Southeast

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.

Winter has arrived in Southeast Alaska, bringing freezing temperatures and enough snow to break daily records for some communities.

Jeff Garmon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.

“I don’t think anybody escapes having to, you know, just make sure that we’re ready for arctic temperatures,” Garmon said. “Typically what’s over in British Columbia, we’re getting. It didn’t stop at the mountains. It decided to come for a visit in Alaska.”

Last weekend, Juneau broke its daily record for Dec. 6 with 9.6 inches of snow, the most snow recorded for that date, according to decades of data maintained by the National Weather Service.

Though there’s no consistent record of snowfall data for Wrangell, the community got over 18 inches of snow earlier this week.

And on Mitkof Island, over 15 inches of snow fell in Petersburg. The town got 7.8 inches on Monday alone, breaking the daily record for Dec. 8 by 3.8 inches. Another 7.5 inches of snow fell on Tuesday, which was a couple inches shy of that date’s daily record — a whopping 9.9 inches that fell during a historic storm in 1946.

Garmon said the average amount of snowfall for a single day is around half an inch.

“It was a significant snowfall,” said Garmon.

Looking ahead, he said freezing temperatures are forecasted throughout the region, and more snow could fall this weekend and early next week.

On a crisp day in mid-November, two wildlife biologists bushwhacked into the Takshanuk Mountains until they reached the edge of a canyon that offers close-up views of mountain goats.

Kevin White, a wildlife biologist and Haines local, checked the batteries and downloaded the photos from a camera strapped to a nearby tree.

“There’s a porcupine,” he said, scrolling through the images. “And a brown bear, it looks like.”

The camera is one of about 60 spread throughout the Chilkat Valley as part of a broader project focused on one carnivore in particular: lynx. Its aim is to gather more information about the wildcats’ presence and behavior in the region.

Leading the effort is longtime lynx researcher Liz Hofer, who splits her time between Haines and Haines Junction, in Canada. For decades, she has studied lynx and other wildcats in the neighboring Yukon, as well as in countries ranging from Switzerland and Norway to Mongolia and Yemen.

Now, with the help of a small army oflocal volunteers, she’s doing the same in the Chilkat Valley. The area is far from a hot spot for lynx, which are known for thriving in dry, boreal forests rather than coastal areas. But local trappers do harvest them in Haines, more in some years than others.

Particularly active trapping seasons in 2019 and 2020 piqued Hofer’s curiosity. She suggested launching a study that would examine the cats’ presence in the valley. She wanted to look at whether they could live here permanently – and whether some already do.

“It seems that the area could support a resident population. And so the question is, is that possible? Can they adapt?” Hofer said.

When hare populations crash, some lynx “just start walking”

When lynx do end up in Haines, it’s due to the population cycles of their favorite meal: the snowshoe hare. Hares are abundant in the Yukon’s Kluane area, just over the Canadian border from Haines. Their populations grow over the course of about a decade before crashing amid predation.

Lynx populations follow the same cycle, increasing in size alongside their prey. But when hare populations nosedive, lynx respond in one of three ways. They starve, they shift their hunting strategies, or “they just start walking,” Hofer said.

And some make it all the way to coastal areas, Haines among them.

That’s what happened in 2019 and 2020, when local trappers reported catching 25 and 26 lynx, respectively, according to state trapping records. Those were the highest numbers since 1992, when trappers harvested 27 lynx. Most other years, the number is closer to one or two.

The researchers haven’t detected a lynx on camera since 2022, after the last peak. As White sees it, that at least seems to suggest lynx have not set up here permanently.

“The jury’s still out a little bit, because we haven’t totally saturated all the places we could have cameras, and there’s still certainly little pockets where there could be lynx that are resident,” White said. “But it seems like the initial indications are, there probably isn’t.”

Ready for the next wave of lynx, whenever that comes

But there’s still plenty to learn – especially because hare populations in the Yukon are on the rise yet again. And Hofer expects the pattern will repeat, with lynx dispersing within the next two to three years.

“It may be very big because of the signs that say that the Kluane region, the Yukon region lynx, will be higher than usual,” she said.

