Northwest

Locals in Kotzebue showed a healthy mix of excitement and concern over the weekend in response to reports that a rare polar bear was spotted in the area.

Polar bear sightings in Kotzebue aren’t without precedent. In fact, the world’s largest documented polar bear was found in Kotzebue in the 60s, weighing more than 2,200 pounds and standing more than 11 feet high.

However, polar bears tend to gather on sea ice. Catching a glimpse of one on land, in August, is pretty rare.

Lindsey Mangipane is a polar bear biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage.

“It has happened before but it’s not very typical,” Mangipane said. “It’s kind of speculation as to why the bear is there now, but in most situations when this happens it’s due to sea ice retreating and the bear essentially gets stuck there.”

News of the bear sighting spread throughout town, with many curious about where exactly it was, and others hoping to get a look themselves. Lt. Scott Kellerman, a Coast Guard pilot stationed in Kotzebue, snapped some photos of the bear on Saturday evening.

“It was down by the fish camp just south of the airport, along the beach line. The bear was out in the area, just kind of sitting there.”

Kellerman says by the time the Coast Guard was made aware of the bear, local state troopers were on the scene, patrolling around the bear and advising people to stay indoors. Kellerman says he kept a healthy distance between himself and the bear as he took pictures.

“People had commented on my photo, ‘It looks like everything is kinda blurry in the background,’” Kellerman said. “And that’s because I was shooting with a super telephoto, like a 400mm lens. It allows me to stay about 200 meters back, which is pretty far. For anybody with an iPhone camera, it would look like a little blur.”

Kellerman says common bear safety includes not making any sudden movements if you’re near a bear and to stay in your vehicle. He says polar bears can be more social than other types of Alaska bears.

“They don’t have the same sort of behavior like normal bears,” Kellerman said. “They’re very interested in you, so safety is number one, especially in a town setting like this.”

Kellerman says the polar bear hung around the area south of the airport for around 15 minutes before hopping in the Kotzebue Sound and swimming north. He says he hasn’t heard of it being in the city limits since Saturday night.

Mangipane, with Fish and Wildlife, says even though it’s out of the city limits, locals should still be cautious near Kotzebue’s coastline or the surrounding outskirts.

“Carry a deterrent with you. Bear spray has been shown to be incredibly effective on polar bears, up to 95% effectiveness even in high wind scenarios,” Mangipane said. “So carrying bear spray or a firearm or some other non-lethal deterrent could be a good idea right now. Also we recommend traveling in groups. Most attacks of polar bears on people have happened with groups of two or less people, so if you are traveling, groups are a good idea.”

As the alabaster-furred visitor ventures out of town, Lt. Kellerman described the opportunity to photograph the bear as a bucket list moment for sure.

Last month, Kotzebue had its wettest month on record, with more than 5 inches of total precipitation. As rain drenched Northwest Alaska, a small group from Minnesota floated the Noatak River in a canoe, with a toddler in tow.

The Noatak River runs for about 425 miles, winding from Gates of the Arctic National Park through the Noatak National Preserve before flowing into Kotzebue Sound.

Bear Paulsen of Minnesota heard from friends it’d be a beautiful canoe trip, filled with gorgeous scenery and some nice hiking.

“There’s a lot of canoeists in Minnesota because of the Boundary Waters and what have you,” Paulsen said. “And really, what we’ve got is a network of people that’ve paddled various rivers all throughout Canada and Alaska. And so we talked to friends of ours, and they said the Noatak’s a great river. We have other friends that actually took a two-year-old down it.”

With no portages and some nice whitewater, Paulsen felt comfortable bringing along his son Dashwa, who’s just under three. Dashwa’s mother Claire Porter and friend Dan Cooke rounded out the group, who arrived in Kotzebue on July 11.

“We had 12 days of sun — felt like the desert, absolutely gorgeous,” Paulsen said. “We put in up as high as we could; Lucky Six is the name of the area.”

Lucky Six Creek is near the mouth of the Noatak, up by Ambler and Kobuk. Paulsen and company spent most of the time taking in hikes as they slowly moved along the river.

As they decided to pick up their pace along the Noatak, rain clouds above started to have the same idea.

“A few days after we started to move along was when the rain started. We heard 250 percent of average of rainfall, somewhere in that neighborhood,” Paulsen said. “We were deluged.”

