Juneau

A group of 14 student athletes from Angoon finally returned home from Juneau Friday morning after a cancelled ferry left them stuck in the capital city for four extra days.

The students came to Juneau on Dec. 3 for a basketball tournament. Angoon School principal Emma Demmert was on the trip with the team and said their trip home on state ferry M/V LeConte was cancelled following record-breaking snowfall across Southeast Alaska.

While in Juneau, she said it was challenging to keep the cost of staying extra days from rising too much, but since Angoon and Juneau are so connected, local residents stepped up to keep students fed.

“I’m very thankful to be a part of the community that I’m in, because without them, you know, our kids wouldn’t have food,” she said. “And you know, they’ve really been reaching out and helping us in any way possible.”

Demmert said a Goldbelt Incorporated employee who went to school in Angoon as a child opened the corporation’s classroom up for students to use during the week.

Despite the change in plans, Demmert said the students behaved well, thanks to a schedule that included time for schoolwork, meals and swimming at Dimond Park Aquatic Center. 

“They’ve been going swimming at the swimming pool because it’s cheap entertainment, and it keeps them busy and it gets them tired,” she said.

Demmert said when the ferry was canceled, the group moved from their tournament lodging into the Aspen Suites hotel until they could leave on the next available ferry four days later.

Being stranded in other communities can be financially challenging; the cost of food and additional lodging eats into the school’s activities budget. But Demmert said traveling to other communities is worth the risks of getting stranded because the students work hard to maintain their eligibility and compete.

“They come to practice every day. They keep their grades up. Because of eligibility, they have to have a certain grade point average in order to even be able to travel,” Demmert said. “So given that, it’s like an award for all the hard work they’ve been doing.”

Despite incurring extra costs from this week in Juneau, Demmert said they hope to work out travel for competitions taking place over the rest of the school year.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has landed on a solution to put an end to glacial outburst floods that have grown more destructive in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods over the past few summers. 

The agency will pursue something called a ‘lake tap.’ It’s essentially a tunnel through Bullard Mountain on the east side of the glacier that’s meant to steadily drain Suicide Basin so it can’t fill to the point of bursting and send some 16 billion gallons of water through the Valley. 

Denise Koch, the director of engineering & public works at the City and Borough of Juneau, explained it with a metaphor on Friday. 

“I just think about Suicide Basin as a proverbial bathtub,” she said. “What the lake tap is, is just leaving the drain open.” 

She said the drain will empty the water from Suicide Basin into Mendenhall Lake through a conduit somewhere between the face of Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls.

The decision comes after a three-day, closed-door meeting the Army Corps held with federal agencies, local officials and researchers in Juneau this week. Their main task was to discuss five options to prevent homes from flooding in the future. The Army Corps initially planned to host press briefings each day, but cancelled them on Tuesday. 

The city announced today that city leaders, along with the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, support the lake tap option, aligning with many of the public comments the Army Corps received last month.

Besides a lake tap, the options discussed at the meeting were a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake, a permanent levee, a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain and relocating impacted residents from the Valley. 

Koch said the group weighed the options based on risk to downstream residents, how quickly they could be built and the overall cost. 

“Ultimately, a lake tap was seen to reduce risk the most while being able to be constructed the most quickly, for the lowest amount of cost, with the least complex and least costly operation and maintenance,” Koch said. 

Koch said the tunnel could take as long as six years to excavate — the most conservative estimate. She said it could cost somewhere between $613 million and $1 billion, but that all estimates are very rough at this stage.

The Army Corps aims to finish its technical report for the lake tap in May. That will include a preliminary design, a more detailed cost estimate and a draft environmental review. There will be another public comment period once it’s complete.

To implement the solution, the Army Corps will need authorization and funding from Congress. 

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that a full draft environmental impact statement is unlikely to be drafted in the technical report.

Juneau Animal Rescue might soon have a location in the Mendenhall Valley for its proposed new animal shelter.

The Juneau Assembly is slated to vote Monday night on whether to lease a parcel of city property to the rescue for less than fair market value.