This time, dozens of cameras will already be set up in key wildlife corridors to capture them in action. Photos could help the researchers get a better handle on how many are in the area.

“It will also be valuable to learn about, where are the hot spots? When they are in the area? And what are the habitat conditions like?” said White.

The project isn’t limited to cameras. The researchers have also asked the public to immediately alert them if they spot lynx – or lynx tracks. Between 2020 and 2025, the team received nearly 50 reports.

In one case, a Klukwan community member observed an adult female with one offspring in February 2023. The sighting indicates that successful lynx reproduction may be happening in the valley.

Hofer said she’s also in conversation with local trappers about either selling carcasses for research purposes or allowing the team to take tissue samples, which could provide insight into what exactly the lynx feed on while in the valley.

“So we have some more tricks up our sleeve,” Hofer said.

She is particularly curious about salmon and thinks the Chilkat River’s fall chum run could serve as an excellent food source.

Trappers have already provided the team with some hair samples to gauge lynx feeding behaviors. Those samples indicate that lynx were primarily eating “mammalian herbivores” and did not provide evidence of marine diets.

The area is also home to some snowshoe hairs, just not as many as in boreal forests further inland. Indeed, about halfway through the hike last month, a solid white hare darted across the mountainside. It was stark against the moss-covered forest floor.

“Good timing,” White said.

Hofer acknowledged that trapping data only provides so much information, and that they can only glean so much from photos. She said tagging and tracking lynx might be the best way to answer her most burning questions — but that’s beyond the scope of the scrappy local study.

Ideally, she said, the information they do collect might “maybe spur somebody else on who has more academic or agency-oriented research.”

Juneau saw a snowfall record during a winter storm over the weekend, and now, freezing temperatures and clear skies are expected to stretch through most of this week. 

Juneau received 13.6 inches of snow this past weekend, measured at the Juneau International Airport. The majority, 9.6 inches, fell on Saturday, Dec. 6, breaking the record for that day in history, according to the National Weather Service. The previous record for Dec. 6 was 7.2 inches, set in 1975. 

“It was a fairly common setup for a heavy snow pattern in Juneau,” said Nathan Compton, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau. 

He said the winter storm was caused by cold, dry air flowing south from interior Canada and moving under warmer, moist air traveling north, turning what would have been rain into snow. 

“That cold air came down from Lynn Canal and just undercut everything,” he said. “Right when that happens, that’s when we get the maximum lift. And so on Saturday, that’s why we got those very, very, very heavy snow rates, right at the beginning of the event.”

Elsewhere in the region, the heavy snow and wind caused the Klondike Highway to close over the weekend, and the Alaska Marine Highway System ferry M/V LeConte scheduled to leave Skagway Sunday was cancelled. That stranded the Juneau-Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé Nordic Ski Team in Whitehorse after a ski trip. 

Abby McAllister is the lead ski coach for the team, but wasn’t on the trip. She said 16 students and their coaches stayed an extra night in their AirBnB. 

They’re driving to Haines, where they’ll stay overnight at the local high school and then board the ferry M/V Columbia early Tuesday morning.

Instead of coming home Sunday night, the team is expected back Tuesday. McAllister said the kids know how to go with the flow. 

“You know, it’s Alaska, and these are Alaska kids, and they’ve just been all positive with the twists and turns,” she said. 

Now that the dry, cold air from the north has mostly wrung out the moist clouds hanging over Juneau, sunshine and low temperatures — ranging from the single digits to the teens — are expected to take hold through Friday. 

More than 200 years ago, Lingít and other Alaska Native people waged battles against invading and oppressive Russian colonists in Sitka. To this day, those battles are a symbol of Lingít resistance to colonialism. A Kiks.ádi warrior named Ḵ’alyáan led the attacks, and in 1804 he wore a carved Raven helmet during one of the battles.

In the early 1900s, the helmet was separated from the Kiks.ádi. It’s considered at.oow — a sacred, living clan item — but the Raven helmet has been behind glass at the Sheldon Jackson Museum since 1906.

