KUAC - Fairbanks

Fifty-six-year-old Patrick Holland has been dealing with congestive heart failure for much of his life, but he says he’s too young to die.

“I had my first heart attack at 29 years,” he said. “My dad died from it at an early age. His brother, my uncle, died at 48. It’s been taking the lives of my family for a long time.”

Three years ago, doctors told Holland he needed a transplant. His heart is twice the size it should be. But he’s at home this week after missing his heart transplant because no planes could land after Seattle’s worst ice storm in a decade.

It took months to become eligible for a transplant, a time spent repeatedly flying to Seattle for dozens of tests at University of Washington Medical Center.

“They checked my lungs, my kidneys, my gallbladder, my digestive tract, man. They put gauges in my neck to check the pressure to my heart,” he said. “My mind was like, man, I hope I get through all this testing before I die.”

Because of his disease, Holland gave up the job he loved as a personal assistant to seniors with disabilities. His wife has been writing about their experience since 2019, saying it helps her cope.

Holland’s family had considered a temporary move to Washington, but Patrick is healthy enough to travel the four-hour direct flight to Seattle.

A transplant coordinator called Holland on Dec. 22 to say they had a heart that was a perfect match. But he would need to get to the University of Washington Heart Institute within a day. He and his brother booked an evening flight to Seattle and arrived at the airport in the midst of a holiday travel crush, complicated by stormy weather.

“I immediately just jumped to the front line, and I apologized to everybody. I said, ‘Ma’am, I’m looking to get a heart transplant and my plane boards in 30 minutes.’ And she said, ‘Oh my gosh, get over here.’ And she immediately pulled me to the side, started looking, and she said, ‘Oh no, your flight has been canceled.’ And I was just — everything left my body.”

Freezing rain briefly closed all three runways at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but Holland says Alaska Airlines agents managed to get them on an early morning flight to Seattle.

“I was comfortable and excited and happy. Most of the fear had gone away,” he said.

It looked like he would get his new heart.

“I felt the landing gear go down,” he said. “I heard the pilot say, ‘welcome to Anchorage.’ I looked at my brother and I laughed and I said, ‘He must be really tired.’ Because at this point it was like 3:30, 4 o’clock in the morning, and I just figured now we’ve been in the air four hours. It does not take four hours to get to Anchorage.”

The ice storm in Seattle had forced the plane back to Anchorage, and Holland missed the window to get the heart transplant.

“ I just lost,” he said. “I felt life just leaving my body. I was so, I so spent on so much emotion, up and down roller coaster.”

Two weeks later, he’s packing to leave his wife and four children in North Pole and move to Seattle to wait for another suitable heart.

“I don’t wanna ever miss another chance,” he said. “It’s just not gonna happen.”

He tells everyone who wishes him well to always be thankful for what they have, and to register as an organ donor.

It’s been another good year for Alaska’s wood bison herd. A recent population survey shows that the Lower Innoko and Yukon Rivers herd is healthy and growing.

The herd was started in 2015 with the transplant of 130 animals from Alberta, Canada. The bison suffered significant losses in 2018 and 2020 due to heavy snows, winter rains and late springs, but better weather over the last two years has seen a rebound with record and near-record calf production.

Department of Fish and Game wood bison biologist Tom Seaton says a Nov. 28 population survey reflects significant herd growth.

“The minimum count of bison out there was about 150, so the population grew about 45% in this last year, and about 19% of that was just from natural growth from having a good calf crop and really good survival of yearlings and adults,” he said.

Seaton says the other 26% of growth is from the introduction of 28 yearlings, again imported from Canada and barged out to the Lower Innoko River area this past summer. He says the young animals have the potential to accelerate herd growth.

“Once they get to the reproductive age classes, which is like 3 years old to twenty years old, they’ll be producing a lot of calves,” he said

The wood bison reintroduction project has been shepherded by Alaska Native groups, Fish and Game, the Bureau of Land Management and others. The goal is to reestablish the animals in Alaska, where they disappeared from the wild over a hundred years ago.

Seaton says if the Lower Innoko Yukon herd continues to grow, limited harvest could be allowed according to a directive from 30 different interest groups, which together manage the herd.

