KHNS - Haines

Three Haines artists were recently recognized by the Rasmuson Foundation, which announced its Individual Artist awardees earlier this month.

Shannon Kelly Donahue took home one of the $10,000 awards, which will help fund her work on a personal memoir that involves travel to Ireland. Andrea Nelson was another awardee. She’s building a collection of sculptural taxidermy to shed light on the northern fur trade.

Writer, biologist and part-time resident Caroline Van Hemert also took home an award. She recently finished sailing the Northwest Passage with her family, and the trip is among the adventures that will inform her new memoir, titled “Upwellings.” The book is about finding hope and joy in the natural world amid climate change and environmental collapse.

Van Hemert sat down with KHNS to talk about the $10,000 award and the project it will help fund.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Caroline Van Hemert: I’m working on a book project right now. So that’s what the Rasmuson specifically is helping to support. And it’s a combination of artist time, and I’ll be using some of my funds for some specific travel, hopefully doing a little bit more in Southeast Alaska, not too far from home. And then maybe make a trip up to the Arctic as well.

Avery Ellfeldt: You said the award is supporting specifically your new book. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? What’s it called? What’s the focus, and where are you at in that process right now?

CVH: It’s tentatively titled Upwellings, which actually comes from a moment when I was sitting at our cabin on Lynn Canal and looking out and watching a bunch of gulls beat up wind on a day probably very similar to what is happening now, with some fierce north winds, and trying to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. And that led me into lots of other questions about the exceptions and extensions to the natural world that often get overlooked. And so the book is a memoir, but it’s kind of a collection of both home-based and travel-based pieces, really, each of them starting with a specific encounter with a wild species that then helps me contemplate bigger questions about climate change and also our relationship to the natural world.

AE: In the Rasmuson blurb about your award specifically, it says you’ll work on your memoir to confront the “collapse” you’ve observed by way of wildlife health research. Could you tell me a little bit more about that – what they might mean by collapse?

CVH: In terms of collapse, I’m referring to some of the ecological and environmental situations that have been unfolding. And I think it’s an alternative, again, to that, that narrative of gloom. We are so inundated with, you know, the story of the end of the world as we know it, which is not entirely untrue. But I think trying to draw on examples from the natural world of existing creativity and solutions and things that we don’t always think about when we look outside and see these massive changes.

AE: Has there been an example of collapse or change or shift that you’ve experienced and that’s made a large impact on you, or that you think has been particularly compelling or jarring to observe?

CVH: Where we live on Lynn Canal is very close to the Davidson Glacier. Anyone who spent any time in or around Haines knows that feature and knows how rapidly it’s changing. So it’s hard not to look at things like that and feel sort of the overwhelm of how rapidly our landscape is shifting.

Sometimes there’s a sense that you can almost run from the bad news by going to the places that we love. But I think this book has come about in part because there isn’t really a running from those experiences so much as trying to figure out, how do you grapple with them? And what are some of the ways that we can both acknowledge the state of change, but gather the joy and the wonder that I think ultimately motivates all of us to think differently, and maybe live differently, in a larger collective way.

Federal funding for libraries and museums has been reinstated nine months after the Trump administration first sought to eliminate the agency that provides that money.

The initial move sparked concern around Alaska, where dozens of tribes and villages rely on federal dollars to pay staff and offer programming at libraries. At the time, a handful of libraries reported grant cancellations.

But in early December, the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services said the funding had been restored. The move came after a Rhode Island District Court judge ruled last month on a lawsuit brought by 21 states over the cuts. The judge ruled that the funding cancellation was unconstitutional.

“This action supersedes any prior notices which may have been received related to grant termination,” the agency said in the three-sentence notice. The notice did not acknowledge the recent ruling, but said grantees should check its online grant management system for more information.

At least some libraries in Alaska that lost federal funding last spring have received notice that it’s been reinstated. But in at least two cases, that happened months before the November ruling.

The Tuzzy Consortium Library in Utqiaġvik saw a major grant cancellation earlier this year. The $80,000 grant pays for staff and professional development at seven branch libraries across the North Slope.

Library director Teressa Williams said she received a reinstatement notice in July that said the agency had determined that the grant “is consistent with the agency’s priorities and furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

“I don’t know why we got reinstated, whereas others didn’t,” Williams said.

The library in the Native village of Klukwan, outside Haines, lost the bulk of its funding in the spring. That included a $150,000 grant, of which only $100,000 had been spent, plus another $10,000 grant.