Listen:

Aanyaanáxch Ray Wilson is the Kiks.ádi clan leader and lives in Juneau. He said that at.oow hold spirits and clan members treat them like relatives.

“So when we don’t have our items, we can’t use them,” he said. “And there it is sitting right in a museum in Sitka and we can’t use it, and it belongs to us. It’s really hard to accept.”

Wilson is 92, and said the colonial legacy of the last two centuries have left Lingít people with only pieces of their history and cultural practices. But when they bring at.oow back into ceremonies, those items help restore what has been lost. 

“The main thing is that it’s coming back to help our people. We all need help,” Wilson said. “These are really trying times, and they don’t seem to get any better. We need the culture to come back to make our people stronger again.”

According to recorded history, this is how the Raven helmet ended up in the Sheldon Jackson Museum: three Kiks.ádi men, including a descendant of Ḵ’alyáan, brought it to Alaska’s Territorial Governor John Brady. Brady co-founded the Presbyterian-run Sitka Industrial and Training School, which is now known as Sheldon Jackson College. 

The helmet has been in the campus museum since. The state bought the museum and its collection in the 1980s. 

But for years, Kiks.ádi leaders have said that isn’t how sacred clan items are given away. According to the Kiks.ádi’s recent petition for repatriation, at.oow are under cultural patrimony, which means all clan members own the item, and no individuals can give away sacred clan objects without the clan’s approval. 

So for decades, the Kiks.ádi have been trying to get the helmet back from the state, arguing that it was not ever the state’s property. And last month, the Alaska State Museums finally agreed to start the process of returning ownership to the Kiks.ádi. 

A spokesperson for the Alaska State Museums said in an email that the museums have been working with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska to “develop and nurture collaborative working relationships.” They said this repatriation is just one of several projects the two organizations are working on together.

Righting the wrongs of the past

Clan member Lduteen Jerrick Hope-Lang has been fighting to repatriate the helmet, just like his grandmother did two decades before. He said the process involved digging into the history of how the helmet changed hands. 

“If you’re asserting you have the right to anything, there must be proof,” Hope-Lang said. “I want to see it.”

The written records claiming ownership start with the Presbyterian church, which ran the Sitka Industrial and Training School. Then, the Alaska State Museums bought the school’s museum and its collection in the 1980s. 

Hope-Lang reached out to Jermaine Ross-Allam. He’s the director of the Presbyterian church’s Center for Repair of Historical Harms, and was instrumental in the fight to repatriate the helmet. Ross-Allam searched the church’s archives to find records of the helmet. He said he found records detailing how men brought the hat to the school. 

“But, of course, there were no appropriate ceremonial protocols,” he said. 

He said the act wasn’t authorized because it didn’t involve those protocols, so the church never had a right to the helmet in the first place. Therefore, the church didn’t have the right of possession when it sold the helmet as part of the museum’s collections to the state decades later.

Ross-Allam hopes righting the wrongs of the past inspires others to do the same, even if it feels like it’s too late. 

“That should give people confidence to continue to engage in more acts of repair and solidarity,” he said. “No matter how big the repair job seems to be.”

Changing the narrative

Hope-Lang said it’s still painful for him to read the way the state dismissed his grandmother in documents from previous requests. 

“When you look at the letters, when she’s asking for the piece, even just for cultural use at our bicentennial in 2004 and the way that she was spoken to,” he said. “The way that she was written about kind of as though she had no qualifications as a Kiks.ádi Lingít woman whose ancestors wore that piece, that’s still painful to read.”

Now, Hope-Lang looks forward to a future when the helmet will always be in Kiks.ádi hands. He said the knowledge of clan ownership makes a difference. 

“It changes the narrative,” he said. “When you go in and you look at this piece, you’re not saying it belongs to somebody else, it belongs to you.”

He said young clan members won’t know the pain of not being able to claim it, and to use it for ceremony. 

“The exciting thing is for the young people below us, who will become the caretakers, the future ancestors, that they won’t know this trauma,” Hope-Lang said. “This won’t be passed on to them.”

And Yeidikook’áa Brady-Howard, Sitka Tribe of Alaska chairwoman, said reclaiming this helmet is one story of many sacred items coming back to their people.

