the statewide average.

“My apprenticeship programs, like we have in Angoon – they can now build houses year over year with their own local crew creating their own jobs,” Pata said. “Because we definitely have a need. We leverage our dollars, we build our crew, and we continue to utilize them. And we realized that we were not going to have build-and-bust communities anymore.”

Randy Hughey, the Executive Director of Sitka’s Community Land Trust, shared another model for providing what he called “permanently affordable housing.” Under Sitka’s land trust model, eligible low- to moderate-income buyers purchase a small home on land owned by the trust. When they sell the home, their profits are capped to keep the home affordable for the next buyer.

“Like all other models of portability, it turns renters into owners, and isn’t that what we really want to do in our communities? ” Hughey said. “Provide a way for young families to own a home and stay there and raise their kids and be a part of our communities. We want to turn renters into owners.”

Hughey said land trusts are one small piece of the Alaska housing puzzle. Pata echoed a similar sentiment, saying that a multifaceted approach is necessary to work towards solving Alaska’s housing crunch.

“We love where we are, we are part of the fabric and we’re going to be here,” Pata said. She added that towns across the region were looking for every opportunity to make homes affordable, in order to help slow outmigration and allow residents “to stay in our villages and in our communities.”

Thursday was the final day of Southeast Conference. You can find resources on their website at seconference.org.

Southeast trollers will have an extra ten days to target coho — or silver salmon — before the summer season officially comes to a close.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game announced the extension last Friday, pushing the end date for the season from the usual Sept. 20 to Sept. 30.

Last year, the story of summer trolling was a remarkable chum harvest. This year, silvers are in the spotlight.

“You know, this year will be the first year in probably five or six years that the trollers are looking to catch over a million cohos,” said Grant Hagerman, the area troll management biologist for Southeast Alaska. Chum runs are largely produced by hatcheries. And although chum runs were strong, the price of chum collapsed, forcing the fleet to reset, and shift its attention to coho.

“With the in-season collapse of that market, it changed things quite a bit and so effort dropped,” said Hagerman. “And with chinook closed, a lot more effort turned back to coho that we didn’t really have last year. We didn’t reach our chinook allocation, and the coho catch was down from season, because we had a third of the fleet that was fishing hatchery, chum salmon for a third of the summer. So, yeah, very different this year.”

In just the last few weeks, catch rates for coho have been more than double the long-term average – not just for trollers, but for gillnetters, too. And the department is seeing good escapement, as the coho who manage to get by the hooks and the nets are reaching their natal streams in strong numbers.

Hagerman says the price bumped up later in the season, as coho became noticeably larger. Although the final price often isn’t settled by processors until after the season, Hagerman says it’s likely to come in around $1.80 or $2.00.

And while it’s not quite the bonanza of the 2022 chum season, coho fishing can feel like dependable income in an industry that’s inherently volatile.

“I mean, that was something incredible, the $9- or $10-million that was caught over a six- or seven-week period,” said Hagerman of the 2022 chum season. “Without a market for these chum and with chinook salmon closed for the season, it was it was good that these cohos were around.”

Many of the coastal areas along Baranof and Chichagof islands, and the Fairweather Grounds, will be closed during the extended season, due to the high abundance of king salmon. Trollers who want to target that species will only have to wait a couple of weeks: The winter season for chinook opens on Oct. 11.