Lisa Phu

Delta Air Lines will fly year-round between Juneau and Seattle starting in May. This is a change from just offering flights during the summer, and could signal more Delta service coming to the state in the future.

Delta Vice President of Seattle Mike Medeiros says the response to its one daily flight between Juneau and Seattle was good last summer. So good, Delta decided a couple weeks ago to extend it all year.

“It’s, quite frankly, a place that needs some competition so we’re ready to step in and be able to provide that,” Medeiros says.

Delta will fly a Boeing 737 during the summer months, which can seat up to 160 people. In September, it will contract with SkyWest, which flies a Bombardier CRJ-900. Medeiros says the 76-seat plane better meets demand during the rest of the year.

He says extending service beyond the summer is not a decision Delta made lightly.

“When we’re making a commitment to a market, it’s very difficult to pull out. It’s difficult on the company and difficult for us to do that,” he says.

Delta will also extend seasonal service between Fairbanks and Seattle to be year-round, and add summer flights from Seattle to Ketchikan and Sitka. Medeiros says the new Southeast Alaska services will be evaluated at the end of summer.

“We’ll see how Alaskan residents have responded to us. If they respond like they did in Fairbanks and Juneau to the competition, then I think it over time could find its way to a year-round pattern as well, but hard to predict that,” Medeiros says.

Adding additional service to the state of Alaska is part of Delta’s expansion in Seattle to connect passengers to international destinations or other hubs within the U.S. Delta has around 95 daily flights from Seattle, almost triple what it had last year. It hopes to grow to around 150 departures in another two years.

Alaska Airlines spokesman Tim Thompson says the company isn’t nervous about Delta’s year-round service in Alaska. He says over the years other airlines have come in and out of the state.

“There’s always going to be competition in business. And we have to continue to make our business perform just like it has over the past number of years with an on-time record, a product that people want to fly on, especially Alaskans,” Thompson says.

He says Alaska saw little change in passenger numbers from previous summers when Delta wasn’t flying from Juneau to Seattle.

“For the most part, we still had a lot of Alaskans flying on Alaska Airlines being able to go in-state and out of state as well,” Thompson says.

And he doesn’t think Delta’s year-round service will change that.

“I think we have a pretty solid reputation, and we have a pretty good loyalty base here in the state of Alaska,” Thompson says.

Travel analyst Scott McMurren is one of those loyalists, and as a member of its mileage program, likes to rack up Alaska Airlines miles.

“But there’s always part of the market that doesn’t care about that or they care up to a certain point, especially if I’m traveling with my family or if buying a ticket for an employee. Delta is going be able to capture some of that market by dropping the price,” McMurren says.

Right now, fares between the capital city and Seattle after Labor Day are priced higher than they are in the summer. But, McMurren says, fear not.

“To have the competitive force year-round, fares will go down,” McMurren says.

He anticipates roundtrip fares between Juneau and Seattle in the winter to be comparable to those in the summer and drop to as low as $250.

The State of Alaska dropped its case against a Juneau woman who was cited for springing legal traps and freeing a bald eagle.

At Kathleen Adair’s arraignment Thursday, the district attorney asked the judge to dismiss the case and encouraged Adair to continue freeing eagles.

District Attorney James Scott says Kathleen Adair did violate the law when she triggered the traps on her way out of the Davies Creek trail. But he says he used his prosecutorial discretion.

“There is space between the technical violation of a law and whether or not a case should be brought, and sometimes cases fall within that space, and I think Ms. Adair’s case is a perfect example,” Scott says.

Alaska Wildlife Troopers cited Adair on Jan. 10 for intentionally hindering lawful traps on Dec. 24. Adair says she sprang a total of three traps out of concern for the safety of dogs and hikers. She also freed an eagle that was caught in two traps. Despite her efforts to save the eagle, it was euthanized later that day.

Scott reminds the public that tampering with lawfully set traps is treated like a criminal offense. Anyone caught doing it could face jail time.

But, as Scott said in the courtroom, he considers what Adair did for the eagle admirable.

