KCAW - Sitka

A new hydroelectric project on Admiralty Island has the green light — four decades after it was approved by Congress.

In late June, the U.S. Forest Service granted a special use permit for a small-scale hydro plant on Thayer Creek, near the town of Angoon. The local Alaska Native village corporation is now going after construction funding for the project, which is expected to fully replace costly diesel power.

The construction of a run-of-river hydro development in the Admiralty Island National Monument was authorized by ANILCA, the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

The project is being propelled by Kootznoowoo, Inc., Angoon’s village corporation. It’s unusual for a Native corporation to build a public utility. Jon Wunrow, Kootznoowoo’s director of natural resources, believes the right people were in the room as ANILCA was being hammered out by the presidential administration at the time.

“My hunch is that the leaders from Angoon who went to D.C. and met with (President) Jimmy Carter to kind of broker this part of the deal probably had representation from the village corp,” Wunrow said. “And I think that’s maybe how they (Kootznoowoo) got named.”

Thayer Creek is about three miles from Angoon. Over the past few years, Kootznoowoo has used a $5 million grant from the Alaska Energy Authority to plan and engineer a dam, power plant, and utility tunnel back to town.

Wunrow says two major barriers remain.

“One is we still have to complete what’s referred to as SHPO 106, which is the heritage work to make sure that there aren’t any historical or cultural items of significance that will be disturbed in any way,” he said.

An archeological team from the Forest Service is on site doing that work this summer.

The second barrier could take more time.

“And then we need funding,” he added.

Wunrow says Thayer Creek is an “unfunded federal project,” authorized by Congress but with no money allocated to build it. Wunrow says this partly explains why Angoon never moved forward with the project – there was always an expectation that the federal government would follow through with the $30 million or so needed for construction.

Steadily rising fuel prices helped to change that attitude. Electricity in Angoon costs up to eight times more than in the Lower 48. The crunch motivated Kootznoowoo to take the initiative about three years ago to plan the project without federal support.

And then came President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which includes $1 billion for “Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas.” The program is tailored to build energy resilience and affordability in communities of under 10,000 people.

Wunrow says this is Angoon’s shot to connect with funding that’s four decades overdue.

“This is really the first, and potentially the only funding of this size, specifically for rural areas to do renewable energy,” Wunrow said. “So it’s kind of got Thayer written all over it. We’re hopeful.”

If it comes to fruition, Kootznoowoo will own the Thayer Creek hydro project, but it will be operated by the Inside Passage Electric Cooperative – or IPEC – which currently supplies electricity to Angoon from diesel.

Affordable hydropower could revolutionize life for Angoon’s 500 residents. Thayer Creek’s 850 kilowatts would fully replace the existing diesel plant, which would be preserved as a backup. The total savings will be 250,000 gallons of fuel annually, worth about $1 million. The project would be built upstream of a natural salmon barrier, so no fish would be harmed.

“If we could just stabilize the cost of power, that would be a big win for Angoon,” Wunrow said. “But we’re also hoping it ushers in an era of electric motors: electric cars, electric boats, and heat pumps.”

The numbers are in for the first opening in the summer troll fishery for king salmon in Southeast Alaska.

The 12-day season saw more chinook landed than expected, despite fewer boats being on the water.

Southeast trollers brought in about 85,000 king salmon from July 1 to July 12, around 8,000 fish over the target for the first opener of the season.

At first, it might look like enthusiasm played a role, as it was only on June 21 that the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay that allowed the fishery to occur at all.

But that was not the case. Grant Hagerman manages the troll fishery for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He says even fewer trollers participated this summer than in 2022.

“We had roughly 580 participants in the king fishery last year,” he said, “and we’re just over 500 for this opening.”

As recently as 10 years ago, Hagerman says it was more typical to see 800 trollers during the first summer king opener. Having 80 boats drop out in just one year suggests that the Wild Fish Conservancy lawsuit created just enough uncertainty to steer trollers into other fisheries – or even into other lines of work.

“Until just several weeks before the fishery, I think a lot of permit holders maybe had to make other plans,” said Hagerman. “Some of the permit holders from out of state may not have come up. Obviously, fuel is still an issue as well.”

Nevertheless, the fishing was pretty good for the 500 boats that stayed in the game. Hagerman says three days of bad weather during the opener meant for some busy days during good conditions. A lot of the work involved shaking undersize kings, which were below the legal length of 28-inches, and trying to keep hooks free for bigger fish.

Hagerman says trollers tend to pull their gear and move to a different area when they’re catching a lot of “shakers.” The average weight of legal fish was 11 pounds.

“And surprisingly, there are legal fish even under 10 pounds,” said Hagerman. “They’re just kind of long and skinny. There’s a fair amount of those. But I wouldn’t say (average weight) is  alarmingly low compared to recent years, but you know, for the long term, yeah, it’s still down.”