The move forced staff to dramatically slash hours to just four per week, and to cancel all events, workshops and other programming.

As of early December, both grants were restored – and the library had been awarded two new ones.

The funding came through sporadically over the course of several months, Klukwan library co-director Jamie Katzeek said in an email. The library’s $10,000 grant was reinstated in June. Then, in August, the library was awarded the same grant for the coming year. In September, the agency notified the library it had been awarded a 2-year “enhancement grant” for fiscal year 2025. Finally, in early December, the library’s larger $150,000 grant was reinstated.

“This will give us funding for staff hours as well as being able to offer our originally planned programming,” Katzeek said in an email Wednesday morning.

Katzeek said the library is currently re-working its budget, but the current plan is to be open five or six days each week.

The president of the Alaska Library Association was not available to comment. Association President-elect Rebecca Moorman said she reached out to libraries across the state to check in on their funding but so far has not received many responses.

Moorman did hear that one project with a suspended grant just had its funding restored, but she declined to elaborate.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services also provides funding to other entities, including states.

Some states received cancellation notices. But Alaska State Libraries, Archives and Museums Director Amy Phillips-Chan said in an email Friday morning that Alaska never received one, and “ultimately received the entire allocation of IMLS Grants to States funding for 2024, and a similar allocation for 2025.”

The American Library Association said in a statement that the organization is “breathing a sigh of relief.”

“Restoration of these grants is a massive win for libraries of all kinds in all states,” wrote association President Sam Helmich. “Every public, school and academic library and their patrons benefit from the research findings and program outcomes from individual library and organization grantees.”

Helmich added that the fight may not be over, given that the administration could appeal the court decision – and that Congress could choose not to fund the agency in the future.

On a crisp day in mid-November, two wildlife biologists bushwhacked into the Takshanuk Mountains until they reached the edge of a canyon that offers close-up views of mountain goats.

Kevin White, a wildlife biologist and Haines local, checked the batteries and downloaded the photos from a camera strapped to a nearby tree.

“There’s a porcupine,” he said, scrolling through the images. “And a brown bear, it looks like.”

The camera is one of about 60 spread throughout the Chilkat Valley as part of a broader project focused on one carnivore in particular: lynx. Its aim is to gather more information about the wildcats’ presence and behavior in the region.

Leading the effort is longtime lynx researcher Liz Hofer, who splits her time between Haines and Haines Junction, in Canada. For decades, she has studied lynx and other wildcats in the neighboring Yukon, as well as in countries ranging from Switzerland and Norway to Mongolia and Yemen.

Now, with the help of a small army oflocal volunteers, she’s doing the same in the Chilkat Valley. The area is far from a hot spot for lynx, which are known for thriving in dry, boreal forests rather than coastal areas. But local trappers do harvest them in Haines, more in some years than others.

Particularly active trapping seasons in 2019 and 2020 piqued Hofer’s curiosity. She suggested launching a study that would examine the cats’ presence in the valley. She wanted to look at whether they could live here permanently – and whether some already do.

“It seems that the area could support a resident population. And so the question is, is that possible? Can they adapt?” Hofer said.

When hare populations crash, some lynx “just start walking”

When lynx do end up in Haines, it’s due to the population cycles of their favorite meal: the snowshoe hare. Hares are abundant in the Yukon’s Kluane area, just over the Canadian border from Haines. Their populations grow over the course of about a decade before crashing amid predation.

Lynx populations follow the same cycle, increasing in size alongside their prey. But when hare populations nosedive, lynx respond in one of three ways. They starve, they shift their hunting strategies, or “they just start walking,” Hofer said.

And some make it all the way to coastal areas, Haines among them.

That’s what happened in 2019 and 2020, when local trappers reported catching 25 and 26 lynx, respectively, according to state trapping records. Those were the highest numbers since 1992, when trappers harvested 27 lynx. Most other years, the number is closer to one or two.

The researchers haven’t detected a lynx on camera since 2022, after the last peak. As White sees it, that at least seems to suggest lynx have not set up here permanently.

“The jury’s still out a little bit, because we haven’t totally saturated all the places we could have cameras, and there’s still certainly little pockets where there could be lynx that are resident,” White said. “But it seems like the initial indications are, there probably isn’t.”

Ready for the next wave of lynx, whenever that comes

But there’s still plenty to learn – especially because hare populations in the Yukon are on the rise yet again. And Hofer expects the pattern will repeat, with lynx dispersing within the next two to three years.

