FAIRBANKS — Charles Ahkiviana died here, just beyond the lights of a Fred Meyer parking lot.

Two days before Christmas, a man on a smoke break found the 55-year-old’s body frozen in a snowbank bordering a scrap of spruce forest.

It was cold in Fairbanks that day — a low temperature of 32 degrees below zero, with a windchill at one point of 54 below. Alaska State Troopers determined Ahkiviana died of hypothermia.

Ahkiviana had been homeless in Fairbanks for years, his sister Kiatcha Nyquist said.

He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had long struggled with drugs and alcohol. Whenever he visited her, he brought a small gift — an eyeglass chain, a trinket.

“He wanted to feel like he had something to offer,” Nyquist said.

He drew the public’s attention in death more than he had in life.

Local news media published stories based on the troopers’ account, making public a quiet reality: Unhoused people sometimes die in the Fairbanks cold.

Fairbanks is the coldest city over 25,000 people in the United States, said Rick Thoman, a climate expert at the International Arctic Research Center.

Ahkiviana’s death was a moment for community reflection, and for “fury and shame,” Jennifer Jolis, the former director of the soup kitchen, wrote in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

“How many other camps are there?” she wrote. “How many others are in danger?”

Activists in Fairbanks, a city of 30,000 people, describe a caring, creative community that helps its vulnerable homeless residents with a patchwork of offerings.

But the Fairbanks safety net has a gaping hole.

Despite an average January temperature of 8 below zero, the city lacks a low-barrier emergency shelter. No place consistently offers an open door and an unconditional warm cot to anyone, at any time, no matter how frigid outside.

So the estimated 50 to 100 unsheltered people who live in Fairbanks find ways to survive. They walk all night in bunny boots, trying to stave off frostbite. They crowd into motel rooms 10 at a time. They build forested encampments and dig snow caves. They squat in abandoned houses and sleep in cars.

Six weeks after Ahkiviana’s death, a man who said his name is Ryan perched on the curb of the busy Fred Meyer parking lot holding a sign: “NEED HELP God Bless.”

He was just down the block from the empty lot where the body had been found. A rumpled nylon tent remained in the lot, buried by new snow.

Ryan said he’d spent years intermittently homeless in Fairbanks. He’d known several homeless people who died.

How did they die?

“From freezing,” he said.

Golden Heart city

Upstairs at the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, Pete Kelly and John Coghill examined a shiny plastic bunk bed designed and constructed locally. It was built to resist infestations of bed bugs and other menaces of close-quarters living.

“This is space-age plastic,” said Kelly, the executive director.

The Rescue Mission is the biggest provider of emergency shelter in Fairbanks and a longtime Fairbanks institution. It can house up to 200 people in a disaster.

The mission has plenty of space, with comfortable rooms that look more like a college dorm. About 90 people, including women and families with children, stayed overnight on a recent weekday, Coghill said.

But some say the mission’s rules — you have to be sober and drug-free to enter — mean it isn’t sheltering the people who need it the most.

The men who run the shelter were among the most powerful lawmakers in Alaska for decades.

Kelly, the Rescue Mission’s executive director, spent more than 14 years representing Fairbanks in the Alaska Senate, including four as Senate president.

John Coghill served for more than 20 years in the Legislature, with a stint as Senate majority leader. He’s in charge of the day-to-day operations of the shelter.

Both say their faith guided them to shelter work. Each had recently lost a bid for reelection when they joined the shelter staff.

The skills of politics have transferred to their current work at the Rescue Mission, Kelly said.

In Juneau, he said, he learned, “Don’t promise things you can’t deliver.”

It’s the same at the Rescue Mission, he said.

Under their leadership, the shelter runs with a tight set of rules: To enter, prospective guests must pass a breathalyzer test and submit to a urinalysis for drugs. Clients are expected to move through a structured program toward self-sufficiency.

“If you’re willing to help yourself, we’re willing to help you,” Kelly said.

The rules are in place because the shelter needs to be an orderly, secure place, especially for people who are newly in recovery, Kelly and Coghill say. Women and families with children also stay there.

The mission can’t help everyone, they say.

“We have been criticized because there’s a level of mental illness that we just can’t take care of,” Kelly said.

