Juneau

A Juneau-born athlete is headed to Italy next month to represent Team USA’s biathlon team in the 2026 Olympic Winter Games. 

Last month, 24-year-old Maxime Germain made the team for the event that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. 

This week, Germain spoke to KTOO from Germany, where he’s racing in the Biathlon World Cup. He said he’s very excited to represent Alaska, as well as the U.S., in the Olympic Winter Games. 

“There are a lot of opportunities, especially (because) our sport has never had a medal,” he said. “As a team, we’re very excited, and I’m very excited to get that opportunity this year.”

Germain was born in Juneau in 2001, but he says his family moved away after about a year. Then, after living in Hawaii and France, he returned to Juneau for another year to attend kindergarten at Sayéik: Gastineau Community School. 

“I didn’t ski when I was a little kid in Juneau because there was no snow and also I was too young,” he said. “But it made me appreciate the wild as well. I like training in the mountains and open areas like Alaska.”

He spent most of his youth in France, but returned to Alaska when he was a teenager, where he graduated from West Anchorage High School in 2019. During his time in Anchorage, he trained with the Anchorage Biathlon Club and raced for the APU Nordic Ski Center. 

“Maxime has worked really hard throughout the off season, improving his mental game and bringing an overall level up to the World Cup this year,” said Lowell Bailey, U.S. Biathlon High Performance Director, in a press release. “This showed right away at the first World Cup in Ostersund, where he proved he can be among the world’s fastest and best biathletes. Maxime will be a great addition to the U.S. Olympic team!”

Germain said he’s grateful for his time in Alaska. He said living and training in the state was pivotal for his career. He pointed to other successful skiers that have come out of the state, like Gus Schumacher, Luke Jager and Zanden McMullen.

“The Alaskan community in Nordic is awesome. Like, we’re one of the highest producers of high-end athletes in the country, especially in Nordic,” he said. 

The 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Italy begin on Feb. 6. 

Avalanche risk rose over the weekend as more snow and then rain pounded Juneau. Meanwhile, staff at the city’s emergency warming shelter for unhoused residents relocated operations three times in two days.

When the city issued evacuation advisories for high risk areas of town on Friday, it said the shelter along Thane Road was too close to historic avalanche paths to stay put, said St. Vincent de Paul Director Jennifer Skinner. 

The warehouse the city and the nonprofit use for the shelter is right below the red zone on the city’s avalanche risk map. 

“It was intense to realize that we were going to have to relocate our operations to, at that point, an undisclosed location,” she said. “And we were on standby.”

The shelter serves an average of 45 people who don’t have another place to sleep each night.

Shelter staff packed up everything they could — including a refrigerator — in an hour and a half. Skinner said she was preparing for an avalanche to prevent them from accessing the building ever again. 

First, the city told them to move to the Marie Drake building between the high school and Harborview Elementary School.

“And we completely 100% reset there, and as we were finishing, we’re hearing the roof, and we’re hearing all these cracks and creaks and such,” Skinner said. “And so we contacted our city officials again and said, ‘Hey, is this safe?’ And he said, ‘You know what? Get out. Let’s err on the side of caution.’”

So warming shelter staff evacuated that building, too. They had to make a safety plan with the fire department to go back in and get all the equipment they’d moved in.

The city and Red Cross of Alaska has made Centennial Hall available for residents in avalanche slide zones. 

But city Emergency Programs Manager Ryan O’Shaughnessy said the city wanted to avoid housing the two groups together, citing concerns over potential drug use and hygiene. 

So the city identified Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx — Glacier Valley Elementary as the only available building for the warming shelter. The school had closed for part of the school week so crews could shovel snow off the roof. 

With the help of a moving company, Skinner said they were able to set up at the school. They finished setting up an hour before the shelter opened at 9 p.m.   

“So that was a huge success for us — we didn’t skip a beat,” she said. “Our patrons were not impacted at all by having to reset.”

The warming shelter operated out of the school for just one night, and 44 people came to stay. 

Then, on Saturday, city officials determined the Thane warehouse to be safe enough for Skinner and her staff to move back in. 

Some Juneau residents raised concerns on social media about temporarily housing the unhoused population in an elementary school. 

City Manager Katie Koester spoke to some of those concerns at Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting.

“We had a thorough inspection, a thorough cleaning of the facility,” she said. “But really for life safety of those residents, we had to make that decision, and we had to make that decision quickly.”

But Skinner said she mostly saw support from Juneau residents during the crisis. 

“I can’t express my gratitude to community members and community businesses that are so willing to step in and step up when we have a hard time,” she said. “And help us problem solve and just be like ‘we got you.’”

The emergency warming shelter is once again operating out of its usual location in Thane, with transportation to and from the Glory Hall, which provides meals and other day services. 

