Interior

Alaska Air National Guard crews out of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson rescued six snowmachiners Monday who were stranded on a glacier in the Eastern Alaska Range near Isabel Pass, just north of Paxson. The Air Guard crew then medevaced one of the snowmachiners to an Anchorage hospital for treatment of injuries.

Alaska State Troopers launched the rescue operation after they got a report at around 7:15 p.m. on Monday that a group of six people on snowmachines were stranded in the mountains east of milepost 200 of the Richardson Highway. That’s about 75 miles south of Delta Junction.

According to a Trooper report, the SOS message from the snowmachiners said they were out of fuel and not dressed for the weather and that one of them was going into hypothermic shock.

Troopers then contacted the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, which dispatched an HC-130 plane and HH-60 helicopter to rescue the group.

“The conditions up in that area were relatively clear, so good for flying. Except there was no natural illumination — there was no moon,” says Alaska Air National Guard spokesperson Alan Brown.

He said when they got to the remote area, the C-130 crew fired an illumination flare so they could get a better look around. He said then they spotted the snowmachiners on the College Glacier, about four miles east of the Richardson Highway.

“They were able to hoist the injured one up immediately,” Brown said, “and then our pararescuemen were able to guide the remaining five snowmachiners to a safer spot on the glacier, where the HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter was able to land and pick them all up.”

The Trooper report says the helicopter brought the five uninjured snowmachiners to the turnout off the Richardson Highway at milepost 197. Brown says the helicopter then took the injured member of the group to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage for treatment.

Troopers were unable to provide the names of the rescued snowmachiners.

Brown said Guard members from the 176th Wing’s 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons participated in the rescue.

A $500,000 federal grant will help the University of Alaska Museum of the North preserve Bus 142, popularized by the book and movie “Into the Wild.”

The funding comes from the National Park Service and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through the Save America’s Treasures program. Angela Linn, a museum collections manager, said the award will help cover the costs for preserving the 1940s-era Fairbanks public transit bus.

“Freeze it and document it in its current state, because the most famous part of it was from 1992 when Chris McCandless was there,” Linn said.

McCandless’ death from starvation at the bus 30 years ago drew travelers from across the world, at least two of whom died trying to reach it. In 2020, a helicopter removed the bus from a spot near Denali National Park and Preserve and moved it to Fairbanks.

Linn said the first step in the preservation process is stabilizing the bus’ structure.

“Making it safe for people to walk around in it, for us to move the bus to the exhibit site,” Linn said. “But it’s also about preserving the surface of the bus both inside and outside, so that we can preserve all the graffiti and all the epitaphs that have been placed on the surface of the bus.”

Linn said the grant will cover the cost of hiring a preservation company to do the work.

“This very well-known and well-respected conservation team out of Pennsylvania, BR Howard and Associates,” Linn said. “And they’re the one who came last summer and did the condition assessment of it and prepared a proposal to us and we used that proposal to get the funding.”

Although the project is focused on preserving the bus as is, Linn notes that because it will eventually go on display outside, missing and broken windows will be replaced. The plan calls for exhibiting the bus behind the museum on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, in a fenced area protected by a shelter.

“So that the direct sun and the snow and the rain and the heavy-duty element exposure will be a little bit lessened,” Linn said.

Linn said another grant is being applied for to build the bus shelter. The museum is also working with the nonprofit group Friends of Bus 142 to raise money. Linn said the museum hopes to open the bus exhibit in 2024.

In the meantime the public can view the bus as it’s being worked on inside UAF’s Usibelli Building, as well as via webcam.

A North Pole woman is keeping her dogs away from a neighborhood gravel pit after a northern pike attacked and injured one of them last month.

Long time North Pole resident Shannon Dhondt says it was a warm September day when she stopped to let her two dogs cool off at the neighborhood gravel pit. 

“This is over off of Copper Street, off Dennis Road in North Pole,” she said. “Been our popular little spot for years, but not anymore.”

Dhondt says her chihuahua Mulan luckily wanted nothing to do with the water, but her husky-greyhound mix Murphy went down to the edge.  

“And out of nowhere, bam, here’s this big old huge fish, which, I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “Three feet, hanging off his muzzle, you know, and he starts shaking his head and this thing is holding on.”

Dhondt says Murphy pushed the toothy fish off with a paw, but then the pike bit Murphy’s leg. 

“It was on his paw long enough to get some really good teeth in there,” she said.

The fish flopped back into the water after Murphy finally got free. Dhondt says when she got him home, he proceeded to bleed heavily.

Dhondt has photos of her home that look like something from slasher movie. She says Murphy wouldn’t let her help. The wounds were numerous but shallow, and Murphy licked them until the bleeding stopped.

He’s fully recovered from the attack, and Dhont says she’s since spent some time researching northern pike.   

“Looked at them online, and number one, they’re gnarly. And number two, they get huge,” she said.

