Interior

Zoe Fuller said she has made some peace with the news of her school’s closure, but initially, she said she was really upset. She and her friend Kaitlyn Manning chatted easily on Monday as they walked down Ben Eielson Junior Senior High School’s linoleum halls, lined with sports trophies and blue lockers. Ben Eielson is a state-run school on a military base, so most lockers have purple stars taped on them to show the student is from a military family.

The juniors are both leaders in student government. They play sports and are leaders in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program. Manning said she’d planned out her path carefully, but her achievements don’t feel like they matter anymore: “We’ve been working for the positions that we have, and now they just don’t mean anything,” she said.

Besides the social and academic stresses of changing schools for her senior year, Fuller said there’s a deeper feeling of loss. “I’m a third-generation student at Ben Eielson,” she said. Her grandparents met here. Her mother and aunts and uncles graduated from here. But next year she will graduate instead from North Pole High School, 10 miles down the road. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug as she pulled her feet up onto her chair so her whole body was scrunched in a ball. “It’s kind of hard to see all that — disappear.”

“It’s hard to see the community here go,” her friend Kaitlyn added. “Because I feel like, looking at other schools, they aren’t as close together as we are.”

The closure of Ben Eielson Junior Senior High School is the dispersal of a close-knit learning community — and a result of education policy on both the state and the local levels that has left the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District with a multimillion dollar deficit. The building will be the second former school to sit empty on Eielson Air Force base and the fourth school the district has closed since 2022.

Brandy Harty, the local school board president, said the decision weighed heavily on every member of the board. Ben Eielson was one of four schools the district recommended closing for immediate cost savings.

“Nobody wanted to close any of the schools. And the hardest part is, we’re not telling our community that more aren’t going to close,” she said. Over the summer, the board will have to fix a funding gap that, depending on the results of a local special election and whether lawmakers in Juneau add funding to schools, could be up to $10 million this year.

Harty said the school board would have had more time to consider how to downsize the district — and would not have had to immediately close Ben Eielson — if Senate Bill 140, an education bill containing a $680 increase to the per pupil formula that funds Alaska schools, had not been vetoed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy earlier this year.

Other districts are shrinking, too. Juneau’s school district will close two schools and its administration building next year to make up for a more than $9 million budget shortfall. And Anchorage School District has announced plans to consolidate its schools as well, citing declining enrollment. The district has a projected $98 million fund gap next year.

The state Legislature has less than three weeks left to make any changes to education policy before the end of its session this year. The only proposal currently under debate for a permanent education funding increase is House Bill 392, which also contains the $680 per pupil boost to the state’s funding formula. In addition, it contains a number of Dunleavy priorities that have been at the center of education policy controversy, including a change to the state’s charter school approval process that the Senate’s majority caucus has called a “nonstarter.”

If lawmakers do not pass the bill, the best educators can hope for is a one-time funding increase. Generally one-time funds are not used to raise teachers’ salaries, the largest component of most district budgets, because teacher contracts are negotiated on a three-year basis. Charter schools can also get short shrift with one-time funding because districts do not have to distribute one-time funds the same way they do money under the state’s per pupil funding formula.

Stagnant state funding has increased pressure on the Fairbanks North Star Borough to fund its schools at a time when it is uniquely unable to do so, according to Harty. Usually, the borough would be able to contribute significantly to increase funding for its school district. But she said this year a newly lowered tax revenue cap means the borough cannot collect enough money to do that. The previous assembly in 2023 adopted the borough’s lowest tax rate in nearly 40 years. That decreases the tax money the borough can collect this year by nearly $20 million. “We could not, without eliminating other borough services, fund education to the cap anymore,” Harty said.

The Fairbanks Assembly aims to increase the amount of taxes the borough can collect so that it can better fund schools. In a special election next month, voters will decide whether to increase the tax revenue cap by roughly 10% so the borough could increase education funding by $10 million.

Harty said Fairbanks property owners would not have to choose between a lower tax rate and the school district if the state had been sufficiently funding education. And she said it’s a tough choice because property taxes are already high. “Would Fairbanks need to raise the tax cap if the state were appropriately funding schools?” she asked, then answered her own question: “No.”

Strain on military families, mission

At the base’s Field House, Joanna Livaudais wrapped athletic tape around a pull-up bar. She runs the CrossFit fitness classes there, and her husband is in the Air Force. They have three school-aged sons. “This is really hard on all of my kids, all of my kids have been greatly affected by the closure,” she said. Her two older sons go to Ben Eielson and pick up her youngest from the elementary school across the street in the afternoon.

