Juneau

A Superior Court judge is allowing the City and Borough of Juneau to refile eviction cases against the tenants who are refusing to vacate the historic Telephone Hill neighborhood in downtown Juneau. 

The city wants to demolish the homes on the hill this winter to make way for denser housing, but some tenants are refusing to leave and filed a lawsuit to prevent demolition and preserve the homes. 

Last month, a District Court judge dismissed the city’s eviction cases a few days before the city planned to evict the tenants, pending the outcome of that lawsuit. 

Then last week, before Thanksgiving, a Superior Court judge ruled that the evictions and demolition were two separate issues and should be handled as such. That ruling opened the door for the city to refile eviction cases against the tenants who remain on the hill. 

The lawsuit is scheduled for a pre-trial conference on Dec. 12. 

Fred Triem, the attorney representing the tenants, said the latest ruling doesn’t say anything about where the case might be heading. 

“It’s not an indication of what the final ruling will be. So I’m not either encouraged or discouraged by what took place the other day,” he said. “It’s just kind of a neutral scheduling event.”

Juneau’s City Attorney Emily Wright said she agrees with the judge — the demolition and evictions should be handled separately. 

“These last tenants need to move out, and we’re taking possession of the houses that we own as a city — we’re the landlords,” she said. 

The city refiled the three eviction cases last Wednesday and requested that they be heard within 15 days of filing. But the tenants’ lawsuit could take much longer to resolve. Wright previously said the city plans to take swift action if the evictions are approved, like changing the locks and removing remaining belongings from the homes as soon as possible.

Wright said the city plans to file new cases against two other residents who were given an extension to move out but haven’t done so. 

Juneau’s Parks and Recreation department began hosting pick-up pickleball three days a week at the Floyd Dryden gymnasium this fall. In the last decade, new players across the country — especially seniors — have been picking up the sport. 

And as Juneau’s population continues to grow older, the city says interest in pickleball is growing with them. 

The patter of pickleballs and squeak of sneakers filled the Floyd Dryden campus gymnasium in the Mendenhall Valley last Wednesday afternoon. The game looks sort of like tennis, but with a lower net and a plastic ball that sails through the wind.

Fred Hiltner waited for his turn to hop into a game. The City and Borough of Juneau’s Parks and Recreation department began hosting $5 pickup pickleball games this fall. Residents can drop in to play, to have fun, make new friends and stay active. 

Hiltner said he has been playing pickleball outdoors for a year and a half in Juneau and was excited when the city began offering it indoors and out of the elements.

“At first I thought it seemed like kind of a silly game, and a friend tried to get me to play, and I thought, ‘I don’t think so,’” he said. “Then I gave it a try, and I just love it. It’s really a fun game that anybody can play, and great exercise.”

Hiltner is retired. He said he was drawn to the social aspect of the sport and how easy it is to learn at any age. 

“A lot of people who might not be getting out — old people like me — have a great opportunity to get out and play together,” he said. 

Pickleball has become one of the fastest-growing sports in the country. It’s particularly popular with people over age 65, who make up a large part of Juneau’s population.

“Juneau is an aging community, and pickleball has been growing,” said Lauren Verrelli, the deputy director of the Parks and Rec department. “I’ve been with Parks and Rec for almost 10 years now, and it has just been exploding over the past 10 years.”

She says the city began hosting the sport after people asked for pickup games. About 15 to 20 people attend each session. 

A 2023 report by the Juneau Economic Development Council found that for the first time, the over-60 population in Juneau outnumbers the under-20 population. And Juneau’s older population is only expected to grow in the coming decades, according to population estimates released by the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development earlier this year.

Verrelli said the goal is to create more chances for people of all ages to stay active throughout the winter. 

“I think that’s what we’re here for, like all of our parks and recreation facilities, for people to get in and have a place to recreate in the winter – in the dark, cold months,” she said. 

Dan Kromarek is 88 years old and he’s taking advantage of the opportunity. On Wednesday, he teamed up with Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior Elliot Welch, who won the boys singles state tennis title this year. 

Back in the day, Kromarek used to do judo and martial arts, but started playing pickleball during the pandemic to keep himself active after a surgery. He’s been hooked since. 