Hagerman says prices were comparable to the long-term average for summer kings – between $5 and $6 per pound. The market forces that created low prices for Alaska’s sockeye fisheries have not been a factor for kings. The delay of chinook fishing in Canada, and the closure of California’s salmon fishery both helped to prop up prices for Southeast kings.

Although the first opener exceeded its target, roughly 24,000 kings remain in the summer troll allocation for kings. Hagerman anticipates that the Department of Fish & Game, after accounting for landings in the sport and commercial net fisheries, will make an announcement regarding a second summer king opening on August 4.

A seafood donation program that began in Sitka during the pandemic is still growing. Now called the Seafood Distribution Network, the program is supplying sockeye to families on the Yukon and Chignik rivers, whose traditional salmon runs have crashed.

The market shift in seafood during the COVID pandemic created a problem for the industry: Unlike many other sectors, the supply — the fish — was still there. How to connect those fish with people when traditional markets vanished?

For Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, it was about connecting the dots.

“So we worked with the local processors here to figure out what fish was stranded by markets being closed, by restaurants being closed, the supply chain disruptions,” Behnken said. “We raised money, bought fish from fishermen that was stranded product, and then started distributing it to people in town that told us they were in need. So it was really ‘You let us know if you need seafood, we’ll provide it.’”

And that’s how the association’s Seafood Donation Program got started in 2020. Basically, a processor-to-doorstep delivery service for people who were having trouble getting by. It didn’t take long for word about the program to get out.

“And then we started hearing from people outside Sitka that there was a need and people really wanted seafood,” Behnken continued. “So we did a distribution with Sealaska, for example, that reached every community in Southeast Alaska. And we did distributions in the Lower 48 to Tribes along the Columbia River, to Anchorage military families, to communities in Western Alaska. Where we heard there was need, we found partners to work with to make that happen.”

Behnken credits Sitka-based processors Seafood Producers’ Coop, Sitka Sound Seafoods, and Northline Seafoods, along with tribes and tribal organizations across the state for helping make the connections that kept the program going.

On paper, it sounds like an impossible undertaking — delivering 645,000 seafood meals across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, but Behnken says it conformed to basic Alaskan values.

“Alaska is a big state, but we’re also a small state and communities really care about other communities,” she said. “And we have a lot of relatives in different parts of the state, and that there is clear reason for us to share between those areas that have a lot and those areas of scarcity, but the infrastructure isn’t really there. So that’s what we’re working on developing is that infrastructure in Alaska so Alaskans can benefit from Alaska’s fish,

A grant from the Alaska Community Foundation got the Seafood Donation Program rolling; a regional food systems grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped ramp it up. But just the energy of regular Alaskans is helping fuel things now. In a pilot project in Dillingham this June, the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association organized a drive to collect subsistence sockeye for communities affected by the crash in chinook and chum stocks.

Natalie Sattler is the program manager for the association.

“We worked with a lot of community members and locals in Dillingham and the Bristol Bay area to help us collect seafood and it was all subsistence donations,” Sattler said. “And within one week, we were able to collect 5,000 pounds of sockeye and folks rallied support, they went down to their setnet sites – kids, families, everyone just you picking fish and donating it and getting it ready to ship out.”

This year, the sockeye will be going to communities on the Yukon and Chignik rivers. And besides providing food, Behnken says the fish are intended to keep food traditions alive.

“What we’ve heard from people in these communities that aren’t able to harvest fish themselves right now because of scarcity is that they really wanted round fish because being able to process that fish as a family – and as a community – is really culturally important,” Behnken said.

The pandemic and the salmon crash have been a one-two punch for many communities in Western Alaska. In a news release, Rep. Mary Peltola said programs like the Seafood Distribution Network were a critical part of the rebound. “Low salmon abundance is an issue that needs to be addressed at every level, from the federal government down to individual communities, and efforts like this are an important piece of that larger goal,” Peltola said.

An insect infestation responsible for defoliating thousands of acres of the Tongass National Forest is abating.

Scientists with the Forest Service believe that the blackheaded budworm, whose numbers surged over the past three years, is now in decline.

And while it’s not clear how much lasting damage was done by the insect, there’s a good chance that some parts of the forest may emerge from the infestation better off.

KCAW caught up with Gordy Williams by cell phone while he was riding the state ferry LeConte from his home on Killisnoo Island in Angoon to Juneau in mid-July. It was a perfect day for a cruise up the Inside Passage, and a perfect day to see the widespread damage caused by the blackheaded budworm.

“You know, I’m looking at Chichagof and Baranof,” Williams said. “There are some pretty big impacts on the east side of these islands.”

That damage is acre upon acre of defoliated hemlock trees — wide swaths of brown striping the otherwise endless green of Southeast Alaska. The trees’ needles were consumed by tiny, voracious caterpillars fueling their transformation into budworm moths.