The nonprofit organization has been fundraising to construct a newer, updated facility for the last few years. The current shelter was built back in 1984 and needs extensive repairs. A 2021 inspection showed it didn’t meet national standards. 

The proposed new facility would have a better ventilation system to help prevent the spread of diseases, and more space for cats, dogs, and smaller animals like rodents and reptiles. Right now, the shelter repeatedly struggles with hitting its capacity for housing cats. 

The proposed lease location is in the Mendenhall Valley and the animal shelter would share it with the Southeast Alaska Food Bank. Juneau Animal Rescue leadership says the timeline to construct the facility depends on fundraising. 

Also on the Assembly’s agenda Monday night is the approval of amending portions of the Title 49 Land Use Code and amending the city’s comprehensive plan by adopting the Downtown Douglas and West Juneau Area Plan. 

Juneau residents have the chance to testify on the ordinances – as well as on non-agenda items – in person or online before the Assembly votes on Monday. People who want to testify online must notify the city clerk by 4 p.m. before the meeting. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. on Monday at Centennial Hall.

The Rasmuson Foundation announced their list of Individual Artist awardees, and eight Juneau projects made the list. The 50 total awards go to artists across the state, who will receive $10,000 each toward a project they have planned. 

For Juneau-based artists like CJ Harrell, the grants support deeply personal projects. Harrell plans to make block print portraits depicting a dozen of the Southcentral Alaska homes they lived in growing up. 

First, they plan to travel to see the homes as they are now, and meet the current residents. The grant helps pay for that. Harrell said that gives them confidence to take on the project. 

“I realized, like, oh man, this would take me years to save up for otherwise and even that,” they said. “Like, I don’t know if I would be brave enough to do this if I didn’t have that funding and that support.”

The project will delve into themes of poverty and abundance in rural Alaska, including Harrell’s experience growing up with a parent struggling with substance abuse. 

“The experience of being both isolated, but also so surrounded by nature and other wonderful spaces and resources and beauties too,” Harrell said. “And how that can soften the blow when you’re dealing with other challenges.”

Harrell said the project reflects experiences many Alaskans have had, but it’s still uniquely theirs.

Awardee Flordelino Lagundino is also using his grant funding to tell a story he knows intimately. He’s putting on a play with Juneau nonprofit Theater Alaska that he first saw 20 years ago. The Romance of Magno Rubio is about a young Filipino farmworker finding his way in America. And he said the play is quite an undertaking.

“It’s a really, actually difficult script to produce. It’s mostly in poetry,” Lagundino said. “Lots of poetry in it, there’s singing, there’s lots of movement.”

He also received a grant from the Juneau Community Foundation. Lagundino is using some of the funding to fly in a young Filipino director he met when the man was only a high school student, and to hire more Filipino actors to fill out the roles.

Theater Alaska, which he founded with other Juneau thespians in 2020, puts on a lot of shows for free, or by donation. Lagundino said it would have taken years to fundraise to put on a dynamic play like this without grant funding.  

The story is set in California in the 1930s. Lagundino said the setting is familiar to Juneau’s own migrant worker history.

“The workers of this town, a lot of them have been Filipino and helped make this place,” he said.

The Romance of Magno Rubio will run this June and July. 

Rasmuson also awarded Ravenstail Weaver Neech Yanagut Yéil Laine Rinehart a grant for a project he’s been working toward for years: weaving a tunic completely out of jánwu, or mountain goat hair. It’s a traditional material for weaving in Southeast Alaska. Rinehart began collecting the fiber from weaving mentors and naturalists as he learned weaving. 

“The core reality of it is just the relationship that you have to have with other people to make something like this happen,” he said.

And he plans to document the process of using the fiber from its raw material into becoming the woven tunic. 

“It really allows you the ability to slow down and recognize, like, how much work has gone into this craft to get it from, say, the side of a mountain somewhere in Southeast Alaska,” he said. “And then just getting it to that point where you can even spin with it is just such a celebration.”