“It’s just an easy exercise that keeps you interested,” he said. “You got to have something to keep you interested, rather than do a solo thing where it’s pretty hard to get out and do stuff on your own.”

Welch runs the pickleball program for Parks and Rec. 

“To get paid and to play — that’s fun,” he said. 

Verrelli said the department planned to expand the program to evenings, too, but now that’s on hold as the city faces potential budget cuts following this year’s local election.

She said the city still plans to renovate the outdoor tennis courts at Floyd Dryden next summer to include two dedicated pickleball courts. A long-term goal is to create even more pickleball courts at Jackie Renninger Park in the Valley in the coming years.

Some Southeast residents put up Christmas decorations over Thanksgiving weekend. The centerpiece, of course, is the tree.

The U.S. Forest Service allows each household to cut down one Christmas tree from the Tongass National Forest per year. Julia Spofford is the assistant director at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. No permit is required, but she said residents should follow a few key guidelines to protect ecosystems.

“We don’t want to do any trees within, you know, 330 feet of bald eagle nests, or 100 feet of salmon streams or 100 feet of roads or trails,” she said.

She said to only take a tree that’s seven inches in diameter or smaller, and to cut as low to the ground as possible.

“We ask that you avoid muskeg as well, just because the regeneration in those areas is difficult for trees to establish,” Spofford said.

Some helpful things to bring are a hand saw, sled, cord to wrap the tree and a tape measure.

Tree harvesters will see a lot of western hemlock and Sitka spruce. Spofford explains the difference in terms of Christmas-tree quality.

“Hemlocks are really soft, but they also have kind of very flexible branches,” she said. “So if you’ve got a lot of heavy ornaments — might not be a good choice — but if you’re likely to brush into your tree a lot or have small kids, it might be a nicer option, since it’s softer versus the Sitka spruce. Spruce has those spikier needles, but often have a little more conical of (a) shape.”

Spofford said it’s important to check Forest Service maps.

People can find Christmas trees by hiking out on the trails, but there are also a couple of accessible spots just off of Juneau’s road system. The first is along Glacier Highway between mile post 29 and 33. The second is up Fish Creek Road toward Eaglecrest Ski Area.

The Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area, Auke Recreation Area and Lena Beach are off-limits.

The City and Borough of Juneau also allows Christmas tree harvest on designated areas of city-owned land, including off of North Douglas Highway near Fritz Cove and False Outer Point, and off of Glacier Highway near Bridget Cove.

The city’s regulations differ slightly from the Forest Service policy. Harvesters must still avoid muskeg and cut the tree at its base. But discarded branches must be scattered and trees must be cut more than 50 feet from a hiking trail and more than 25 feet from any body of water.

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Lingít and Dena’ina writer and playwright Vera Starbard recently clinched her fourth Emmy nomination for the PBS Kids show, “Molly of Denali.” She was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series for an episode called “Thanks-for-giving.”

The episode aired last November and follows Molly and her friends as they learn why some Alaska Native people don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. 

Starbard, who is currently Alaska’s State Writer Laureate, said she’d been pitching the episode since early in the show’s creation.

“It was sort of a, ‘let me at it,’” she said. “You know, I want to tell a Thanksgiving episode from a Native perspective. I don’t personally celebrate Thanksgiving.”

In the episode, Grandpa Nat, Molly’s grandfather, talks about why he doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving and calls it a time of mourning. He talks about “new people” who outlawed many Indigenous traditions and destroyed different cultural pieces.

“Ah, sometimes people do awful things when they don’t understand other people’s way of life,” he says in the episode. “Remembering it makes my heart feel heavy.”

Starbard said the scene explaining that traditions were outlawed was the core of what she wanted to convey with the story.

“It wasn’t something lost, like I think when we hear about it, it’s as if we forgot it, that Native people just sort of blacked it out for some reason. It was taken from us,” she said. “It was very forcefully and violently taken from us. And that is difficult to do in a show like ‘Molly’ when you’re trying to, you know, talk to four year olds and eight year olds. You don’t want to re-traumatize people with it, but you do want to tell the truth, and you want to tell the full truth that really hasn’t been told to us in our history books.“

In the rest of the episode, Molly and her friends host a community-wide celebration highlighting Alaska Native traditions. That includes time to mourn. In the episode, Molly asks her aunt about it. 