Williams worked for years in the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. He understands that budworms and their partner-in-crime, the hemlock sawfly, have a role in the forest. But this latest event he considers extreme. The Forest Service estimates 685,000 acres were defoliated by insects in the last three years.

“It’s a natural cycle, but when it does get ramped up like this, it does have a pretty, pretty significant effect on the ecosystem,” said Williams. “So what our curiosity is at this point, and our concern is: What are the impacts of this radically thinned-out forest canopy in so many areas? You know, that’s what provides winter cover for deer and other animals and is it going to impact stream temperatures, and that kind of thing?”

This part of Chatham Strait is notorious for winter storms – huge sou’easters that blow right up the channel between Admiralty and Baranof islands, and can make this ordinarily pleasant ferry ride a bit of a stomach-churner. Hemlock sawfly stressed these trees in 2018 and 2019. The blackheaded budworm infestation followed in 2020.

Forest Service entomologist Liz Graham described it as a one-two punch to the forest, putting it on the ropes. The weather may have finished the job.

“It definitely seems to be on some more extreme sites, too,” Graham said, “the ones that are really heavily exposed. And so I do think that it’s a little bit more like a compounding impact where there was heavy defoliation, and then maybe on top of that a big windstorm or ice storm, and that really kind of stripped the last of it. And so I do think that that’s why we have seen some of those areas with really more dense mortality — that there’s been more than one event there.”

Graham said that, depending on the area, up to half of the hemlock trees may have died. Although this sounds like a high toll, Graham’s colleague, silviculturist Molly Simonson, says on a forest-wide scale, the damage is limited. Most areas are unaffected. And some forest die-off is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Trees do die,” Simonson said, “whether it’s clusters of them during a particular event, or whether it’s just individually over the course of that forest’s development. But you know, it contributes to nutrient cycling within the ecosystem. And there’s always going to be other trees in the understory waiting to take over that space. There’s regeneration underneath those dominant trees that are just waiting to take over. And will capitalize on that.”

The last major blackheaded budworm infestation in the Tongass was in the 1950s, and good data is hard to come by. Liz Graham says tree ring studies could help her identify the timing of the budworm cycle, but humans are throwing new variables in the mix. Climate change — or specifically, the number of frost-free days — could play a role in outbreaks. But warmer weather can also disadvantage budworms.

“The budworm population actually extends all throughout the Pacific Northwest,” Graham said. “And so the outbreaks that we’ve been experiencing here have really just been happening in Southeast Alaska and haven’t extended to British Columbia. And so, based on some of the research we’ve been looking at, it might be actually too warm down there. So it could be that we’re in this perfect little climate window right now for budworm outbreaks.”

Although the outbreak in Southeast Alaska is subsiding, there are some areas where budworms are peaking – notably Juneau and Haines. Picture a slow-moving budworm tsunami that began on Prince of Wales Island, and traveled north. Defoliation is not certain death, however; trees that were stripped near Gordy Williams’ home on Killisnoo Island are sending out new buds this year, as are many along the route of the LeConte as it steams up Chatham Strait.

“And we’ll just have to see how many of those trees can come back and how long it takes,” said Williams.

The commercial season for king salmon in Southeast Alaska opens on Saturday, July 1. For trollers across the region, it’s the equivalent of New Year’s Day – the beginning of the annual salmon harvest that lasts through next March.

For 50 anxiety-filled days this spring, it appeared that this fishery would not happen. On May 2, a federal judge in Washington ordered fishing closed to make more kings available to an endangered population of killer whales in Puget Sound. On June 21, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court issued a stay of that order, allowing trollers to fish as usual while the case remains under appeal.

Photojournalist Berett Wilber grew up in Sitka deckhanding aboard her family’s troller. She recently returned and spent a couple of afternoons visiting the docks, photographing and talking to trollers as they readied for the opening. As she explains to KCAW’s Robert Woolsey, Wilber found mixed emotions among the fleet.

Listen:

Berett Wilber: I think many people were excited and relieved that this fishery which makes up often, you know, 40% of their income, even if it’s just a few weeks of fishing each year, that they could still do this. For a fishing family, that’s a big dent in your bank account. And so I think there’s a lot of relief in terms of the economic value of the fish that people are going to be able to go out and make the money that they expect and need to make to fulfill their needs.

But I think there’s also frustration, there’s disbelief. I mean, there are people who are thinking that they weren’t going to be fishing July 1 who ripped out their hydraulic system to rebuild it, or people who rejiggered their boats and put on longline gear and decided to go longlining instead, and just don’t really have time to reconfigure everything to rush out for kings. And I talked to one fisherman who said that his wedding anniversary I think is July 3, and he and his wife had made plans to celebrate for the first time in decades their wedding anniversary together in person because he was always out fishing. And suddenly now that was off the table again.