“It may be very big because of the signs that say that the Kluane region, the Yukon region lynx, will be higher than usual,” she said.

This time, dozens of cameras will already be set up in key wildlife corridors to capture them in action. Photos could help the researchers get a better handle on how many are in the area.

“It will also be valuable to learn about, where are the hot spots? When they are in the area? And what are the habitat conditions like?” said White.

The project isn’t limited to cameras. The researchers have also asked the public to immediately alert them if they spot lynx – or lynx tracks. Between 2020 and 2025, the team received nearly 50 reports.

In one case, a Klukwan community member observed an adult female with one offspring in February 2023. The sighting indicates that successful lynx reproduction may be happening in the valley.

Hofer said she’s also in conversation with local trappers about either selling carcasses for research purposes or allowing the team to take tissue samples, which could provide insight into what exactly the lynx feed on while in the valley.

“So we have some more tricks up our sleeve,” Hofer said.

She is particularly curious about salmon and thinks the Chilkat River’s fall chum run could serve as an excellent food source.

Trappers have already provided the team with some hair samples to gauge lynx feeding behaviors. Those samples indicate that lynx were primarily eating “mammalian herbivores” and did not provide evidence of marine diets.

The area is also home to some snowshoe hairs, just not as many as in boreal forests further inland. Indeed, about halfway through the hike last month, a solid white hare darted across the mountainside. It was stark against the moss-covered forest floor.

“Good timing,” White said.

Hofer acknowledged that trapping data only provides so much information, and that they can only glean so much from photos. She said tagging and tracking lynx might be the best way to answer her most burning questions — but that’s beyond the scope of the scrappy local study.

Ideally, she said, the information they do collect might “maybe spur somebody else on who has more academic or agency-oriented research.”

Most weeks between September and December, Stacie Evans drives up the Haines highway, counting bald eagles through a high-powered scope.

Her drives are part of a longstanding annual survey that aims to provide insight into the valley’s annual gathering of eagles, which is one of the world’s largest. Last week, she saw more than 1,400.

“It’s the highest count that’s been documented since the year 2000,” said Evans, who is the science director of the Takshanuk Watershed Council, a local conservation nonprofit.

The annual gathering in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve is central to the area’s identity – and it serves as an economic boost for the town of Haines at the start of the winter.

Evans emphasized that the road surveys do not amount to a comprehensive population count, so there’s no way to say for certain how many raptors are actually in the area each year.

But they do provide a snapshot of what’s happening, particularly within sight of the highway. The large number of eagles counted this year marks a departure from recent survey data, which has captured significantly fewer eagles compared to decades past.

“We can say that there has been a decline,” Evans said. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious from when the survey started in 1988.”

Between 1988 and 2000, for instance, surveyors counted well over 1,000 eagles every year but one. But in road surveys conducted since 2011, peak counts only surpassed 1,000 four times, including this year.

Some locals say they’ve seen a decline with their own eyes. Craig Loomis has lived in Haines since the 1960’s. He recalls driving up the highway and seeing far more eagles than he does today.

“I mean there were eagles all over the place,” Loomis said. “And that didn’t count the ones away from the river that we couldn’t see.”

A big year for salmon – and eagles

The road survey entails counting eagles at the same pullouts, and along the same sections of road, as many weeks as possible from mid-September through mid-December. That protocol has remained consistent over the years.

At each stop along the way along Evans’ drive last month, eagles were perched in the cottonwoods and scattered across the riverflats both alone and in larger groups.

The valley has a resident bald eagle population that sticks around all year. But each fall, more arrive from as far away as Washington state to take advantage of a unique hydrological feature – and fishing opportunity.

“A lot of the water that’s coming from the Tsirku into the Chilkat is subsurface, so it’s not exposed to air temperature,” Evans said. “Which means in the winter time, it is relatively warm, and so it keeps the Chilkat River from freezing.”

That facilitates prime access to a particularly late run of chum salmon heading into the coldest months of the year.

“It is a really unique thing. There’s not a lot of fish available at that time of year,” said Steve Lewis, a raptor biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It probably gets them through the winter.”

The high count in November likely correlates with an especially strong chum run. Alaska Fish and Game area management biologist Nicole Zeiser said this year’s peak chum count – recorded via aerial surveys – surpassed 20,000 fish.

In an email, she said that’s a “strong number given that surveys capture only a fraction of the total fish present in the drainage.”

In 2020, the run was incredibly weak – and the eagle count was, too. The peak count that year was under 300 birds. Zeiser did not respond to questions about the long-term stability of the Chilkat chum run.