“If she finds herself in the same situation I hope she does the same thing again. However, before she takes it upon herself to trip traps generally, I really encourage her to meet with and talk to the other folks with an interest in this to keep us from having to go to court at all. That’s really my goal here,” Scott says.

Alaska Wildlife Trooper Sgt. Aaron Frenzel says his office had a valid case and stands by the decision to charge Adair.

“If the law is violated we have the duty for both the victim in this case, as we would with any case, to bring charges forward on an individual. It was clearly violated so we felt like the charges were appropriate,” Frenzel says.

He stresses Adair was not given the citation for freeing the eagle or springing a trap in the immediate area; she was cited for tampering with another trap twice over a span of four days. Frenzel says the complainant, called “J.F.” in official paperwork, had said even more of his lawful traps were sprung during that time period.

“To say who, if maybe something else set off other traps, who knows? We know what she had advised us of and what he had advised us of, and was there more? I don’t know,” he says.

Adair says she feels relieved with the court’s decision. She says in hindsight, she may have acted differently.

“I probably would’ve left the eagle there. I mean, it saved the eagle from some suffering but they ended up having to put the eagle down anyway and all of this hassle just – I don’t know whether it was worth it or not,” Adair says.

Then again, “It’s hard to say if I would or not. When the eagle is staring at you the way that one was, it’s really hard to say what you’d really do,” she says.

Adair says she might pursue the official steps to limit trapping on Davies Creek Trail.

A bald eagle was lying on the ground, each leg shut inside traps. When Juneau resident Kathleen Adair came across it scouting a trail for a group hike, the eagle was alive and looking at her. She spent an hour freeing it.

But there’s more to the story. Two and a half weeks later, Alaska Wildlife Troopers cited her for the hindrance of lawful trapping. She now faces a potential $500 fine and 30 days in jail.

On Dec. 24, Kathleen Adair was on Davies Creek Trail when she saw the eagle in her path. She’s familiar with the Juneau Raptor Center and knew the bird rescue nonprofit would be concerned, so she took photos of what she saw and recorded the GPS coordinates.

“I wanted to go back and tell the Raptor Center where it was. I knew that would be the best thing to do, but I also knew that it would be getting dark soon. It was 2 miles from the road and it was all the way at the end of the road, so I knew that they wouldn’t be able to get out there that day to it,” Adair says.

So she took the matter into her own hands. Before untangling the eagle from what she describes as two large long spring traps, she noticed a smaller trap on the other side of the trail. Out of concern for the three dogs with her, she sprang it. She then tied the dogs up so she could deal with the eagle.

Adair says the eagle’s legs were wrapped up in the trap chains. Before she did anything, she covered the eagle’s head to keep it docile, something she’s learned from her time around raptors. She says it took an hour to get the eagle out of two traps.

“I knew at the time that the eagle didn’t have a very good chance. I knew if I left it there all night, it would have had a worse chance of surviving,” Adair says. “But even as it was, I could tell one of the legs was just dangling, just completely broken and I knew they wouldn’t be able to fix that, but I was hoping they could at least fix the other and keep it as an educational bird.”

She placed the eagle in a large pack and hiked it out. When she got to what she estimates to be a half mile from the highway, she spotted another large trap near the trail. She sprung that one as well, worried for the hikers that would be on the trail in the coming days.

Adair is no stranger to the outdoors. She spent the early part of her life in Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island. She moved to Juneau when she was 9 and has lived here for almost 30 years. She grew up fishing and hunting and shot a bear at age 16. She raises rabbits for food. As an avid outdoors person, she often sees traps, but had never tampered with any before this. She saw one earlier that day, but it had been hanging from a tree and off the trail.

“I’m not against trapping per se. I am concerned about the traps when they’re on the trail in such a way as these were,” Adair says.

As soon as she drove into cell phone range, Adair called the Raptor Center. She brought the eagle to a volunteer’s house and sent photos. She was told the Raptor Center would call U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to report the incident. At that point, she thought her involvement was done.