Rinehart said the grant helps him to financially support himself while devoting time and attention to the project. And he said it gives him the chance to reflect on why working with traditional materials is important to understanding weaving, and Lingít peoples’ long history working with the land and all of its inhabitants.

The Rasmuson Foundation also awarded grants to the following Juneau artists: musicians Annie Bartholomew and the Heists, Drag King Max Stout, Lingít scholar and writer X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, and the weaving and documentary team Gunaashaa Lisa Fisher and Gemini Waltz Media. The artists have a year to complete the project.

Editor’s note: Gunaashaa Lisa Fisher is a member of KTOO’s board.

Juneau’s Eaglecrest Ski Area is slated to open at a limited capacity on Saturday and Sunday after an influx of snow earlier this week. 

General Manager Craig Cimmons said the city-owned ski area will begin operating with only the Porcupine lift running from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. That lift services the mountain’s easiest trails. 

The ski area is calling the partial opening a “winter preview weekend” since it’s only running one lift. Cimmons says opening the other two lifts that service higher up the mountain is weather-dependent and he couldn’t give a specific date yet. 

This past weekend, Juneau received nearly 14 inches of snow, measured at the Juneau International Airport. The majority of it fell on Saturday and broke the record for that day in history, according to the National Weather Service. 

The National Weather Service forecasts sunshine and low temperatures taking hold through the weekend. More snow is forecasted Saturday evening and into early next week. 

This year marks Eaglecrest’s 50th season as a ski area. 

Many retirees tend to spend their leisure time volunteering, reading books, or playing pickleball. But, 69-year-old Jack “Jack Hammer” Duckworth spent his Saturday evening in a boxing ring at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, facing an opponent half his age. He was there for the AK Beatdown’s 40th fight night in Juneau.

Duckworth was the oldest of 22 male and female boxers and MMA fighters between ages 16 and 69 who participated in the fight night – like Meg “Thrilla from Manila” Miranda, William “The Wolf Man” Atlas and Jamie “The Flat Liner” LaChester. AK Beatdown is a Juneau-based fighting league that hosts family-friendly fight nights that feature local and Alaska fighters. 

Duckworth ultimately got knocked down in the second round, but he said he still had fun. 

“I love it,” he said. “I started doing Taekwondo at 25, so I’ve been teaching for all these years and doing the boxing, and I totally support it.”

And, he wasn’t the only Duckworth fighting. His son and grandson were also in the ring that night. The family traveled from Ketchikan to partake in the event. He said fighting is the Duckworth way. 

“That’s why I’m doing it, just so we could all be on the same card,” he said.  

Professional fight nights like these have taken place in Juneau since at least the late ‘90s under different organizers. Cyndi Isaak is the current owner of AK Beatdown. The show took a five-year hiatus but returned last year. Now, Isaak said it’s back and better than ever. 

“It’s definitely got a fan base. It’s had the same following that comes all the time,” she said. “It’s just all around a healthy sport. I think the community loves UFC, and so it’s just kind of carried through.”

Saturday night’s show was completely sold out of its more than 450 tickets. In just one day, Isaak’s crew transformed the empty ballroom into a fighting arena. Dozens of tables and hundreds of chairs surrounded a professional fighting ring in the center of the room. 

“We really try to be super professional,” she said. “We have medics here. We have trained corner coaches. Our judges have been the same judges from day one, so it’s very consistent. We have the referees.”

Spectator Brian McFadden sat at one of the tables. He’s fought in previous fight nights, but on Saturday, he was there to celebrate his 34th birthday, alongside his children and family. 

“This is so far my favorite beatdown, since I don’t have to fight in it, and I just get to enjoy the livelihood and the energy,” he said.

McFadden said the event offers something for fighters to work and train for in Juneau,  especially during cold winters. 

“I think it’s a great asset to the fighting community,” he said. “It gives people in the community the ability to meet up every few months and do this for real.”

Isaak, the event’s organizer, said more events are planned for next year, and she’s excited to see support expand in Juneau.