Both talk about “extending grace” — allowing a man who stole back in, letting people ride out extreme weather in the foyer — but there are limits.

“If we have to tell (someone) to leave, we make sure they have hats, gloves, good boots, winter clothes, sack lunches,” Coghill said. “We’ll send them out with as much as we can.”

Advocates say the Rescue Mission does important work — but it shouldn’t be the only option for emergency shelter in Fairbanks.

“I understand why they have the limitations they do. I really do,” said Hannah Hill, executive director of Stone Soup Kitchen. “And we need to have low barrier shelter. … It’s very much about the lack of alternatives.”

Sobriety as a precursor to housing “just isn’t how homelessness works,” said Brynn Butler, housing coordinator for the city of Fairbanks. People can’t really work on their addictions, she believes, until they have stable and secure housing.

She was once an addict and homeless herself, living in cars and abandoned houses. Later, in recovery, she worked in encampment outreach and got to know people who lived without shelter in Fairbanks. She became the city’s housing coordinator in December, less than a month before Ahkiviana’s death.

Lynda Purvis, a case manager with the Tanana Chiefs Conference, hears a lot about Anchorage’s current version of a large, low-barrier shelter: Sullivan Arena. To her, it sounds like what Fairbanks needs.

“I really wish that we had something like that here,” she said. “Somewhere you could throw cots down, give you something warm to drink and just get out of the cold.”

Barriers

Robyn Demientieff soaked up the warmth inside the Centennial Center, a conference space at the city-owned Pioneer Park.

Demientieff, with short hair and a sprinkling of tattoos under her eyes, spent the previous night huddled in a hotel hallway grasping a few hours of sleep, then disappearing before anyone could kick her out, she said. She’d made her way to Project Homeless Connect for snacks and an application for a Housing First apartment. Her old friend Starla Adams sat with her.

Around them, behind folding tables, sat representatives of Fairbanks’ many social service groups, offering snacks, free haircuts and applications for housing and ID cards. A yearly event, Project Homeless Connect is meant as a one-stop shop for unhoused people to connect with services in a single location.

Demientieff said she’d been homeless on and off in Fairbanks for years. There was a strange logic to the way emergency shelter worked here, she thought:

“To go to the mission you have to be sober,” she said. “To go to the sobering center you have to be drunk.”

People get drunk simply to qualify for admission to the sobering center to dodge a night in the cold, she said. Demientieff was hoping her application for a Housing First apartment would be accepted.

“At least I’d have somewhere to go at night,” she said. “They won’t judge me.”

The friends agreed that surviving homelessness in Fairbanks involves strategy and hard work. A “warming center” is open sometimes, but not always. People can be taken to the downtown crisis recovery center but can’t stay more than 23 hours. The soup kitchen is open 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. A food pantry serves meals on Wednesdays.

On this afternoon in January, the temperature was dropping into the teens and single digits. Demientieff wore snow overalls with no shirt underneath, a sweatshirt and a thin jacket.

“I can get you a jacket if you need one,” Adams quietly offered from across the table. She was staying at a women-only shelter.

Demientieff slid out of her chair and headed for the bus stop, lugging a bag. She had no idea where she’d spend the night. The Rescue Mission wasn’t an option for her, she said. Maybe she’d head downtown.

“If you could walk a mile in my shoes and survive, I commend you,” she said.

Scott Walston was standing at the bus stop, carrying his belongings over his shoulder with a stick. Walston is from Utah but said he’d been homeless in Fairbanks for about five years, on and off. His shelter options are limited: He’d been to the Rescue Mission but had been kicked out.

“I couldn’t stop drinking,” he said.

He spent all night walking. He does that sometimes. He prefers the big-box stores of East Fairbanks, he said. Safer to be among the Walmarts and Safeways. He’s practically become nocturnal, he said: Walk all night, ride the bus all day. In the coldest weather, he’s passed nights in empty houses. You curl up against your friends, hedging body heat against freezing.

“Been there, done that,” he said.

Searching for camps

Niko Thompson trudged through heavy snow, his path lit by a headlamp. He was searching for the camps of unhoused people he knew existed in Fairbanks. They were proving elusive.