The eagle was immediately brought to a vet in Juneau where it was later euthanized.

Three days later, Adair led nine people on an 8-hour hike on Davies Creek Trail to the Thiel Glacier. It was dark as the group was finishing. Adair again saw a large trap near the trail head and sprung it. She says she was concerned for the hikers’ safety. Adair knows it’s illegal to mess with lawfully set traps. She wasn’t sure about this one because it was so close to the trail.

State and municipal codes say it’s illegal to trap within a half mile of any road and within a quarter mile of a designated list of trails. Davies Creek Trail is not on that list, but it is in the popular book, “90 Short Walks Around Juneau.” Adair says there was another group on the trail that same day.

Alaska Wildlife Trooper Sgt. Aaron Frenzel says his office received a complaint from a trapper on Dec. 30 regarding someone tampering with several of his traps. On Jan. 10, Adair was cited. The paperwork only identifies the trapper as “J.F.”

Frenzel says he doesn’t know how many traps had been tampered with. To his knowledge, no photos are part of the investigation. Since the complaint, he says no troopers have gone to the site to look at the traps.

“We got out and do routine checks of trap lines throughout the Juneau area so we had already been on this trap line once before and there was really no reason to go back in since there was nothing to investigate at that point,” he says.

At the start of the Trooper investigation, Frenzel says he didn’t know about a trapped eagle. He says that information got to him sometime after Jan. 1 via the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“What we expect from the public is if they come upon an eagle in a trap, to notify us as soon as possible. That way we can go out there and see what’s going on,” Frenzel says.

He says hindering lawful traps is illegal, but freeing an eagle from traps isn’t.

“If a trap’s already sprung on a animal, you cannot hinder it because that trap can no longer be caught, so whatever you do to that trap, you’re really not hindering at that point. That would not be something we would cite for, if a person came in and was freeing an eagle from a trap the eagle was in,” Frenzel says.

There is no regulation against accidentally trapping bald eagles. Frenzel says in the eight years he’s been in Juneau, he hasn’t heard of any other cases of trapped eagles and troopers haven’t cited anyone for hindering traps.

Jesse Ross is a trapper in Juneau and a member of the Alaska Trappers Association. He says he sympathizes with Adair. He’s seen wounded animals in nature and he’s accidentally trapped animals he wasn’t targeting.

“It’s unfortunate. You feel bad that you caught something that is now wasted and hopefully you learn, say, ‘Hey, maybe what could I have done different?’ That’s what I tell myself when I see that,” Ross says.

But he says Adair broke the law.

Ross says trappers follow a code of ethics and go to great lengths to reduce the possibility of trapping nontarget animals, but he says they’re guidelines. Trapping is ultimately about good judgment.

“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right thing to do,” Ross says.

Adair is being arraigned in court this afternoon at 1 p.m. As of last night, she didn’t have a lawyer.

The Southeast Waffle Company in Auke Bay is closing January 26 and plans to reopen in February as GonZo, a gourmet waffle and coffee shop. New owners Aims and Alex Alf, former managers of Panhandle Provisions, took over the business early this month and will make some big changes.

Carnivores Unite, Herbivore for Equality and Spunky Monkey are just a few of the dishes you’ll likely see on the menu of GonZo.

Alex Alf, 27, assures Juneau, the waffles will remain. But they’ll be different.

“We just want to think of the waffle as like a taco shell, as a vehicle to serve food on. So we’re going to be doing braised short ribs on top of waffle with aged Wisconsin gruyère cheese and sour cream and some green onions,” Alf says.

Ingredients like sausage, bacon and ham will be made in house. Eggs will come from Swampy Acres. The couple will also offer more soup, sandwich and salad options, vegetarian and gluten-free choices.

Alf says, by day, GonZo will be a bakery, coffee and waffle shop.

“At night, we’re going to transform more into a dinner, sit down. Once a month we’re going to be offering a five to 10 course dinner, prix fixe menu. So it’ll give diners a different feel of what GonZo really is,” Alf says.