Weather is the other factor that can impact the eagles and where they feed. Warmer falls can result in more open water. Lewis said that allows the eagles to feed in different areas of the valley that are farther from the road, making them harder to spot.

“If it’s really, really cold, and lots of places are frozen, then the eagles are really condensed. If it’s not that cold, and they can be spread out, then they’ll be spread out,” Lewis said.

That could happen more frequently with climate change. In Southeast Alaska, average temperatures between September and January are about four degrees higher today than they were in 1988, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Any anecdote that says it is warmer than it used to be is almost certainly correct,” NOAA Senior Scientist Brian Brettchneider said in an email.

The annual Bald Eagle Festival typically happens in mid-November. But Kathy Benner, of the Haines-based American Bald Eagle Foundation, said event organizers are considering delaying the event to increase the odds that it will overlap with cold temperatures – and lots of eagles feeding within eyeshot.

“I personally think it probably would be a great idea to try to move it a little bit closer to when the temperatures are colder,” she said.

‘No means for counting’

The Chilkat Valley gathering is often described as the world’s largest, but experts say the Harrison River in British Columbia — considered Canada’s only “salmon stronghold” river — likely deserves that title.

The area can draw as many as 15,000 eagles in November and December, said Myles Lamont, a wildlife biologist with TerraFauna, a Canadian wildlife consulting group.

The gathering in the Chilkat Valley, meanwhile, is often put at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 eagles.

Fish and Wildlife biologists used to fly over the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve to do a more comprehensive survey. But that hasn’t happened for at least 20 years, Lewis said, and it probably isn’t in the cards any time soon.

“We don’t have tons of funding no matter what,” he said. “And I don’t have a lot of funding to support that kind of specific area survey for this one population.”

Lewis said that’s unfortunate, given that he regularly hears from people in Haines who are interested in learning more about what is happening in the eagle preserve each year.

Evans, of Takshanuk, said the organization would be interested in aerial surveys, but they also lack the necessary funding. Benner, of the Bald Eagle Foundation, said the same.

“We have no means for counting at this time,” Benner said in a phone interview.

That leaves the road survey data. It’s not a perfect system; the surveys have been conducted by different people over the years, and there are a smattering of years with no data. Plus, there’s no way to see the entire valley from the road.

“It doesn’t necessarily always give you the most unbiased look at what the numbers are doing,” Lewis said. “But obviously, if there’s lots of eagles in the valley, you’re probably gonna have a higher count. If there’s not as many, you’ll probably have a lower count.”

Evans emphasized that bald eagle populations as a whole are doing quite well. So even if the Haines congregation is shifting in some way, over time, that doesn’t mean the raptors are in danger. It could just mean they’re elsewhere.

“This is not a population survey at all,” Evans said. “There’s no indication that eagle populations are diminishing.”

Lewis echoed that point. Ultimately, he said, “I’m not sure what the eagles are doing in the valley.”

Haines’ mayor would like the borough’s Tlingit Park to be owned by the Tlingits.

In November’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, the Mayor Tom Morphet made the case for granting the land, part of which is a Tlingit cemetery, to a local tribe, the Chilkoot Indian Association. The plan was met with mixed reactions.

The mayor first brought up the concept this spring and says he has had conversations with the Chilkoot Indian Association’s tribal administrator.

“I’ve been having informal discussions with Harriet Brouillette … and I posted back in March on my site,” he said. “And I also posted on Facebook, and I just figured the public wasn’t interested because I never heard anything bad. But there was quite a bit on Facebook this week, or the past few weeks, and a lot of people have questions.”

Morphet stressed that the idea is conceptual, and would need to be approved by the Tribe and the Haines Borough Assembly.

“The idea that we’ve refined, as much as it’s been refined, is to transfer the park property, the grassy part to the Tribe,” he said. “… this would require a new property line to be drawn. But the borough, at this time, would retain ownership of the … senior center and the playground of our dreams next to it. So this would be just the tribal house pavilion, the Native grave sites and the picnic tables restroom that would become owned by the CIA.”

The land would come with a caveat, according to Morphet’s plan. The trail through the park would remain open to public use.

Morphet said there are two reasons to change ownership of the land. The first is that he believes the land should already be Native-owned. He said it was originally granted to the Presbyterian Church to be used as a mission school. Federal law says that property used for indigenous mission schools should revert to Tribes.