At one trail into a greenbelt, he saw only fox tracks in the new-fallen snow.

At the northeast edge of town, he called toward an empty tent in the trees. He stepped into a dilapidated building.

“Anybody there?” he hollered. “I have some bus passes, McDonald’s gift cards.”

No one answered.

Thompson, a veteran who got out of the military in Fairbanks and stayed, runs a program through the Rescue Mission that aims to help homeless veterans but extends help to all unhoused people. Tonight, his job was to survey camps as part of an annual point-in-time count of unhoused people.

In Fairbanks — unlike in Anchorage — the camps tend to stay hidden, invisible from roads. Usually, the camps are small. The biggest he’d seen was seven people living in one place: a junked bus.

After hours of searching, he’d found only one active camp. Nobody seemed to be there.

“Doesn’t mean they aren’t out here,” he said.

Morning

Wherever the unsheltered in Fairbanks may have secreted away for the night, about 100 people showed up for breakfast the next morning at the Stone Soup Cafe, a no-judgments grassroots soup kitchen.

The philosophy of The Bread Line, which operates Stone Soup Cafe, is different from the Fairbanks Rescue Mission: It’s a come-as-you-are place, with minimal rules. It also offers a place to be indoors for two hours a day.

On this January morning inside the building near downtown, volunteers served apricot oatmeal with lentil stew and pork chops available to go.

Ahkiviana’s death may have momentarily raised community consciousness about the dearth of shelter, said Matt Davis, a longtime cook at the Stone Soup Cafe. But he wondered if it would be long-lasting enough for action. The suffering was everywhere if you noticed it. Look around, he said: Lots of the guests eating breakfast were missing fingers due to frostbite.

“We bring (concerns about adequacy of shelter) to the attention of our local governments. And every time we do, it’s, ‘Well, we have a rescue mission.’”

After breakfast, people filtered outside to splinter into smaller groups or to walk off alone.

Kenneth Cooper, in fatigues and a long white beard, smoked a cigarette with fingertips made tender by repeated bouts of frostbite. On the best days he crashes with friends, he said, though he tries to avoid staying for more than a night at a time.

He’s no longer welcome at the Rescue Mission, he said. Now, in the coldest weather, Cooper sometimes burrows into a snowbank and makes a dugout shelter, big enough for just himself, he said. He runs a PVC pipe up through the snow to create a vent and burns a candle for warmth. Or he waits until the coldest, darkest hours to nurse a single cup of coffee at the only all-night diner in town.

Several other people said they stay in abandoned houses.

One such house was midnight dark in midmorning, the walls mildewed and molded. The only source of warmth was an electric oven left open and glowing red. Trash and random belongings — piles of clothes, a power drill, fast-food cups, towels — were heaped hip-deep on the floor. Someone was sleeping on a mound of detritus, partly covered with a blanket.

Back in the parking lot of the soup kitchen, Lakota Head, tall and wearing capri leggings in the cold, was in mid-beef with the occupant of an idling truck.

“Fuck you, Donna!” she shouted.

Anger tends to dissipate fast in a place this cold, Head said a few minutes later. People need each other too badly. The ethos would extend to Donna, the woman she had been cursing out.

“She could come to me later today or tomorrow or next week or, you know, whenever and just be like, ‘Dude, I’m cold,’ or ‘I’m sick.’”

Head, who sometimes comes to the soup kitchen for breakfast, said she’d help her however she could.

“If we’re mad at each other, it don’t matter — that just evaporates. Because what becomes important is the fact that we have to survive.”

Momentum

Butler, the city’s housing director, senses there’s momentum for change. She doesn’t see Fairbanks directly taking on a low-barrier shelter as the Municipality of Anchorage has in the form of Sullivan Arena. But at minimum, the city could develop a cold-weather plan that might allow it to activate emergency shelters in extreme weather.

She thinks the need for more shelter may be becoming obvious enough that if a funding source can be secured, a site located and workers hired, it could become a reality. Not this winter. But maybe next.

“That’s my hope,” she said.

There’s still a belief among some in Fairbanks and beyond that homelessness, and the addiction that often presages it, are essentially self-inflicted conditions, Butler said. It’s a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps perspective that’s at odds with what Butler says is now known about addiction as a disease.