Immediately after the board voted to close the school, she said her family was less likely to stay in Alaska, where she grew up and planned to retire. “I didn’t think it was going to be this emotional,” she said as her voice broke. “While we love Alaska and it’s home to me, the failing education system is keeping us from planting deeper roots here, as of right now.” She said several friends extended their enlistments so their kids could stay at the same high school. Now they have to change schools anyway. She said it felt like military families had to bear the brunt of the district’s financial shortfall because they are less likely to stay in the state and less likely to vote in local elections.

Livaudais said she doesn’t know if a school funding boost would have saved the school, but she thinks districts need more funding — and likely some reform. “If you want people to stay up here, and you want people to come to the state, you’ve got to be able to provide a good education,” she said.

Both of Eielson Air Force Base Commander Col. Paul Townsend’s children attend Ben Eielson Junior and Senior High School. He said the Air Force has invested in growing the Eielson base, and the school is a key part of supporting military families stationed there. “Academic stability and quality, I think that definitely has an impact on members,” he said.

Townsend and the school board’s base representative Col. Antonio Alvarado said the school closure could have an impact on readiness because families will have to spend more time commuting to get their kids to school and activities in North Pole. “We’re about a 40-minute round trip or so, give or take, in good weather,” Townsend said of the drive for his family. He added that many military families come from other states, and don’t have the backup of grandparents to help with child care and transportation for their kids.

Townsend met with district leaders to communicate the importance of the school and held community meetings to talk about the change, but was unable to stave off the closure.

More than half of the students at the Ben Eielson school come from active duty military families. Back on campus, that was especially evident in the JROTC classroom. It was piled high with moving boxes full of equipment. “Uniforms, robotics kits, curriculum, winter survival gear,” said Sgt. Kathryn Manning with a gesture towards the boxes as blue-uniformed cadets folded flags on a cluster of desks. Most of the gear will go with students to North Pole schools; the rest will be donated. She has run the program at Ben Eielson for five years.

Manning wrote each scholarship and college acceptance on a white board in red marker. “We capture that to show what each student has done with their time in this program,” she said. Several students will start careers in the military, and several others have already earned their pilot’s licenses through the program.

Sgt. Jeremy Burkeen helps run JROTC and is set to lead it at North Pole High School next year. He and his wife chose to stay on the base in Fairbanks so their two daughters could have stability through their high school years.

“Definitely a detour in the plan,” he said of the closure. His daughters will go to the North Pole school next year, too. “This ecosystem that is Ben Eielson is a very unique place, even throughout the Air Force, so it’s very sad to see it disband.”

The last year

Principal Bruce Bell’s office is full of red and black Ben Eielson paraphernalia, and after nearly a decade at the school, he said its colors permeate his wardrobe, too. He has students and staff at the front of his mind as he guides the school through its final year.

“We pride ourselves on being small and nice and kind of a small-knit community, that we know our kiddos and know our families,” he said. “And so we’re definitely feeling the emotions of closure, that this isn’t gonna exist.”

But he acknowledged that the cost of operating the small school is high, and that it’s been harder to offer the same amount of courses as some other schools. When two teachers retired last year, the school lost four Advanced Placement courses. The district will save more than $2 million by closing Ben Eielson. For the district it was a trade-off that means class sizes everywhere else don’t have to go up.

Most of Bell’s students will go to North Pole Middle and High Schools next year, so he has arranged several school visits to increase familiarity with the new campuses. He has also invited the counselors from those schools to meet students at the Ben Eielson campus. Staff has to pack up the classrooms and the decorations, pictures and trophies that bring the halls to life, but Bell said they aren’t touching the main corridor until after graduation in May. “We don’t want it to look like we’re moving out while they’re graduating,” he said.

Staff is planning a special celebration the day after graduation for students to say goodbye to the school. Bell said he doesn’t quite know what to call it. “Community closure” was one failed moniker. “The best I’ve come up with is community celebration,” he said.

Bell grappled with words to describe his personal reaction. “Heartbroken — is just my feeling, but it’s my job to be there for the staff,” he said.

There are some challenges even careful planning cannot offset. The school opens its doors early so military parents can drop their children off before they report for duty at 7 a.m. “If the drop-off time at North Pole High is 7:00, they’ll be late to work,” he said.