“When that three-year average growth shows enough that you can also harvest ten animals and have a similar amount of growth, then we’ll start to hunt,” he said. “And if there are good winters in the next five years, then it will probably happen in the next 5 years.”

Meanwhile, a second wood bison reintroduction project is being considered. Seaton says 10 bison at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Station, another 30 at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, plus additional animals from Canada could seed a herd in the Eastern Interior.

“Some folks in the Upper Tanana have written the governor asking for wood bison there,” he said. “There’s also quite a bit of interest in the Lower Tanana. There’s some interest in the Yukon Flats.”

Seaton says planning meetings this winter will bring together interest groups to talk about a new reintroduction project.

University of Alaska students who do academic research, teaching and support work are seeking to unionize. The Alaskan Graduate Workers Association would represent 425 academic student employees, about 80% of whom work at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

UAF biology graduate student and research assistant Abigail Schiffmiller, one of the organizers, says the union would mostly represent graduate students who work as research, teaching and support assistants. She says compensation is a key driver of the effort.

“The cost of living in Fairbanks and Anchorage has increased a lot in recent years, but the pay increases through the university have been minimal and sporadic,” Schiffmiller said.

She said a union could also address health care and working conditions.

“There’s also concern about kind of grievance procedures and workload and transparency,” Schiffmiller said. “But ultimately, baseline is that we want to have a seat at the table. We want to be involved in (the) decision making process for decisions that affect our lives.”

According to a news release, the Alaskan Graduate Workers Association is the first academic student employee group in the state to file for union recognition, and the University of Alaska is the only high-level research institution on the west coast that does not have a student employee union.

Schiffmiller says they are organizing under the umbrella of the UAW, a national labor organization which already represents 100,000 higher education workers. She says organizers gauged interest by sending out cards to them this fall.

“We actually got a supermajority to sign cards,” she said.

Schifmiller says an authorization petition was submitted to the Alaska Labor Relations Agency Dec. 9, and on the same day a letter was sent to University of Alaska President Pat Pitney requesting voluntary recognition of the union.

In a written response, UA associate vice president of public affairs Robbie Graham said Tuesday that the university is “reviewing the petition, to better understand definitions, who would be covered in the bargaining unit and the needed level of support.”

If the university does not voluntarily recognize the union, Schiffmiller says the Alaska Labor Relations Agency will verify the list of employees in the group, and a formal vote on unionization will follow.

A former contractor has been sentenced for conspiracy and bribery related to military contracts at Eielson Air Force Base and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

According to the U.S. attorney’s for Alaska’s office, Best Choice Construction LLC owner Ryan Dalbec of Mesa, Ariz., was ordered to serve 42 months in prison, and pay a $172,000 fine and $16,000 in restitution to Eielson.

Court records show Dalbec had agreed to pay over $460,000 in bribes to former U.S. Air Force contracting official Brian Lowell Nash II, in exchange for confidential bidding information that helped him win contracts, including a $6.8 million project related to the buildup of F-35 Lightning II fighter jets at Eielson.

Dalbec and his wife, Raihana Nadem, also helped Nash launder the bribery proceeds. Nash was sentenced last month to serve 30 months in prison and forfeit $47,000 in “unlawful gains” from bribes paid by Best Choice.

Both Dalbec and his wife pleaded guilty in the case, with Nadem scheduled for sentencing on Dec. 16.

There’s new proof of the success of a pioneering ascent of Denali. Historic photographs from the 1910 Sourdough expedition were found this fall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The black and white images provide hard copy evidence that Alaskans Pete Anderson, Billy Taylor, Charlie McGonagall and Tom Lloyd — known as the Sourdough expedition — got members to the top of Denali’s 19,400-foot North Peak in April 1910 — a feat that’s long been subject to skepticism.

“They went,” said UAF geophysics professer Matthew Sturm, who found the photos. “They did the climb, but they were not good about documenting it.” 

Sturm says he came across the Sourdough expedition photos in October while doing research for an unrelated mountaineering book at the UAF Rasmuson Library archive. He says he was looking through a box of materials and found a folder with a label that included the words 1911 McKinley climb.

He said he “got a tingly sense that maybe something good could come of this,” even though the date on the folder was off by a year.

Sturm says one of the photos in the folder shows two climbers he immediately recognized.