Avalanche risk remains high, and the city’s evacuation advisory is still in place for residents living in the Behrends slide path. 

The cost to move Juneau’s City Hall is coming in millions of dollars higher than expected.

According to the city administration, it’s expected to cost $20.5 million to purchase, renovate and move into two floors of the Michael J. Burns building, which houses the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation downtown. The floors are slated to become Juneau’s new City Hall location. 

In September, the Juneau Assembly greenlit the purchase of the floors from the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation. At the time, the cost estimate was less than $18 million. 

Mayor Beth Weldon said the move to the Burns building is the best option for both city staff and citizens. 

“We have to find a solution. We have looked under every rock to find a cheaper solution. There is no cheaper solution,” she said. 

Those rocks include trying to build a new City Hall, and looking at existing buildings like the former Walmart in Lemon Creek, the Marie Drake building and the Floyd Dryden campus. 

The $20.5 million price tag is millions of dollars higher than city officials anticipated it would be just a few months ago. That cost is to cover moving expenses and a partial remodel of the floors — including things such as new paint, carpet and cubicles. 

And, while the Assembly has already put aside about $14.5 million for a City Hall project during recent budget cycles, they still needed to find another $6 million.

So at a meeting Monday night, Assembly members agreed to pay for the shortfall by pulling that amount from a hodgepodge of other proposed city projects, including the Capital Civic Center, the Lemon Creek Multimodal Path and a waterfront museum. 

But not everyone was in favor of the plan. New Assembly member Nano Brooks voted against the transfer of funds, arguing it was too much money. 

“The amount of $20 million is just, I can’t support that in good conscience,” he said. “It’s not what the taxpayers voted for, and even the funds that were initially set aside has left a lot of the community feeling very disparaged and unheard.”

The Assembly’s vote comes after multiple years of push and pull between city administration and Juneau voters. The city asked voters twice during recent municipal elections to approve bond debt. They said no both times. 

Juneau’s current City Hall near Marine Park fits less than half of the city’s employees and it needs millions of dollars in maintenance and repairs. The new location would consolidate several departments that are now in separate buildings.

Assembly member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs said the plan isn’t perfect, but she’ll support it. 

“There is no workable alternative that I have heard,” she said, “So we need to find the solution, and this is frequently where we find ourselves, which is just choosing the best of our least favorite choices.”

According to the city administration, the renovations and the move to the new location are expected to take at least a year to complete. 

An avalanche evacuation advisory remains in effect for one neighborhood that sits beneath Mount Juneau in Alaska’s capital city. And now, for the first time, the city is using a radar detection system to track avalanches that rumble down the mountain, thanks to state money freed up by the city and tribe’s disaster declaration last week. 

Severin Staehly works for an avalanche technology start-up called Gravimon in Zurich, Switzerland. On Sunday, he installed the Doppler radar system at the Alaska Electric Light & Power substation on Douglas Island. It’s called an Avymonster, and it points at Mount Juneau continuously to scan for avalanches. 

“We can really see where it happens and where it starts, where it ends, measure the speed and give all this information to the forecasters,” he said in an interview at City Hall. 

Staehly said the Avymonster is popular in other places with high avalanche risk like Norway, Canada and the European Alps. He said he installed one in Alaska last week near Portage Lake, south of Anchorage.

John Bressette, the city’s avalanche advisor, said it works just like boat radar, so it can scan through the night and in poor weather. Now, the team won’t have to wait for clear weather to see whether avalanches occurred. The radar system notifies staff instantaneously.

“It allows us to detect avalanches when we can’t visually see them, which in Juneau is often with the darkness and with the weather,” he said. 

Using drone flights and binoculars when the clouds rose a bit on Sunday, Bressette said he was able to see where avalanches released some snow down the Behrends path to the end of Judy Lane. But he said the avalanche didn’t start from high up the mountain. 

“There’s a lot of undisturbed snow at the top of the Behrends pass still that hasn’t been affected yet,” he said. “We feel that there’s still potential for — if that were to go — to potentially reach homes.”

That’s where the city is still advising residents to keep clear. An evacuation advisory was issued Friday for residents living in avalanche hazard zones for all slide paths in downtown Juneau, and for part of Thane Road south of downtown. The advisory was lifted Sunday for everywhere but Behrends. 

North of downtown, Bressette said he confirmed a loud avalanche reported on Thunder Mountain this morning around 9:00 a.m., but that it didn’t threaten homes. 

Bressette said his next step is to work with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to fly a helicopter-mounted LIDAR sensor over the mountain to measure the snow. He also wants to dig snow pits to look at layers in the snowpack. He said that will help forecasters better estimate the risk to those who live in the Behrends path. 