Robert Woolsey: You mentioned people have been fishing for years and years. There are portraits of Chester Jackson, who’s 83. There’s Steve McMurray, he’s on the Seahorse. There’s Spencer Severson, who’s on the Dryas. These guys have seen a lot over the years, but they have never seen anything like this lawsuit and the roller coaster ride that it’s given people. What was it like talking to these guys?

Berett Wilber: I love talking to fishermen. And I love hearing what they are thinking. And I think after growing up on boats,  to me talking about fish and talking about the fishing industry and talking about fish politics is a real part of coming home. And so I really enjoyed talking to them. And I think the stories that you hear that people are willing to share even just you know, with a stranger with a camera like I am.

I’m maybe not quite a stranger, because I am somewhat recognizable. I’ve been on the dock before and I’m wearing Xtratufs. And it’s not like I’m a tourist down there in my poncho. But the level of detail that people are willing to talk about – they take fishing so personally, especially trolling, which one of the guys I talked to, Chester (Jackson), called ‘the most inefficient method of fishing possible.’ And it’s kind of nicknamed ‘the gentleman’s fishery’ for that reason.

Your relationship with fish and with the ocean is such an important part of what it means to make a living. And to have that taken away from you by a judge unexpectedly, is just really painful for people. Some of these guys have been fishing for a long, long time. Chester talked to me about his stories of escaping from a Native boarding school in the Lower 48 when he was 15, and working his way back up across the country to get back to Alaska to start fishing. And when he started, it was before Alaska was a state and you just had to buy one permit, and you could fish for everything in any manner you wanted. And you just think about how many changes people like him have seen during their lifetime of fishing. And it’s incredible.

Robert Woolsey: You have an image of Chris Caroll. And Carol told you something interesting about now that killer whales had been thrown into this mix, it sort of created a false dichotomy, that somehow it’s trollers or killer whales.

Berett Wilber: This was a feeling that people expressed a lot: This feeling of frustration that this lawsuit has created an image in the minds of the public, especially people maybe outside Alaska who aren’t interacting as much or aren’t seeing the real relationship that fishermen have with whales.

Having those moments where you unexpectedly see a whale or unexpectedly see the dorsal fin of a killer whale cutting through the water in the morning as you’re pulling the anchor. Those are some of the most special magical moments that people love to fish for. That’s part of the reason that they want to work on the water, is to have these relationships with marine mammals.

And I think this lawsuit creates this fiction that it’s either a fisherman or whales. And the thing that Chris said to me is, he was really frustrated by that idea, because at the end of the day, we’re all eating the same fish, you know, and to set this conflict as somehow being about fishermen versus whales, I think really is ignoring the the bigger picture of really big changes in the ecosystem that are affecting fish, fishermen, and whales all together at the same time.

Sitka hosted more than 13,000 cruise-ship visitors in one day last week. That’s nearly one and a half times the roughly 8,300 people that live in the community, based on the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sitkans understood that there would be days like this: Visitors shoulder-to-shoulder along the roughly five blocks of Lincoln Street that were closed to vehicle traffic for the occasion.

Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz owns a retail store in the heart of this area. At Tuesday’s assembly meeting, he wondered aloud whether June 21 was a bonanza — or a lesson in overcrowding.

“The general consensus that I got was, if you had a storefront, you said it was too many people. If you had a food truck, or you were out on the street like that, you generally liked it because you sold out early and you got to go home,” Eisenbeisz said. “The feeling even from the merchants who stand to profit from that was that 10,000 people in one day was far too many. And I say that not because it was one or two, but it was everybody.”

Sitka administrator John Leach said he took a walk downtown to visit with business owners. Leach told the assembly that it wasn’t just Sitka’s main street that was overcrowded.

“Trying to do work at City Hall, our bandwidth was gone,” Leach said. “And our computers slowed to a crawl, and our phones weren’t working. So I know other communities have had these issues before. I know Juneau had these issues when they had their cruise boom. And I reminded some of the folks that I talked to in the cruise industry of some of the early discussions we had about over commitment of Sitka’s resources. And where is that balance?”

Off of main street, other organizations were also feeling the pinch. The Sitka Sound Science Center announcing that they were reducing their hours and closing at 3 p.m. Center director Lisa Busch says her organization values the opportunity to educate people about science, salmon, and the ocean, but this was just too many people.

“We are just realizing what our carrying capacity is for that, for our staff and for our building,” Busch told KCAW in a phone interview. “We just can’t take all the people that want to come all at once.”

Busch says closing earlier will give her staff a chance to prepare for the next day and fulfill other functions at the center, which is a year-round scientific research facility.

The high volume of cruise passengers in Sitka on June 21 was caused by the simultaneous visits of the Ruby Princess, the Eurodam and the Quantum of the Seas. Those same three ships are scheduled to be back in port on July 19.