“How can you be sad and celebrate?” Molly asks. 

“When we remember our ancestors together and talk about what was lost, we know we’re not alone,” Auntie Merna replies. “Then we can all heal together and celebrate what we have.”

Communal grieving through ceremonies like a Lingít ku.éex’ — also known as a potlatch — was also outlawed. Starbard said she wanted to bring that into the show.

“I don’t see many people talking about communal grief outside of Native communities,” Starbard said. “I think Native communities, we talk about it a lot, and I don’t see that many other places. This, to me, was a gift the Native people could give the rest of the world. This is how you grieve together, and it’s a good thing to grieve together.”

Starbard said this fourth nomination means a lot to her. But it’s a bittersweet moment. She thought about her dad when she learned she was nominated again. She brought her mom and sister to the Emmy ceremony for her previous nomination and wished she could have brought her dad as well.

“He had said, ‘Oh, but next time you’re nominated, I’ll go to that one.’ And he passed away a couple months ago, and that was definitely on my mind, just that he was so confident that I would be nominated again for my work, but also sad that he can’t be there,” she said. 

The winner of Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series will be announced at the Children’s & Family Emmy Award ceremony March 2.

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For the first time, Juneau’s famous Mendenhall Glacier is not touching Mendenhall Lake, which was hidden beneath a thick sheet of glacial ice only a couple of hundred years ago. Scientists say this means the glacier has entered a new phase of its retreat.

Jason Amundson, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Southeast who’s been studying the Mendenhall Glacier for years, said the glacier is the symbol of Juneau. 

“There’s several glaciers around, but when someone says ‘the glacier,’ they’re definitely talking about Mendenhall,” Amundson said. 

The inside of Juneau’s City Hall features a panoramic image of the glacier. It’s the most striking part of the landscape that travelers see when they fly into Juneau International Airport. It’s the capital city’s top tourist attraction, with more than 700,000 visitors each year. 

For generations, the glacier fanned out across the lake that it carved out. But it’s been rapidly retreating out of the lake over the past two decades. Now, scientists say it’s separated from the water completely. 

Amundson flew over the scene in a helicopter about two weeks ago. 

“That was the first time I had really thought, ‘Oh, it doesn’t look like it’s touching the lake anymore,’” he said, adding that photos posted on Facebook by local photographers confirmed it.  

But he said glacial ice and water will probably touch again for brief periods over the coming seasons. Rainfall and snowmelt could cause the lake level to rise enough to meet the ice. Also, the glacier still pushes toward the lake a fraction in the winter, when gravity pulls on the added mass of the snowpack. 

Eran Hood, an environmental scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast, said that despite these expected seasonal meet-ups, the Mendenhall is “functionally” no longer a lake-terminating glacier.

“It’s clear there’s a lot of shallow sediments through there that it’s kind of sitting on, or even perched up above,” Hood said. “There’s just not much chance at this point that it would really have meaningful interactions with the lake anymore.”

Climate change has accelerated the glacier’s retreat. Between 1941 and 2020, the local mean temperature rose by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit. 

In recent years, Amundson said that glacial ice on the lake has quickly disappeared. 

“There was pretty rapid retreat that occurred because there was this shallow, pretty thin area of the glacier that was in the lake and that broke apart— like where the ice caves used to be,” he said. 

According to a previously unpublished report shared with KTOO and written by Hood, Amundson and their colleagues, the Mendenhall Glacier retreated fastest between 2007 and 2011 — losing roughly a football field per year — because icebergs were calving off at a high rate as the glacier’s terminus moved through the deepest part of Mendenhall Lake. 

Amundson said that’s because of the way that ice interacts with water. 

“When you have a glacier that’s in deep water, there’s a lot of pressure at the bottom, so the glacier tends to flow faster,” he said. “Then, if it’s flowing faster, it can break apart.”

