Interior

Alaska State Troopers are investigating the killing and mutilation of a cow near Delta Junction. The ranchers who owned the animal are offering a $2,500 reward for information about its death and the disappearance of two other cows over the past week. 

Tangy Bates and her husband, Matt, own 300 head of cattle. And because there’s not enough pasture at their ranch, they keep most of their beef cows in other farmers’ fields. But all that changed this week, when kids next door to one of those farmers found a dead cow.

“It was a couple of 8-year-old girls that found it,” Tangy Bates said. “They were out playing.”

She says the girls found the cow Wednesday in the woods that surround the field, where she and her husband kept about a hundred of their cows. She says last week they’d found the carcasses of two other cows that had gone missing, and they weren’t sure of their cause of death, either. 

But Bates says the third cow, a lactating female, had clearly been killed and mutilated.

“They had cut her ears off, cut her udder off, her reproduction organs, cut her eyes out, backstraps out,” she said.

Bates says it appears the cow was killed within the past five days or so. She says some people have suggested it was killed by a predator, like a bear. But she disagrees because the incisions clearly were made with a sharp edge.

“We have a butcher shop,” she said. “We know the difference.”

Bates and her husband have been operating their farm and ranch in Delta Junction for about six years, and she’s never heard about any cattle mutilations in the area during that time. 

Nor has Scott Mugrage, another Delta Junction rancher who’s also president of the Alaska Farm Bureau.

“I haven’t run into such a thing,” he said.

Mugrage says perplexed by the cow killing, too. But he says the fact that they cut out the backstraps — the two long strips of meat that run along the spine — leads him to suspect the cows were killed for food by someone who can’t afford to buy it at the grocery store.

“Meat, groceries are getting pretty doggone high,” he said. “And you’re probably going to see more instances of something like this.”

But the high cost of beef also means that Bates and her husband will have to pay some $2,500 to replace each cow. And that doesn’t include the loss of revenue they would’ve gotten from the sale of calves the cows would’ve produced.

“The short-term value is $2,500. But the long-term value of that animal is, I’m losing out on thousands of dollars,” she said.

Troopers are investigating the cow killing, and that’s about all a spokesperson could say about it Wednesday afternoon. 

Bates says she and her husband have sent tissue samples from the three cows to a lab in Washington state for necropsy in hopes that might shed some light on the case. But she, too, has her suspicions, based on what she’s encountered during a lifetime of ranching.

“I originally come from Idaho, and we’ve seen this before, where you have cults that have come through and do cattle mutilations and take reproductive organs, eyeballs,” she said.

Bates says she’s just speculating about that. 

Meanwhile, she and her husband have been spreading the word around the local agricultural community about the suspected cattle killings. And fellow farmers and ranchers have been donating money towards the $2,500  reward the Bateses are offering for information leading to the conviction of the suspected rustlers.

There will be no poultry at the upcoming Tanana Valley State Fair in Interior Alaska for the first time in decades. Fair board president Coleen Turner says the decision was made because of the threat of avian influenza.

“We really felt like it was in the best interest of people who bring their poultry to the fair, that we make sure that they’re safe and that we don’t cause any undue harm to those animals,” said Turner. “And that’s why we made that decision. And it was thoroughly vetted with our livestock committee, the state vet and our board of directors.”

More than 40 million poultry have been impacted by the bird flu nationwide, plus over 1,800 wild birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The birds on display at the Tanana Valley State Fair typically include geese, turkeys, chickens and ducks.

Turner said when deciding to ban them organizers also took into account the fairgrounds’ location next to Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge.

“They’ve actually had birds there infected,” she said. “That made it a higher risk and so we really felt like we could not have the poultry here because of that.”

The Tanana Valley State Fair starts Friday and Turner said preparations are going well despite Monday’s windstorm which damaged some vendor tents.

“Quite a few people’s tents were blown away and destroyed, but I have to tell you, people are very resilient, helping to find poles to put things together,” she said.

Turner said the fair’s big-top tent barely survived the high winds.

“It was kinda touch and go with that tent,” she said. “We literally had to take all the tent sides off because the poles were coming off and we definitely were quite concerned that we were gonna lose that tent.”

The Tanana Valley State Fair runs from Friday, July 29, through Aug. 7.

Four children are dead in what Alaska State Troopers say was a murder-suicide in Fairbanks.

A trooper dispatch says officers responded to a call about shots being fired late Tuesday afternoon at a home in the Skyridge Drive subdivision. 

The dispatch says troopers found four children dead from gunshot wounds. Three other children were found at the home uninjured.

The parents were not home.

Troopers say their investigation determined that one of the dead children, a 15-year-old boy, shot three siblings and then himself. 

The Office of Children’s Services has been notified and the bodies of the four dead youth are being sent to the State Medical Examiner’s Office.

Troopers say the investigation is ongoing.

Line crews worked through the night after high winds in the Tanana Valley on Monday downed trees and broke power lines, causing several fires and widespread power outages across Fairbanks.

The blackouts affected 30,000 Golden Valley Electric Association customers, including the central emergency communications dispatch for the entire region.  

At one point the Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center sent subscribers an alert saying there was no 911 service for much of the Interior, but the service was restored about 45 minutes later.

Fairbanks Memorial Hospital lost primary power but is supported by three backup generators.

“The main power went off and it triggered the generator power. So they were completely fine. They were up and running, and GVEA had them up and running,” said Nancy Durham, the Fairbanks North Star Borough’s emergency manager.