“I’m a bit of an amateur history buff for climbing in Alaska and the Yukon, and I thought — whoa, that’s Charlie McGonagall and Pete Anderson from the Sourdough climb,” he said.

Sturm says he worked with University of Alaska Fairbanks archive and Museum of the North staff to confirm the identities of the pictured Sourdough climbers, including Taylor and Anderson, who he says made it to the north peak’s summit.  He says he figured out where the photos were taken by comparing them with modern images of the mountain.

“We could place them quite high on the route,” he said. “The highest one is near around 16,000 — and we’d never been able to place them anywhere near that before — for marvelous sort of insight into an event that has been revered by some climbers and doubted by others for a hundred and ten years.”  

Sturm says the photos add to another piece of evidence that the Sourdough expedition climbed Denali’s North peak: a spruce flag pole the climbers set up a little below the summit, which members of the 1913 Hudson Stuck expedition reported seeing. They were the first to reach the top of Denali’s higher south peak.

“I think it moves it from shadowy, maybe it did or didn’t happen, right into the mainstream,” he said. “It happened.”

Sturm says the Sourdough expedition photos were donated to the UAF archive in the 1980s by the daughter of an early 19 hundreds Fairbanks newspaper editor who was friends with Sourdough expedition climber Billy Taylor. 

“She donated a lot stuff to the archives, and they logged it in, and it would have taken an expert to know what it was,” he said.

Sturm says it remains a mystery why the photos weren’t used by expedition members to prove their summit claim. Sturm plans to write an article for a mountaineering journal about the photos.

Alaska’s longest and most popular hunting season ended early this year. Only 50 animals were taken because last winter’s heavy snow and ice buildup wiped out nearly a third of the Delta Junction bison herd.

The Delta Junction bison hunt usually extends from October to March, but the state limited this year’s season to just two weeks.

The hunt is by far the most popular for any game species in the state. Hunters submitted more than 44,000 applications last year in hopes of drawing a permit to harvest one of 120 animals the state had planned to make available this year.

“That’s definitely the highest ever,” says Bob Schmidt, the state Department of Fish and Game Delta-area wildlife biologist.

Schmidt says state managers had to rethink their plan for this year’s hunt after finding out that about 180 bison, or nearly a third of the 600-animal herd, died of starvation last winter. That’s three times the number they estimated last spring.

Schmidt says the bison weren’t able to eat because storms dumped an almost impenetrable layer snow and ice atop the grass and sedges that bison feed on.

“Last winter was a winter like we’ve never seen,” he said. “And it was really the rainstorm right after Christmas that was really hard on wildlife across much of Interior Alaska, and particularly bison.”

Schmidt said in an interview Thursday that the magnitude of the die-off became evident last spring.

“They looked really bad well into the summer,” he said. “Even the survivors were really skinny and in poor shape.”

Game managers responded by reducing the number of bison that could be harvested this year from 120 to 50. And they cut the length of the hunt from six months to two weeks. But Schmidt says the hunters reached that quota in half that time during the abbreviated hunt held last month.

“Normally, they’d be hunting all the way ’til March,” he said. “But this time it was, y’know, ‘Get up here, wham, bam, get it done.’ Y’know, no messing around kind of deal.”

Schmidt says he sees signs that the Delta Junction herd is rebounding. And if that proves true, Fish and Game likely will extend the season in the next year or two and increase the harvest quota. He says the objective is to maintain a sustainable herd of about 360 bison — not too large, so as to limit the damage they cause by trampling on area farmer’s fields and raiding their stores of hay and feed.

“We probably don’t want to let it get all the way back to 600,” he said. “There are some agreements we’ve got in place with the ag community to try and stay closer to that 360.”

The Delta Junction bison hunt attracts more applications every year than any other game species. It’s an iconic species prized by hunters, not the least because they provide hundreds of pounds of meat per animal. And because the six-month-long season gives hunters time to return to regroup and return to the area as often as needed in that timeframe to find the ideal specimen.

“This bison hunt is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime hunt,” he said.

Schmidt says he feels bad for hunters who drew permits and weren’t able to get in on this year’s hunt. He said his personal opinion is that they should consider appealing to the state Board of Game before the April deadline for another opportunity to re-apply for permits for the 2024 hunt, and to ask the board to waive the required waiting period.