 

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Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the city’s emergency programs manager, estimates the radar system and installation costs about $200,000 or less. Since Gov. Mike Dunleavy approved the city and tribe’s disaster declaration, he said the state is likely to pay for it. 

“We’re very confident that this will be part of our public assistance reimbursement,” he said. 

At the top of the White avalanche path on Mount Juneau, weather sensors track air temperature and snow depth. But avalanche experts say adding other sensors that measure wind, solar radiation and snowpack temperatures could also help refine avalanche risk assessments for downtown Juneau neighborhoods. 

The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska recently launched a new foundation. Its main goal right now is to fundraise for a new education campus in Juneau. 

The tribe announced the formation of the Tlingit & Haida Foundation last month. Jamie Gomez is the executive director of the nonprofit. 

“The mission is, we strengthen tribal communities through resources that advance education, wellness and self-determination,” she said. “It really covers almost all the programs and a lot of the work that we do at the tribe.” 

Gomez said the nonprofit’s first major goal is to help fund the tribe’s proposed tribal education campus in the Mendenhall Valley. Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson announced plans to develop the campus during the 89th Annual Tribal Assembly in 2024. 

The 12-acre tribal education campus — slated to be located behind Fred Meyer — would serve students from early childhood into college. The tribe says its goal is to improve education outcomes for Alaska Native students by providing culturally relevant, place-based lessons.

In total, the campus is expected to cost $90 million. Gomez said the tribe plans to develop it in phases. She said the tribe likely won’t break ground on the project for at least a few years. 

“The foundation is going to be a big part of trying to help find funding to support the education campus,” she said. “Those in Juneau and the community know supporting our youth and future generations is really important to us, but there’s a lot of funding to be raised there.”

Other tribes in Alaska also have nonprofit arms, like Cook Inlet Tribal Council, which serves tribal members in communities from Chickaloon to Seldovia.

Gomez said the Tlingit & Haida Foundation plans to connect with the Juneau community in the coming months to share more information about the nonprofit and the education campus.

Two small avalanches released on a slide path of Mount Juneau, above the Behrends neighborhood, as Ezra Strong was on a walk this morning in the pouring rain. 

The city issued an evacuation advisory about an hour earlier for Juneau residents in all known slide paths downtown and along Thane Road. Strong and his wife live on Gruening Avenue with their dog. He said he’s not heeding the advisory.

“I think in part because we’re a little bit protected by a rock wall and some other things behind us, in part because we have seen slides come down before on the main slide path that didn’t even get close to us,” he said.

During an online press conference Friday morning, the City & Borough of Juneau’s new Avalanche Advisor John Bressette said that many small slides reduce the hazard by decreasing the amount of snow that could be released in a larger slide. 

“So it’s actually a good thing that we’re seeing smaller slides reducing the total snow load that is capable of producing an avalanche,” Bressette said. 

Some avalanches released above the Flume Trail today. The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities confirmed numerous small avalanches along Thane Road Friday morning. The agency expects more avalanches this evening since the forecast shows continued heavy rainfall, strong winds and warming temperatures. The closure of Thane Road could be extended multiple days. 

Some residents of the Behrends neighborhood have evacuated to friends’ houses or Centennial Hall, the official shelter set up by the city and the American Red Cross.

Carlos Cadiente lives kitty-corner from Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé in the Behrends slide path. He evacuated at around 11:30 a.m. in one vehicle while his wife drove behind in another. At a stop sign, he told KTOO they were headed to a friend’s house just down the street. 

“We already had a go-bag going and we already had the cars loaded up and ready to roll, and so we’re rolling,” Cadiente said. 

He said this is the first time they’ve heeded an avalanche evacuation advisory in the decades they’ve lived here. 

“It’s kind of an extreme measure, you know, extreme weather that we’ve had,” he said. “So we’re just kind of trying to be proactive and not be a problem,” he said. 

Britt Tonnessen is the community disaster program manager for the Red Cross of Alaska in Southeast. In coordination with the city, the Red Cross set up an emergency shelter at Centennial Hall downtown for residents on Friday. 

At the shelter on Friday morning, she said the Red Cross has been preparing for the last week in case of an evacuation. 

“We’ve seen multiple fatal landslides and avalanches in the past decade,” she said. “Evacuating to a congregate shelter is not people’s dream idea. It’s a safe place to go. We do the best to meet the needs and we have incredible, loving, warm volunteers to meet people.”

Tonnessen said that anyone from avalanche zones, as well as those who feel the load on their roof is becoming too heavy, are welcome at the shelter. 

She said they are prepared to take 150 people, and around 30 people signed in by the early afternoon. 

Avalanche, weather and road conditions are expected to worsen Friday evening.

KTOO reporter Clarise Larson contributed to this report.