Paulsen said adjusting to the rainfall meant monitoring to make sure the water level didn’t reach the group or their gear as they camped.

“We were putting marks and cairns, sticks in the shore, cairns on the shore to measure how far up the river was coming each night,” Paulsen said. “Making sure we didn’t get sunk. And we were continuously wet.”

Paulsen said while he didn’t expect the level of rainfall his group encountered, they had prepared for less than dry conditions.

“It’s something that you always are aware of that might happen,” Paulsen said. “We didn’t expect … it was pretty surprising to get ten straight days of rain. But we have nice tents, we have a nice bug shelter that keeps us out of the rain when we need to.”

Paulsen said they adjusted their approach slightly, considering they had Dashwa with them. Paulsen said he felt the Noatak was a mellow, more predictable river than others he’d paddled.

“Beyond that, we don’t paddle long days, because otherwise he goes nuts,” Paulsen said. “He starts hitting his mother because he shares the bow with her. He lasts about three hours at a stretch.”

The rainfall made one last strong push at the end of July, before the skies started to part and sunshine fell on the Northwest Arctic. For Paulsen, it was the optimal time to power back to town.

“We were about 20 miles up the Noatak and saying, ‘OK. Do we think we can cross today or  tomorrow morning?’ We kept looking at the forecast saying, ‘I’m pretty sure we can do it,’” Paulsen said. “So, total reprieve, I mean, to be able to paddle up to the hotel.”

The expedition concluded last Thursday as Paulsen and company pulled up to shore from the Kotzebue Sound, right in front of the Nullaġvik Hotel. Looking back, Paulsen said his trip up the Noatak — his first in Alaska — was a little too wet, but the bugs weren’t that bad and he loved it.

Kotzebue’s July was one for the record books, with the highest monthly precipitation on record. The previous rainfall record for the midsummer month was set more than two decades ago.

To understand what led to Kotzebue’s heavy rainfall in July, it helps to look at weather systems in the Northern hemisphere.

This summer saw two instances of high pressure systems near Alaska. One was in eastern Siberia and the other was in Western Canada and Eastern Alaska. Both led to dry weather and numerous wildfires in the area.

“Western Alaska has just been stuck between those two high pressure systems,” said Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. “In the atmosphere between two high pressure systems, you have low pressure. That’s how the atmosphere works. And so we’ve had multiple storms moving through the area, bringing not just one round of rain, but repeated rounds of rain.”

In total, Kotzebue saw 5.31 inches of total precipitation in July. That beat out the previous record of 5.26 inches set in August 1998. And when meteorologists measure precipitation, that includes snowfall in the winter months.

“You take the snow, and melt that down to get how much water’s in it,” Thoman explained. “So when we talk about precipitation, it is a fair comparison between what falls in January and what falls in July.”

Looking at the rainfall trend in Kotzebue, July was bookended with two heavy rain events. The first came on July 6 and 7, when Kotzebue saw the highest single-day rainfall amount on record.

“(We) had the all-time 24-hour record and then the repeated rain the last week of the month,” Thoman said. “Yet in between, from the 11th until the 23rd, there was some rain but not a lot of rain.”

Thoman says it’s not unusual for Kotzebue to see a lot of rain in the summer, but it normally comes towards the end of the season.

“Lots of folks have been remarking how July seemed like a fall month with all the rain,” Thoman said. “And certainly when we get these heavy type rain events like this, they are much more likely to occur in August than in July.”

Kotzebue wasn’t the only community in Western Alaska that saw heavy rainfall in July. Red Dog Mine saw over 7 inches of rain. Nome saw its second wettest July on record and Bethel saw the wettest July in more than 90 years.

Thoman said as the Arctic gets warmer, more extreme weather patterns will become more likely.

“With earlier ice loss, with warmer ocean temperatures, we can anticipate that when Northwest Alaska gets in between these high pressure systems at the hemispheric level — so we’re in the low pressure point — the threat of heavy rain will be higher than it was in decades past,” Thoman said.

Thoman said these days in the Arctic, weather is always extreme somewhere. It’s just a matter of where.

A Kotzebue couple has been arrested and charged with two dozen felonies for assaulting children in their care, according to court documents.

Last Thursday, a grand jury indicted 44-year-old Mandy Lee Hill and 35-year-old Abraham Lambert on 24 counts of assault and one count of endangering a child.