Wendy Clark, the school’s counseling technician, snatched a tissue off his desk when she described the effects of the closure. “For me, it’s a rough one, because this is a family,” she said. “I honestly did not think that this was going to happen.”

Her desk sits below a poster that says, “Don’t let your ice cream melt while counting someone else’s sprinkles.” She quickly checked in on a student who was sent to the office for discipline and gave him a task. Behavioral issues have increased a bit because some students are struggling with the change, she said, but for others it’s exciting. “My juniors are hit the hardest,” she said.

“Wendy knows every student in this school,” one of her colleagues said as she passed the door to Clark’s office. “You won’t get that at another school.”

Back in the hall, Zoe Fuller’s locker is full of books, cleats and JROTC gear. She tossed out an empty snack wrapper and picked up some note cards decorated with the school’s raven and lynx mascots.

“They were throwing everything away,” she said.

She kept them to write goodbye notes to her friends from the graduating senior class.

“I think also it kind of feels like almost our own graduation. Because like, we’ll be going to high school next year, but it’s not — we’ll be graduating from this school, if that makes sense,” she said.

Manning jumped in to finish her friend’s thought. “Going to North Pole is cool,” she said.

“But it’s not our school.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

 

 

Tuesday’s crash of a large cargo plane in the Cripple Creek area southeast of Fairbanks shook the neighborhood with several explosions. Witnesses said their windows rattled and the ground trembled. For the family closest to the crash site, it was traumatizing.

A Federal Aviation Administration incident report for the crash posted Wednesday said both people on board the Douglas C-54, a version of the DC-4 airliner, were killed when it went down at about 10 a.m. Tuesday. The plane, with tail number N3054V, was listed as being operated by Alaska Air Fuel.

Tuesday was sunny and clear. Mike Emers was at his home office at Rosie Creek Farm when he heard the first boom.

“I was just getting some orders together. So, I sat here, and I heard an explosion, and I followed it across the sky. So, it went in that direction,” he said.

Emers said he watched the plane pass through his window, then called first responders.

“Yeah, and then I, fumbling around trying to find my phone, called 911, and couldn’t get through. And I did get through to the trooper’s dispatch, but I couldn’t get through to 911. There’s no cell service here. But I’m on Wi-Fi calling. For some reason it wouldn’t call 911.”

His son ran down from the house and the two of them ran on their trail several hundred yards through the trees to the crash site above the river.

“We were running, yeah, and ran out to the river there to see, and then there was big black smoke and I, and I was really worried, so I’m going up there to see,” he said.

Emers said troopers and firefighters were there in about 15 minutes. The dirt road in the neighborhood became choked with a muster of vehicles from the Alaska State Troopers, Alaska Wildlife Troopers, University of Alaska Police, Fairbanks Airport Police and Fire, Fairbanks City Police Department, Ester Volunteer Fire Department, and Chena Goldstream Volunteer Fire Department.

They were able to get to the hillside on ATVs and got the fire under control, and it didn’t spread into the forest.

There was no one to rescue.

When he returned to his farm, Emers checked his security video. He scrolled through, looking for the right timestamp. One camera that looks across the farm, caught the plane, flying toward the airport.

“It comes from here,” Emers said, pointing at a computer screen.

A moment later, the plane appears on the screen at 10 a.m.

“Oh, there it is. There it is. There, it burst into flames,” he said.

It was 10 seconds from the time of the explosion of one of the plane’s engines, to when it crashed, off the screen. In the video, a huge shadow blocked the sun shining on the greenhouses, as the smoke billowed up.

Emers choked up. He didn’t know who was on the plane, but everyone in Alaska knows someone who flies.

On the trail walking back to the crash site hours later, there was a faint smell of fuel. And farther down the slope, a heavy smell of smoke.

And then a tight acre, maybe acre and a half, of charred ground and spruce trunks on the steep hillside above the river. The hillside was scattered with debris and plane parts.

“It’s still burning a little bit here. There’s a hot spot here. It’s smoking,” he called to fire crews at the scene.

Emers is not on his own land. The plane crashed on uninhabited property owned by the Binkley family. But it’s all the same to him.

Fire technicians Billy Morrow and Josh Chiles were among a crew from the state Division of Forestry & Fire Protection laying out long hoses on the charred ground Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s a lot of snow pack and everything behind it, but we’re gonna butt it up with some sprinkler kits connecting from that flank down on it, connecting to the river, all the way up here and then down to this side,” Chiles said.