The idea is that “if they just wanted it bad enough, they could have a house,” Butler said. “And that’s just not the case.”

“Addiction … is a trauma response,” she said. “It’s not going to heal until you’re safe and secure. And then you can start to focus on that.”

In January, Charlie Ahkiviana’s family held a funeral service and placed an obituary in the News-Miner describing his independence and pride. Instead of flowers, they asked for donations to the Fairbanks Native Chapel. Or the Fairbanks Rescue Mission.

On a Tuesday night at the end of January, Scott Walston walked into a pool of light from a streetlamp on Gaffney Road.

He’d taken a bus to a spot where he had cached supplies in an encampment, only to discover someone had ransacked it. No great loss, he shrugged.

In the distance, he watched two figures walking bunched together. At this point he knew the streets of Fairbanks and their inhabitants so intimately he could recognize people by the shape of their silhouettes, he said.

Walson didn’t know where he’d end up, whether a door would open to a warm room or if he’d wander the streets until morning.

“Well, I’d better keep walking,” he said.

This story originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

Two Fort Wainwright soldiers are undergoing treatment for injuries they sustained Sunday when their Army attack helicopter crashed at the Talkeetna airport during a training flight.

The soldiers, with the 25th Attack Battalion, were transported from the scene to area medical facilities for treatment, according to a Monday statement from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division. One of the soldiers was flown to a hospital and the other was taken by ambulance.

A division spokesperson says the AH-64 Apache helicopter was one of four that were taking part in the training.

The spokesperson said the crash will be investigated by a team from the Army Combat Readiness Center at Fort Rucker, Ala.

Fairbanks’ only natural gas supplier signed a 20-year contract with Hilcorp earlier this month to begin sourcing gas from the North Slope. It’s a historic deal — the first time North Slope gas will be commercialized for use elsewhere in the state, and in this case, in a region heavily dependent on expensive heating oil.

But some Fairbanks residents and utility experts are concerned the deal wasn’t the best option for the region, where locking down an affordable, stable source of heating fuel is a central issue.

“The whole Fairbanks area is hurting, hurting for some kind of reasonable energy cost so we can live and grow economically and every other way,” said former Interior Gas Utility board member Patrice Lee.

IGU is a relatively small business. It’s a public corporation owned by the Fairbanks North Star Borough with about 2,000 customers and a network of gas storage tanks and pipelines that crisscross Fairbanks and North Pole.

Natural gas is, generally speaking, cheaper than heating oil and cleaner than burning wood, coal or diesel.

For years, IGU has purchased natural gas from Hilcorp operations in Cook Inlet. They process it at an IGU-owned liquefaction plant at Point Mackenzie, and truck the liquid gas north more than 300 miles up the Parks Highway to the Interior.

Two weeks ago, IGU signed another contract with Hilcorp. This one, to bring gas south from Hilcorp’s Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

“That’s going to be their footprint for any other businesses up there that need gas. And that’s all good and fine, but many of us feel that we could have found the amount of gas we need for less,” Lee said.

Lee and others question whether it would have been cheaper to import liquid natural gas, or LNG, from Canada.

The price of Canadian LNG fluctuates, said Mary Ann Pease, an energy consultant who helped IGU with sourcing and contracting in 2021. But at the time, rates were competitive with their Cook Inlet gas supply, she said.

“It provided a nice additional amount of gas and at a price that was commensurate with the other option of liquefying it at Point Mackenzie and trucking it ,” Pease said.

This time around, IGU general manager Dan Britton said the utility didn’t do a direct price comparison using Canadian LNG because of concerns about the exchange rate and the risk of price volatility. Transportation distances from Canada were also a concern, Britton said.

IGU started looking for new sources of natural gas last year, after Hilcorp made an announcement warning utilities about uncertain gas supplies in Cook Inlet.

The utility was ready to transition quickly to a new source, IGU spokesperson Elena Sudduth said.

“We are already set up to transport LNG from somewhere and we are closer to the North Slope than any of the other utilities that source natural gas,” she said.

Eventually IGU and Hilcorp came to an agreement to purchase North Slope gas. The plan involves a Hilcorp-affiliated company called Harvest Midstream building a liquefaction plant near Deadhorse. Then, IGU plans to truck the gas 500 miles south to Fairbanks down the Dalton Highway.