The couple both have backgrounds in fine dining and moved to Juneau from Pittsburgh in August. After a few months of managing Panhandle Provisions, the gourmet food store and deli from Rookery owner Travis Smith, Aims Alf says they were ready to take on their own business. They bought Southeast Waffle Company from Julie Thatcher.

Aims Alf says the inspiration for GonZo came from Hunter S. Thompson and his style of writing,

“Reporting about something, but being in it. Empathizing with it, but actually participating in the writing, and that’s what we’re doing with food,” Alf says.

Alf, 26, is originally from Juneau and studied at the University of Alaska Southeast. She followed her passion into the food business and hopes that translates into the cooking at Gonzo.

“Food is like the best form of love, I think, even to strangers, because they can taste how much work you put into something,” Alf says.

Despite all the changes, Alf says GonZo will still have customer favorites, like the regular, blueberry and chocolate waffles. She also plans to have nights catered to UAS students, like a nacho fest.

For now, the menu remains mostly unchanged. The new owners are giving people a preview of what’s to come with their spin on the waffle of the day.

About 200 people attended the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration held Monday at St. Paul’s Catholic Church. The event was organized by Juneau’s Black Awareness Association.

Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott gave the opening speech. He spoke about his mother’s experience with discrimination.

Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott said his mother, Emma – a Tlingit woman – would cry whenever she had to leave Yakutat to go to Juneau.

“And she was crying for her brothers and sisters because to come to this place was to come to a place in which she was not welcome and a place in which she was not accorded respect, the place in which her innate and wonderful dignity was not recognized,” Mallott said.

Mallott’s mother was around when Elizabeth Peratrovich testified for Alaska’s Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945. Peratrovich told the Territorial Senate it was time to give Alaska Natives basic human and civil rights.

Mallott said he grew up during a time of conscious healing.

“A time in which every Alaskan had to look into their hearts and soul and examine their place in this wonderful land and make personal decisions about the kind of life that they would lead to either reject or embrace their brothers and sisters around them,” Mallott said.

Mallott has seen change in his lifetime, and he said his position as Alaska’s Lieutenant Governor is proof.

“And so I hope to wear this office very lightly because, for all of us, every day that we live is just another step in a life, a life that follows the arc of history and time, that the Rev. Martin Luther King stated so visually powerfully, the arc of history, the arc of time that hopefully ‘bends toward justice,'” he said.

For Mallott, the color of unity is the color of his mother’s eyes.

Listen to other sounds of the celebration, including Salissa Thole singing, actor Michael Flood performing King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon and Sherry Patterson, president of Juneau’s Black Awareness Association.

Perseverance Theatre offers a glimpse into the personal side of Martin Luther King Jr. in “The Mountaintop.”

The theater’s marketing manager Tom Robenolt says the play depicts the imagined last night of Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination in 1968.

“Martin Luther King comes in after delivering his speech, The Mountaintop, and when that happens he calls for room service and a mysterious hotel maid shows up. Her name is Camae. From that point on, there’s a lot of discussion about his mortality. She questions his legacy and makes him confront certain things that he may not himself have confronted,” Robenolt says.

New York City actor Liz Morgan is the character Camae in the two-person play written by Katori Hall and directed by Lydia Fort. Morgan says the play portrays King’s human side.

“For the general public, Martin Luther King Jr. is an icon and we have this view of him that’s so untouchable and Katori Hall has found this really beautiful way to make him approachable and just show him as a man with humanity, that he has these idiosyncrasies that aren’t unlike us mere mortals,” Morgan says.

Michael Flood, also from New York, stars at King. He says “The Mountaintop” is inspiring and touches on issues that are relevant today.

“This past 2014, we had a lot of events that occurred that really shook this nation and I feel like when you watch this play, a lot of the themes echo that – what has happened today. People today are still fighting for social justice. People are still fighting for higher wages and jobs,” Flood says.

There isn’t a performance of “The Mountaintop” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but it will be showing at Perseverance Theatre in Douglas Thursday through Sunday until February 1.