They didn’t know how long the operation would take – the rest of the day, or overnight. They were placing the hoses around debris up and down the slope.

One of the plane’s engines was in the broken land-fast ice on the shore of the river. It was still on fire. Another big piece was out on the firmer river ice. A third big piece had already melted through and disappeared under the ice.

A drone flew along the river. Just off the burned zone, in the green trees, was the Emers’ family canoe.

“Well, we felt like this was our secret little place and now, you know…” Emers trailed off.

Work is scheduled to resume this month on a bridge that will cross a slumping stretch of the road into Denali National Park. The $100 million bridge will span 475 feet across a landslide at Mile 45, in an area known as Pretty Rocks, where accelerated melting of a rock glacier has closed the road since August 2021.

During the summer of 2023, bridge project contractor Granite Construction built a work camp and staging areas, transported materials and equipment, and began site preparation that included blasting, excavation, slope stabilization and pioneering a temporary heavy equipment access route across the Pretty Rocks landslide.

Denali National Park engineer Steve Mandt called 2023 “a huge year for the project” at a recent virtual town hall event, during which he reviewed last season’s progress and previewed what’s to come.

Mandt said this spring’s work will complete excavation on the west side of the slide, followed by construction of bridge abutments, or foundations.

“These foundations are composed of these large precast concrete blocks,” Mandt said. “So each of those blocks is 15 feet long, 4 feet wide, 4 and a half feet thick. There’s 13 of those per abutment. Each one of those is about 40,000 pounds of concrete. So, this entire abutment is 52 feet long, 15 feet long and four-and-a-half feet thick, so it’s just a massive foundation that’s going to be supporting each end of the bridge.”

Mandt said the abutments will be secured into solid underlying rock on either side of the slide.

“Basically, it’s a hole drilled into rock into which a steel bar is inserted and then that’s grouted in place,” he said.

Mandt said the contractor will also begin installation this summer of thermosiphons, commonly used along the Trans-Alaska pipeline and some Alaska roads, to keep ice underlying rock and soil on the east side of the bridge from thawing.

“We all know that climate is changing and even recent trends in the park are showing just progressively warmer temperatures over time, so we want to make sure that the ice that is ultimately helping support the bridge…that ice remains frozen,” Mandt said. “So, the thermosiphon is the tool that’s going to be used to do that.”

This season’s work will also see construction of a platform on the east side abutment, and the first third of the actual bridge.

“So, on that launch platform this year the contractor is going to be erecting the first three bays of the bridge,” Mandt said. “So, the first three sort of triangles of the truss will be assembled and sitting on that launch platform at the end of this construction season.”

Mandt said the rest of the bridge bays will be constructed on site in 2025 and then the entire structure will be pushed from the east side out over the slide to a receiving structure extended from the west abutment.

“Progressively moved over to the west side and then once that’s done that launch nose, the temporary truss will be removed,” he said. “The truss will be lowered onto the foundation.”

Bridge deck and guard rail installation are slated for summer of 2026, after which the bridge will open for park service and private in-holder use. Park visitor buses are scheduled to begin driving across the Pretty Rocks Bridge in the spring of 2027.

A clothing shop near Denali National Park will pay $53,000 in fines to the state of Alaska after telling an undercover investigator that it was selling items made from Yakutat alpacas, which do not exist.

The fines are the result of a consumer protection lawsuit filed in July by the Alaska Department of Law against the owners of a shop known variously as The Himalayan and Mt. McKinley Clothing Company. State prosecutors reached a settlement agreement in November.

State law prohibits someone from falsely claiming that a product was made in Alaska.

According to the state, the clothing shop repeatedly attempted to mislabel foreign products as Alaska-made, something verified by an undercover investigation.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, the shop will have to pay fines and notify the state before it sells any products labeled as “made in Alaska.” The terms of the agreement expire in 2028.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here by permission.

For years, scientists have wondered why North America’s highest mountain is not a volcano. All the ingredients for volcanic activity lurk deep beneath Denali, which sits above where one planetary plate grinds past another.

Recently, while looking for something else, researchers found a reservoir of what might be magma, seven miles beneath the muskeg of middle Alaska.

The spot intrigues Carl Tape because above it, at the ground surface, are ancient volcanic features.