Harvest and Hilcorp both say that they are pleased to supply North Slope gas to the Interior, but neither would comment further for this story.

Critics see issues with this plan.

One is IGU’s selection of a Hilcorp-aligned company like Harvest to build the liquefaction plant, instead of putting out a call for competitive construction bids.

“I don’t think it makes sense at all,” said Pease, the energy contractor. “Why would you have someone controlling the entire value chain from gas supply to liquefaction?”

Britton said that while the utility has called out for bids on other projects, they went with Harvest this time because the company has worked on similar projects in the past.

“Given their capacity and their ability to get the project constructed in a reasonable timeframe, and the fact that they operate assets in the North Slope today,” he added.

IGU signed 20-year contracts with Hilcorp and Harvest that they say will offer stability to their customers and a comparable price to what they’re paying now. Over that 20-year period, the contracts stipulate that rates cannot increase more than 20%, according to IGU.

Still, that’s a long time to be locked in with the same suppliers, Pease said.

“What will happen if other options come online in the near future, where the price is more competitive?” she said. “What kind of carve outs do they have if there’s other options that materialize?”

Pease said the deal is low-risk — and that’s something utilities tend to look for — but long-term, she’s not sure it’s the best price IGU could have delivered for a region so in need of affordable heating fuel.

IGU said plans are already underway to build the North Slope liquefaction plant. It’s expected to be online by late 2024.

A Fairbanks man was sentenced Thursday for carrying out a series of arson attacks in the Pleasant Valley and Two Rivers area in the summer of 2021. Jamison Gallion, 19, was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Paul Lyle to serve 24 years in prison.

Gallion, who was 17 years old when he was arrested in August 2021, was tried as an adult.

Given time served since his arrest and assuming a one third sentence reduction for good behavior, Lyle said Gallion’s mandatory release date will be in 2037. Gallion is also ordered to pay restitution to victims, including forfeiture of permanent fund dividends.

Gallion admitted to setting fire to seven properties, including two structures with people inside. He pleaded guilty last year to the felony crimes of arson, burglary, criminal mischief and terroristic threatening.

The judge underscored that it was “sheer happenstance” that no one died or was injured by the fires Gallion set. Speaking before a crowded courtroom, Lyle explained key factors weighed in the sentencing and the seriousness of Gallion’s crimes.

“The defendant engaged in a series of arsons that caused millions of dollars of damage. He directly endangered the lives of ten people, some of them as they slept,” he said.

Lyle also spoke to letters Gallion sent to the Pleasant Valley Community Association which he described as “terrorizing and taunting the entire Two Rivers-Pleasant Valley community for three months in the summer of 2021.”

Rehabilitation potential was another factor, and Lyle highlighted Gallion’s remorsefulness.

“He stood and faced his victims in the courtroom and apologized, which in this court’s experience is relatively rare,” he said.

Lyle additionally noted Gallion’s young age, lack of prior criminal history and supportive family as favorable to rehabilitation, but also expressed uncertainty given Gallion’s  “disturbing motivations” for the arson attacks.

“The defendant has indicated that he committed the arsons for the thrill of it, to calm his stress, which would return after each fire, for personal satisfaction and because he allowed wickedness to overtake him. His June 2021 letter said he committed the arsons to obtain revenge and to release anger against people who were unkind,” Lyle said.

The sentence Lyle handed down is longer than those recommended by attorneys for Gallion and the state, and it surprised arson victim Donald McKee.

“After listening to the DA last week, I was going ah, he’s probably going to serve about ten years,” McKee said. “Well, Judge Lyle put a little bit of teeth to it, and I was happy to see that.”

McKee, his wife, other family members and a rental tenant escaped a fire that destroyed their multi structure property. He says Gallion should have gotten more time, but some charges were dropped. He estimates the replacement cost of the property he lost at about $2.5 million but says the arson attack has also taken another type of toll.

“This morning I was taking a shower and right in the beginning of my shower, the power went out,” he said. “And my first thought was ‘Oh man, another fire.’ And that’s every time the power goes out. I hope I get over that someday.”