State fisheries biologist Klaus Wuttig says he’s never heard of pike biting a dog, but he’s not necessarily surprised.

“Pike are pretty prehistoric fish, you know — they don’t really have brains. They’re programmed to eat, right?” he said. “Pike are pretty renowned for hitting baby ducks, voles on the surface, and so the dog snout — could that activate a pike to strike? Surely.”

Wuttig says he’s been bitten by pike a few times, and it’s important to pry their jaws open rather than try to pull away. The fish have hundreds of tiny teeth that can result in a lot of cuts.

Dhont has a video that a friend shot of a pike — possibly the same one that bit her dog Murphy — going after a beaver in the gravel pit. She says nobody has been able to catch the fish.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is operating the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program facility, or HAARP, for 13 projects this month. The projects are the latest made possible by federal support for the ionospheric research facility in Gakona.

In 2021, the University of Alaska Fairbanks received a five-year, $9 million grant to establish and operate the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science at HAARP.

HAARP research support services lead Evans Callis says this month’s research campaign is funded by the National Science Foundation.

“They help us with the funding aspect to make the program happen, and we work directly with the scientists to make their work happen,” Callis said.

Callis calls the 10-day campaign, which runs through Oct. 28, unprecedented.

“The most experiments that we’ve had under our NSF grant that we’re currently operating under,” he said. “Also, the most diverse set of experiments that we’ve had.”

And it’s not all hard science. Among the projects is part two of an endeavor that uses HAARP’s high-power radio transmitter for art. It involves transmitting a signal into the ionosphere which can be picked by ham radio operators around the world and decoded into low-resolution TV images.

“Narrow band television video art — it also includes spoken word and sound art,” Callis said. “It’s kind of a collaborative work between the artist and the amateur radio community to kind of make the artwork happen.”

Canadian artist Amanda Dawn Christie first transmitted art via HAARP in 2019. The other dozen projects being conducted using the HAARP facility are scientific, including a NASA experiment that involves bouncing a signal off the moon.

“Very similar to ground penetrating radar actually,” Callis said. “You know we use that here on earth, but we’re applying it to figuring out the composition of asteroids, the moon, things like that.”

Another HAARP experiment aims to better understand a low-altitude, aurora-like atmospheric glow known as Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, or STEVE. Callis says the experiment uses HAARP’s transmitter to send out so-called hot electrons thought to cause STEVE.

“And if we see that air glow and it matches the wavelength of light that we see from naturally occurring STEVE, that would give us indication that the hot electrons are playing some role in the formation of STEVE,” he said.

HAARP was built to conduct experiments in the earth’s ionosphere, but another project happening this month employs it to probe a similar electrically charged region over Jupiter, the giant gaseous planet 374 million miles away.

“This is a first-of-its-kind experiment (which) at least to my knowledge has never been attempted before,” Callis said. “We transmit several different frequencies from HAARP directed at Jupiter. We listen for the echo that returns, and that should be able to tell us something about electromagnetic conditions around Jupiter.”

The wide array of projects underscores the enduring scientific research value of HAARP, which began in 1993.

Callis says it remains the most powerful and flexible instrument of its kind in the world, and attributes this month’s research campaign to the NSF funding which provides for maintenance and prolonged viability of the facility.

“And the sense of security that brings helps scientists feel more comfortable coming up with a proposal to make use of the facility,” he said.

Scientists with NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory and Los Alamos National Lab, as well as numerous universities, are involved in this month’s HAARP research campaign.

Pentagon officials have taken another step toward building a small nuclear power plant for Eielson Air Force Base. On Monday, they released a request for proposals that invites contractors to outline how they’d design, build and deploy a so-called microreactor at Eielson within five years.

Air Force officials announced last year that they’d selected Eielson as the site of a pilot project that would prove the viability of small-scale nuclear power plants at military installations.

“This is really about energy resilience,” said Mark Correll, a former Air Force deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and infrastructure.

Correll said last November that the project at Eielson is meant to help demonstrate a microreactor’s capability to provide power in case the base’s main source of electricity — a 70-year-old, 15-megawatt coal-fired heat and power plant — goes offline.

“We’re looking to make sure that at any point in time, any of our bases with any mission will have the power it needs, where it needs it, when it needs it, in the quantities that it needs, to assure that we can continue to do the defense mission that we have,” he said.

The United Coalition for Advanced Nuclear Power is backing the Eielson project.

“There’s both a geopolitical reason, as well as an energy-resilience reason. Which is why Eielson is so exciting,” says Lucian Niemeyer, a principal with UCAN, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for nuclear-powered electrical generation.

Niemeyer says the Eielson microreactor may demonstrate that the technology holds promise for the Interior’s other remotely located military installations.

“Eielson relies on a coal plant with oil backup in a very critical area of the country,” he said in an interview Monday.