Tape is a seismologist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. A few years ago, he headed a team that peppered seismic instruments along the Parks Highway and on the Denali seismic fault. They installed hundreds of seismometers at spots along the road and dozens more right on the fault.

While looking at the seismometer data, which revealed ground motions large and small, Tape and his colleagues noticed a spot where earthen waves slowed down as they passed through.

“Sometimes a slowdown is due to sediments, such as those in the Tanana (River) valley,” he said. “Sometimes it’s due to magma. This one is beneath the Buzzard Creek maars.”

The Buzzard Creek maars are two vegetated craters northeast of Healy. They formed when molten rock rose to the water table and blew up about 3,000 years ago. Geologists have found rocks around Buzzard Creek with the same chemical signature as Aleutian volcanoes.

Those volcanic features near Healy are within a region scientists have named the Denali Volcanic Gap. The gap is a puzzling absence of volcanoes from Mount Spurr (across Cook Inlet from Anchorage) to the Wrangell Mountains in eastern Alaska.

Volcanic activity of the Aleutian Islands seems to end at Mount Spurr. But if the curve of the Aleutian Arc were to extend north, it would intersect the Alaska Range.

Other conditions there are favorable for volcanoes, too: Most of the Aleutians are located about 60 miles above where the slab of the Pacific plate plunges beneath the North American plate. The Buzzard Creek craters and the mountains of the Alaska Range (including Denali) are located about 60 miles above the interface of the giant plates.

University of Utah student Santiago Rabade pored over subtle signals picked up by the dense network temporary seismometers Tape and his team had set up quickly in February 2019. Then they performed rare winter fieldwork to detect aftershocks from the magnitude 7.1 Anchorage earthquake on Nov. 30, 2018.

The earthen hum generated by ocean waves disturbing the sea floor is a constant source of noise we can’t feel but seismometers can; that signal allowed the scientists to detect the patch of magma beneath the Buzzard Creek craters.

“We had zero plan to look for what we found,” Tape said. “It’s fun to find results when you don’t seek them. And it’s generally better science.”

A next logical step to discover more about the mystery magma spot would be to cluster seismic instruments directly above it. Tape is hoping his team’s recent paper will inspire someone to take a closer look at the red blob that might help solve the riddle of the Denali Volcanic Gap.

Alaska State Troopers and state Department of Transportation workers recovered the bodies of two people Friday found dead in a snowbound vehicle on the Steese Highway at Eagle Summit. According to a trooper dispatch, the two were reported to have left Fairbanks on Tuesday headed for Circle.

DOT spokesperson John Perreault says a road crew from an area maintenance station headed up Eagle Summit in stormy conditions Wednesday morning and found three vehicles. Two of the vehicles were still running, but a third was buried in the snow, and the crew got no response when they knocked on the windows or tried the doors.

Perreault says the crew left to help the two other vehicles off the summit and then returned to check the third again.

“They couldn’t see inside,” he said. “The windows were frosted and tinted, and so they cleared the passenger doors. They even tried to pry them open.”

Perreault says the crew came off the mountain about six hours after first locating the vehicle Wednesday morning.

A State Trooper dispatch says they responded that evening and broke a window to get in and found two people dead inside.

“Because the weather I’m told at that time was 60 mile an hour winds, the Trooper and the DOT personnel came down off the summit and had to wait for the weather to clear up. And the vehicle was recovered with the occupants Friday morning,” Perreault said.

The Trooper dispatch says the bodies were transported to Fairbanks for identification and would then go to the state medical examiner for autopsy, adding that no foul play is suspected.

Strong winds are common in the Eagle Summit area, and the DOT has gates to close the highway when conditions warrant. Perreault says a road crew did not lower the gates after completing work around 4:30 PM Tuesday.

“They were open Tuesday night because the pass was clear when our guys came off shift,” he said.

Perreault says the DOT closed the gates Wednesday morning, as conditions had significantly worsened.

“And so traffic had gone over Tuesday night before they had come back on shift to make a determination,” he said.

Perreault says the incident and response will undergo review.

“Anytime tragedies like this happen, we want to make sure that we did everything we could, and we’ll be sure to put those sort of decisions through a process of review and to make sure we’re enabling our staff to protect the public as best they can,” he said.

Perreault encourages drivers to check weather reports and Alaska 511 for conditions, and to let someone know where they’re headed and be prepared with sufficient fuel, emergency supplies and equipment.