Several area fire departments responded to fires that started when trees pulled down power lines. Alaska Forestry firefighters responded to a wildfire overnight west of Fairbanks. Fire information officer Sam Harrell says it started by a tree downing a power line in the Standard Creek Road area.

Harrell says there were also fires near Cripple Creek west of Fairbanks.

A fire nearly started at the home of Frank Chythlook when a huge white spruce tree came down right next to his house, taking power lines with it.

“I heard this crack, and it came down on top of a power line. It was kind of like, suspended by this power line, not quite touching the ground. I was glad that it didn’t blow the other way and crush the house,” he said.

Chythlook said a fire crew monitored the situation and kept people from approaching.

“After GVEA was called, they said, ‘hey, try to stay 300 feet away from a downed power line. I took that pretty seriously,” he said.

Renicka Gober was luckier — there were no power lines near the tree in her front yard — but a 40-foot black spruce broke off near its base and wrapped itself over her roof, breaking again at the apex. She was inside with her grandchildren eating dinner when it happened.

“I just heard the crackling of the tree and boom, it just fell over on top of my roof. And, uh, yeah, we were pretty scared. Neighbors came over to kind of check on us, you know, made sure that we were okay, which we were. You know, here I am, trying to figure out the next move on how to get the tree off of my roof,” she said.

This is the second region-wide power outage in the Interior in as many weeks.

A group of young wood bison are being transported to the Lower Innoko River region in Western Alaska. It’s the latest step in a decades-long effort by state and federal agencies and Alaska Native groups to re-establish the animals in Alaska. 

The 28 yearling wood bison are part of a group form Alberta’s Elk Island National Park that were trucked to Fairbanks in April. Alaska Department of Fish and Game wood bison biologist Tom Seaton says the animals spent the last three months at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Station.

“When we first got them, they were just kind of bony calves that had just been weaned, and we wanted to get their body condition up. So we got them on some really good hay from Delta Junction and supplementing them with alfalfa pellets to try to improve their protein so they can gain some muscle mass,” he said. “This summer was a great growing summer, and you can really see it in the bison. Some gained as much as 200 pounds since April, and it’s pretty amazing.”

The even mix of female and male wood bison are destined to join a herd seeded by animals transplanted from Canada to the Innoko River region in Western Alaska in 2015. Seaton says the young bison were separated into four groups of seven in preparation for this week’s trip.

“They’ve had some time to develop their social relationships in those groups of 7, which is important because you don’t want certain individuals in a container working out their dominance hierarchy when they’re being transported,” Seaton said.

The bison are traveling in four customized steel shipping containers, which longtime project partner Carlile Transportation trucked from Fairbanks to Nenana Wednesday.

Carlile Transportation senior account executive Eleanor Harrington says the company provides the service for a nominal fee because it supports the wood bison project.

“This is just one of the coolest projects,” she said. “My background is in animals, so I’m personally very invested in this.”

From Nenana, it’s a three-to-four-day barge voyage along the Tanana, Yukon and Innoko Rivers to a pre-staged release site on the Innoko. Seaton says 2 biologists are accompanying the wood bison on the river trip, during which overheating is the biggest concern.

“They take shifts and monitor them 24 hours a day, and there’s air conditioning units on there, and temperature and humidity sensors,” he said.

Seaton says the journey is stressful for the wood bison, which will be released into a large, fenced area to adjust to their new environment. He says the enclosure was constructed by Holy Cross and Shageluk residents at a site along the Innoko River in an area where the existing herd of around 130 animals gathers for the rut this time of year.

“We need to connect them with the wild bison so they can join that social group and learn about where to eat and where to go, and what to do and all that from the wild bison,” he said. “So if we can get the bison settled, and then the wild bison show up, then we’ll turn them out.”

Seaton emphasizes that bison are very good at finding other bison.

“Young bison want to be with adult cows and adult cows want to keep young bison with them, and so even for young bison that they don’t know, there’s an attraction there, a magnetism there that will work in our favor,” he said.

Seaton says a grant from the Bureau of Land Management is covering the $300,000 cost of this latest phase of the reintroduction project.

He says another 11 bison from the same group of yearlings brought from Canada in April are remaining behind in Fairbanks because they are still a little too small to be released into the wild. He says that group will likely join the others along the Innoko River next summer.

The main artery between Fairbanks and Valdez reopened yesterday after a weeklong closure due to flood damage. 

Department of Transportation spokeswoman Danielle Tessen says the worst damage was under a 70-year-old bridge at milepost 233, south of Black Rapids.

“The road actually completely washed out at that bridge, causing this closure to be a little bit longer because we had to rebuild the road to open it up,” she said.

Still, the closure was shorter than many expected given the extent of the damage. Tessen says crews worked day and night work to bring earth and material to the site to rebuild the road.

Pilot cars and flaggers will guide traffic through seven areas where crews are still working, including at Bear Creek.

“We have crews that are gonna be actively working. Some of that work is going to be cleaning out culverts, working in the ditches, but we also have a ton of work still happening at Bear Creek,” Tessen said. “But the good news is you can get through now.”

The flooding also damaged a fiber-optic cable, limiting cellphone and internet service throughout the region.

Th Bear Creek Bridge was on a DOT replacement schedule even before the washout. The project is in the design stage and scheduled to start construction in 2025.