Now that the ice isn’t touching the water, Amundson said the Mendenhall’s retreat could slow down. In the report, the researchers found parts of the glacier that terminated on rock retreated substantially slower than parts that terminated on the lake. Between 1998 and 2020, the ice attached to bedrock receded about 56 feet per year, while ice on the lake vanished at more than two-and-a-half times that speed, at roughly 148 feet per year.

“So once you get out of the lake, it’s harder for the glacier to retreat as quickly as it has over the last 5, 10, 15 years,” Amundson said.

But the glacier is still receding. Using ice-penetrating radar, the research team is currently trying to predict when it will pull into another lake of unknown size, shape and location that’s currently hidden beneath the ice. That could speed up the glacier’s retreat again.

Losing a scenic view

One day in the not-so-distant future, scientists say Juneau’s symbol will disappear from the vantage point of the U.S Forest Service visitor center that was built to feature its scenic vista.

Hood said he thinks that will happen sometime around 2050. 

Alix Pierce, the visitor industry director for the City and Borough of Juneau, said that losing sight of Juneau’s most accessible glacier could change how the city markets itself as a tourist destination. Although, she suspects many cruise ship passengers will probably still come to see the Mendenhall. 

“But we’re going to need to be creative about how it changes, what it looks like, how we adapt,” Pierce said. 

A few years ago, the Forest Service looked at several different options for how to address that foreseeable future. 

“Some of those options were things like boating people across the lake to a satellite visitor center where they’d be able to see the glacier for longer,” Pierce said. “Those things weren’t ultimately selected in their final plan.”

Hood said the visitor center at Portage Glacier in Chugach National Forest could be a cautionary tale. In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people traveled there. But since that glacier pulled out of view, visitation has plummeted.

Paul Robbins, a spokesperson for Tongass National Forest, did not comment on how the agency might try to maintain scenic access once the current view of the glacier is lost. 

“Our current plans are focused on improving access and increasing visitor capacity, safety and enjoyment through the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Facilities Improvement project,” Robbins wrote in an email to KTOO. “The project adds a Welcome Center, an outdoor plaza, enlargement of parking areas, additional restroom facilities, three new trailhead parking lots, and improvements to the existing facility.”

But Pierce said those improvements don’t address the decline of the glacier.

“Things like that, that are vital and necessary for managing the traffic flow that we have out there today, but aren’t necessarily looking into the future for how we adapt to climate-related changes to how people use the area,” she said.

UPDATE, Dec. 1:

The comment period has been extended to Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. 

Original story:

The comment period for the first phase of construction of a new ferry terminal north of Juneau ends this Friday. 

The state’s proposed Cascade Point Ferry Terminal is slated to be located just beyond where the road ends in Juneau on land owned by Goldbelt Incorporated, a local Alaska Native corporation.

The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities began soliciting public comment for the first phase of construction in late October. 

Shannon McCarthy, DOT’s communications director, said the current public comment period is only for the first stage of the project and is not the end of public input for the overall project. She said a no-build option is still on the table, even though DOT has already signed a $28 million contract for the first phase of construction.

“We have been talking about this project for a long time, and it really does fit in with kind of the philosophy of shorter ferry trips, longer roads, so that we can really have that operational efficiency,” McCarthy said. 

The first stage would develop the access road to the site and a staging area for future construction. According to DOT, construction could begin as soon as next summer.

The Cascade Point terminal would be Juneau’s second ferry terminal, located about 30 miles north of Juneau’s already existing terminal in Auke Bay. 

Under the Dunleavy Administration, the state has been pushing for the project for several years, saying it would benefit travelers by reducing operating costs and travel time between Juneau, Haines and Skagway. A Canadian mining company also wants to develop an off-site ore terminal at the site in partnership with Goldbelt. 

DOT recently released an economic analysis of the terminal that portrayed it as having more pros than cons, despite criticism from regional officials, conservation groups and members of the Alaska Marine Highway Oversight Board. City officials in Haines and Skagway have also openly opposed the project. The Juneau Assembly hasn’t taken a stance on the project. 

“This is really a part of a larger strategy to really reinvest in the marine highway infrastructure,” McCarthy said. 

Written and emailed comments must be submitted by this Friday. McCarthy said the public comment period for the second stage of the project is slated to open in the coming months.