Lambert and Hill had a history working with children. Lambert coached the Kotzebue High School boys basketball team and was an employee of the Northwest Arctic Borough School District. Hill had worked for the school district in the past and recently worked for the City of Kotzebue, though she is no longer employed there.

School officials did not respond to phone calls about whether Lambert was still an employee of the district.

Alaska State Troopers say they received a report of child abuse in 2019, and the Alaska Bureau of Investigation’s Technical Crimes Unit and Major Crimes Unit began a two-year investigation. Court documents detail the physical assault of four different children occurring between 2015 and 2019. Investigators say Lambert was the father of the four children, who were all under the age of 12.

Among the charges, Hill and Lambert are accused of stabbing a child in the knees and abdomen with scissors, stomping on a child’s feet and violently putting their hands on three children’s necks. They’re also accused of binding a child’s hands with a scarf, harming their blood circulation, and withholding food from a child who was legally in their care.

Troopers say they conducted the investigation with help from the Office of Children’s Services, Alaska CARES, Southcentral Foundation and the Kotzebue Police Department.

Both Hill and Lambert are currently in custody at Anvil Mountain Correctional Center in Nome. Their next court appearance is scheduled for September 8. Attorneys for Hill and Lambert did not respond to requests for comment.

A Coast Guard aircrew rescued a man Friday near Nome who said he was attacked by a bear.

Officials say the Kodiak-based helicopter crew was flying from Kotzebue to Nome when they saw an SOS sign on top of a shack near a remote mining camp. The crew circled back and spotted a man in front of the shack waving down the helicopter with both hands.

The man told the crew that a bear had harassed him for a week straight and attacked him a few days earlier. The crew noted the man had bruising on his chest and a leg injury. Officials say friends of the man reported him overdue when he hadn’t returned to Nome.

The man was transported to Nome, where he received medical attention.

Cloudy skies and a light drizzle didn’t dampen the spirits of residents of Kotzebue on the Fourth of July as hundreds gathered across town to celebrate. This year’s celebration brought back some of the exciting in-person events that had been canceled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On July 4, 2020, about three months after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the world, the only major event in Kotzebue commemorating the holiday was a parade.

“Last year it was pretty close to shut down,” said Chad Nordlum, the head of the City of Kotzebue’s Parks and Recreation department.

Nordlum says this year’s celebration didn’t have the same events as in pre-pandemic years, like the maktak eating contest, tug-of-war or blanket toss, but it was more open than last year.

“The way we approached it was to try to avoid the really big gatherings and spread people out throughout town and have smaller gatherings and events,” Nordlum said. “We want people to get together and see their friends and have good food, but we want to avoid huge gatherings, so the fairgrounds is closed.”

Residents were able to apply with the city to set up vendor stands along the route of the parade of vehicles.

After the parade, local organizers began to gather near Kotzebue Sound for the Lovie Harris Baby Beauty Contest. The annual event allows families to show off the traditional regalia of their families. It was held virtually last year.

Ashley Stickman organized the event. She says the gathering was smaller due to crowd restrictions and the short notice of the event.

“I wasn’t even sure until about two weeks before Fourth of July that we were going to have it,” Stickman said. “The numbers are typically doubled. We normally have anywhere from 20 to 25 babies in the 0-11 month category and easily close to 30 in the older category.”

Despite the smaller pool of baby talent this time around, the contestants dazzled the crowd. While some were decked out in colorful atikluks, parkas and maklak boots, others got more creative, with one wearing a tanned sheefish outfit and another wearing clothes sewn from their father’s military uniform. But there could be only one grand prize.

“For our overall, grand champion of the 2021 Lovie Harris Baby Beauty contest goes to Jennifer Clare Gupaaq Nanouk,” Stickman announced to an ecstatic crowd.

As Gupaaq Nanouk squirmed around, her mother Kristen Sheldon described her regalia.

“Her atikluk was made by Cindy Lincoln,” Sheldon said. “And the parkie was made by my grandma May Douglas with calfskin in the back.”

Babies also won for most patriotic, most creative and most traditional. Stickman says all of the babies went home with an award.

“I honestly, you know how crazy and hectic it can be at some point, this is what makes it worth it,” Stickman said. “Doing the participation awards, getting to recognize the babies for their personalities. Getting to see them in their regalia.”