The arsons also destroyed and heavily damaged buildings belonging to the Pleasant Valley Community Association. Association treasurer and founding board member Bob Sugden expressed mixed emotions after Gallion’s sentencing.

“Quite frankly I’m sick in my stomach just having to have relived all of this,” he said. “I feel like what has been done and what has been sentenced is appropriate and right. I don’t want to be capricious and mean spirited, but at the same time I don’t want this person to ever have access to our community again.”

Sugden, a pastor, says he hopes Gallion can eventually find some semblance of a healthy and whole life. The courtroom was filled with people for the sentencing, a mix of Pleasant Valley Two Rivers area residents, including arson victims as well as family and friends of Jamison Gallion.

Gallion looked down for periods of the over hour long proceeding, but seemed to maintain composure as his sentence was delivered.

Genetic genealogy recently helped Alaska State Troopers identify a human skull found 25 years ago.

Interior Alaska commander Capt. Eric Spitzer, said a pair of hunters found the skull along the Porcupine River near the Canadian border in September of 1997. It was later retrieved and delivered to the state medical examiner.

“The cause of death was suspected of being the result of bear mauling,” Spitzer said.

Spitzer says the identity of the bear attack victim remained unknown until last April, when a DNA sample from the skull was compared to a genetic genealogy database enabling investigators to home in on relatives. The testing tentatively identified it as belonging to Gary Frank Sotherden of New York.

“The Alaska State Troopers contacted a suspected brother of Gary who submitted a DNA sample to Family Tree DNA, which subsequently resulted in positive identification, determining that they were indeed brothers,” Spitzer said.

Spitzer said troopers were also able to fill in the Alaska part of Sotherden’s story.

“While speaking with family members, Alaska State Troopers learned that Gary was dropped in and around the area where the remains were found, sometime in the early to mid-1970s, presumably to go hunting,” Spitzer said. “He has never been heard or seen by his family since then. A family biography and grave marker for Sotherden annotates he was lost somewhere in Alaska at the age of 25.”

Spitzer said Sotherden’s brother was notified about the positive identification Dec. 27 and put in contact with the state medical examiner’s office so the family could make arrangements to take possession of the remains.

The Air Force has begun replacing Eielson Air Force Base’s aging fleet of F-16’s with upgraded models of the fighter jet. The first two of the newer jets arrived last week.

The two newer F-16 Fighting Falcons are both about 35 years old, a couple of years younger than the jets they’ll replace. More importantly, the incoming F-16s have avionics that were updated five years ago, nearly a decade after than the old jets got their last upgrade.

“So, it’s still the same airframe and engine,” says Lt. Col. Albert Roper, the commander of Eielson’s 18^th Aggressor Squadron. “However, with the increase in systems capabilities upgrade, some of the software, the processors, all that has been replaced.”

Roper says the upgraded jets will enable his unit to better train U.S. and allied pilots to fight adversaries’ advanced aircraft, including so-called fifth-generation fighters, comparable to Eielson’s F-35s and the F-22s based at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.

“Our daily training here is interaction with local fifth-gen aircraft here in the state of Alaska, both F-22s from down there at JBER and then with the F-35s here at Eielson Air Force Base, in order to keep them operationally proficient and combat-ready,” he said in an interview Thursday.

Roper’s unit is called the Aggressor Squadron because its pilots often play the role of adversaries during training exercises held every year out of Eielson and JBER. Those include Red Flag and Northern Edge, both of which are conducted in the skies above the 65-thousand-square-mile Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex, a series of ranges spread around the state.

“The mission of the Aggressors is to know the threat,” he said. “We teach that threat to our combat aircrews and their partner nations. And then we replicate that threat in the aircraft.”

Roper says that training will continue over the next several months, with both the new and old F-16s. He says during that time, two or three of the newer jets will arrive every few weeks, and two or three of the older ones will then fly their final missions to the Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in southern Arizona — the so-called Boneyard, where aircraft are stored before being sold, repurposed or recycled.

“By August or September of this year,” he said, “hopefully the transition’s been completed and we’ve got our newer jets here and the other ones are down in the Boneyard mothballed-away.”

Roper says all 19 of the squadron’s F-16s will be replaced with the newer jets.