On his mayor’s web page, Morphet wrote the following:

“The park, a Tlingit graveyard, should have gone back to the Tlingits 40 years ago when the Presbyterian Church was deeding the last of its vacant mission properties back to the Tribe. But by then the City of Haines had scooped up the parcel for a downtown park.”

Morphet said another reason is cost. The borough has less money and more responsibilities than ever.

“The borough has a million-dollar deficit,” he said. “Also, we’ve just accepted a new park, park land from Margaret Piggott, that will cost money to maintain over time, or develop or do whatever we’re going to do.”

Former Mayor Jan Hill listened to the presentation and expressed concern. She worried that changing owners could cause unintentional harm.

“I understand the warm and fuzzy feeling that some people get from this,” she said. “But it just feels like this is a way to slough off borough responsibility and liability onto an organization that’s totally grant driven — and that doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy to me. It could put this organization in a really tough financial spot.”

Georgiana Hotch is a Chilkoot Indian Association council member. She spoke at the meeting in favor of more discussion.

“… this is a really great gesture,” she said. “Because we do have, we do have a cemetery. You can look at that as sacred, like sacred sites to our people. It’s community-oriented, which is good for the entire city. And we appreciate being able to put it on the table and talk about it.”

Members of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee agreed that more information is needed. Their next meeting is Jan. 14.

You can contact this reporter at melinda@khns.org.

A controversial mineral exploration project north of Haines has changed hands twice in the last year. That included earlier this month, when Vizsla Copper purchased the Palmer Project in exchange for $15 million of its company stock.

Steve Masterman currently serves as deputy director of the Alaska Critical Minerals Collaborative at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Before that, he was the state geologist.

The Alaska Desk’s Avery Ellfeldt caught up with Masterman to discuss what’s been happening with the project, which has been under exploration by Constantine Mining since 2006. He said projects like this can move quickly or take decades to become mines, for a lot of different reasons.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Masterman: Well, it’s all across the spectrum. You know, some of them go pretty quickly, like Fort Knox and Pogo went pretty quickly in a relative sense, and then other ones take many decades. Donlin is another example. And some of them never become mines, even though they look very promising for a long while, for various reasons. Could be economic reasons, could be environmental reasons, could be social reasons. Could be all of the above.

Avery Ellfeldt: The project has changed hands a few times in the last year or so. Could you speak to whether that’s a pretty normal progression in terms of these exploration projects changing hands pretty frequently?

Steve Masterman: I think it is fairly common. I mean, this has happened to this one several times. You see other properties, the Nickel Platinum Group property in the Alaska Range, has changed hands several times. The Johnson property on the Alaska Peninsula — sorry, Cook Inlet — has changed hands several times. So it does happen. And, you know, I think if the project is more compelling, it happens less.

Avery Ellfeldt: My other question would be do these types of transactions necessarily mean anything about a project’s viability or economic feasibility? Anything else you’d add there?

Steve Masterman: There’s reasons that people back out, obviously. And I don’t know what the reasons are that the latest groups backed out of the Palmer Project, but they had a reason. Sometimes those reasons are that they’re not a good fit for the company at its current stage. So it might not speak necessarily to the project itself. It might in some cases have a lot more to do with the corporation and how their overall business is being managed and their portfolio of projects.

Avery Ellfeldt: Could you walk me through why projects like these are attractive from an investor point of view, given that they operate over such long timelines and so many never come to fruition?

Steve Masterman: It’s a risk and reward equation. These are riskier investments, that’s for sure. And so investors have to look at it pretty critically and analytically to see whether they think it’s worth rolling the dice on, essentially.

Avery Ellfeldt: They’ve kind of cited the Trump administration’s orientation toward mining in Alaska as a potential boon for the project. I’m curious if you could speak to that, whether the current administration’s mindset or approach could actually benefit a project that’s at this stage of exploration?

Steve Masterman: The current administration definitely has a pro-development stance. I think that’s pretty obvious. So they’re going to be leaning favorably toward mineral development projects. But whether this thing gets to that point within this administration is an open question. And I would guess, in three years, they’re not going to be ready to apply for permits. So whatever will happen, in a permanent sense, will probably happen in a future administration.

Avery Ellfeldt: One of the local tribes, the Chilkat Indian Village, has made it pretty clear that they’re not in support of this and that the new owner won’t be able to receive social license or community support. Would you say that’s pretty common with exploration projects in Alaska, specifically?

Steve Masterman: I think it’s common with mineral development projects globally. The problem the industry has is its perception. And I think the industry is working hard to change that perception, but it takes a while.