Critical because of the area’s national security assets — Eielson’s two squadrons of advanced F-35 fighters; Fort Wainwright’s airborne units; and the missile-defense installations at Fort Greely and Clear Space Force Station.

“Nuclear power can serve a significant capability to run these critical bases and assets on reliable power for a period of five to 10 years without refueling,” Niemeyer said.

The request for proposals calls for construction of a facility to accommodate a micronuclear reactor that would generate up to 5 megawatts and operate for 10 years, until its fuel is spent. The plan calls for construction to begin in three years and for the reactor to begin generating power in 2027.

Correll, who talked about the project in a news conference held after it was announced, said the microreactor would be self-contained in a structure that’s about the size of a CONEX shipping container that’ll be located in a site of about 5 acres. He said it won’t cost the Air Force any money upfront. Instead, it’ll pay for it through power purchases from the company that’ll build and operate it, at a rate that’s competitive with what the base pays now.

Niemeyer says the Pentagon and industry likely will learn a lot from how the facility performs.

“I think the lessons we learn from that are going to drive maybe a decision to start looking at other locations,” he said.

Air Force officials say they’ll conduct a conference and site visit to Eielson on Oct. 12 for industry representatives considering submitting proposals for the project.

Steven Harris Downs was sentenced yesterday to 75 years in jail for the 1993 rape and murder of Sophie Sergie in a dormitory bathroom at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The case baffled investigators for decades and became notorious because of the circumstances: a young woman stabbed and shot while she was visiting friends at college in Fairbanks right before finals week that spring. Among the potential hundreds of witnesses in the dormitory complex, no one had enough evidence to give Alaska State Troopers a solid suspect.

In 2018, DNA science provided a breakthrough. A sample on the victim was matched to Downs, who was living in Bartlett Hall that semester, one floor up from where the victim was found.

“The murder and rape took place in a woman’s restroom on the UAF campus in the woman’s floor of a dormitory, and the women’s restroom is an area where women are likely at their most vulnerable, but this is the location Mr. Downs chose to invade and commit his crimes,” said Superior Court Judge Thomas Temple.

Temple presided over the trial last January and listened Monday to pre-sentence reports from prosecutor Jenna Gruenstien and Defense attorney James Howaniec.

Gruenstein asked the judge to consider factors to influence a longer sentence: the use of multiple weapons in the crime, both a knife and a gun, as well as using a murder to prevent the reporting of a sexual assault.

“Whether they’re aggravators by analogy, or just factors that the court considers and places weight on (for) implementing the appropriate sentence — so in this case, the court has very wide discretion in the murder in the first degree sentence, 20 to 99 years to impose,” she said.

The judge said he would use the 1993 sentencing guidelines.

“To the charge of sexual assault in the first degree, the court is required by law to impose exactly an eight-year term of incarceration, and the court has no discretion to deviate from that number according to the laws in effect in 1993,” Temple said.

Defense attorney Howaniec asked the judge to consider Downs’ health and approach sentencing from a more “practical” approach.

“I’ll be honest, Judge. The way we’ve approached this is really more on a practical plane. Steve is 48 years old now. He’s over 400 pounds. He’s got very high blood pressure. I think that his life expectancy is not gonna be, you know, 103 years old here. Anything in excess of a 20-year sentence, that’s gonna be bringing him to near the end of his life under the best of circumstances,” Howaniec said.

Downs attended University of Alaska Fairbanks from 1992 to 1996. He lived in Arizona for a while and returned to his home state of Maine. Both the state and the defense noted Downs had no criminal record before, and had no known criminal activity since.

“We asked the court to consider the intervening nearly 30 years. He’s been nothing but a model citizen. He became a nurse, one who cared for hundreds if not thousands of patients. He’s really been a model prisoner at the Fairbanks Correctional Center. He’s helped his fellow prisoners there with everything from their GEDs to help helping to counsel them if they’re dealing with depression or substance abuse issues. He was on the Dean’s List multiple semesters for the remainder of his four years at UAF and then went on to be successful, without a criminal history for the next 30 years,” Howaniec said.

The victim’s brother, Alexi Sergie, was on the phone from Western Alaska before Monday’s hearing began, but the call was dropped before he could testify about the effects his sister’s death had on his family. He did not rejoin the hearing, even after a recess. Friends of the victim were ready to testify, but Judge Temple said it was not appropriate for this hearing.

“I will note that there’s no sentence this court could impose that there be adequate restoration to Ms. Sergie’s surviving family or her extended support network. There’s nothing the court could do to restore those folks,” Temple said.

Steven Downs, himself, did not say anything at the hearing. Howaniec says Downs maintains that he is innocent of the crimes.

“With regard to murder in the first degree, the court imposes a sentence of 67 years. Time to serve court is imposing the eight years of time for the sexual assault consecutive to the 67 years for murder in the first degree. The composite sentence is going to be 75 years,” Temple said.

Under Alaska law, Downs could be released after he serves one-third of his sentence, or 25 years.