“And so those items that are scattered across the country are literally our ancestors living away from their homeland, in a sense,” she said.

Brady-Howard said the Raven helmet’s return comes at a time when the relationships between Indigenous people and organizations like churches and museums are changing for the better.

“I don’t feel that we can view the repatriation without also viewing it in the larger lens of colonialism and trauma,” she said. “But also truth, reconciliation and healing.”

The Alaska State Museums said there are still several steps before the repatriation process is complete. It must submit a notice to the Federal Registrar saying it intends to repatriate the item, and remove the helmet from its own collection. 

Most weeks between September and December, Stacie Evans drives up the Haines highway, counting bald eagles through a high-powered scope.

Her drives are part of a longstanding annual survey that aims to provide insight into the valley’s annual gathering of eagles, which is one of the world’s largest. Last week, she saw more than 1,400.

“It’s the highest count that’s been documented since the year 2000,” said Evans, who is the science director of the Takshanuk Watershed Council, a local conservation nonprofit.

The annual gathering in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve is central to the area’s identity – and it serves as an economic boost for the town of Haines at the start of the winter.

Evans emphasized that the road surveys do not amount to a comprehensive population count, so there’s no way to say for certain how many raptors are actually in the area each year.

But they do provide a snapshot of what’s happening, particularly within sight of the highway. The large number of eagles counted this year marks a departure from recent survey data, which has captured significantly fewer eagles compared to decades past.

“We can say that there has been a decline,” Evans said. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious from when the survey started in 1988.”

Between 1988 and 2000, for instance, surveyors counted well over 1,000 eagles every year but one. But in road surveys conducted since 2011, peak counts only surpassed 1,000 four times, including this year.

Some locals say they’ve seen a decline with their own eyes. Craig Loomis has lived in Haines since the 1960’s. He recalls driving up the highway and seeing far more eagles than he does today.

“I mean there were eagles all over the place,” Loomis said. “And that didn’t count the ones away from the river that we couldn’t see.”

A big year for salmon – and eagles

The road survey entails counting eagles at the same pullouts, and along the same sections of road, as many weeks as possible from mid-September through mid-December. That protocol has remained consistent over the years.

At each stop along the way along Evans’ drive last month, eagles were perched in the cottonwoods and scattered across the riverflats both alone and in larger groups.

The valley has a resident bald eagle population that sticks around all year. But each fall, more arrive from as far away as Washington state to take advantage of a unique hydrological feature – and fishing opportunity.

“A lot of the water that’s coming from the Tsirku into the Chilkat is subsurface, so it’s not exposed to air temperature,” Evans said. “Which means in the winter time, it is relatively warm, and so it keeps the Chilkat River from freezing.”

That facilitates prime access to a particularly late run of chum salmon heading into the coldest months of the year.

“It is a really unique thing. There’s not a lot of fish available at that time of year,” said Steve Lewis, a raptor biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It probably gets them through the winter.”

The high count in November likely correlates with an especially strong chum run. Alaska Fish and Game area management biologist Nicole Zeiser said this year’s peak chum count – recorded via aerial surveys – surpassed 20,000 fish.

In an email, she said that’s a “strong number given that surveys capture only a fraction of the total fish present in the drainage.”

In 2020, the run was incredibly weak – and the eagle count was, too. The peak count that year was under 300 birds. Zeiser did not respond to questions about the long-term stability of the Chilkat chum run.

Weather is the other factor that can impact the eagles and where they feed. Warmer falls can result in more open water. Lewis said that allows the eagles to feed in different areas of the valley that are farther from the road, making them harder to spot.

“If it’s really, really cold, and lots of places are frozen, then the eagles are really condensed. If it’s not that cold, and they can be spread out, then they’ll be spread out,” Lewis said.

That could happen more frequently with climate change. In Southeast Alaska, average temperatures between September and January are about four degrees higher today than they were in 1988, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Any anecdote that says it is warmer than it used to be is almost certainly correct,” NOAA Senior Scientist Brian Brettchneider said in an email.

The annual Bald Eagle Festival typically happens in mid-November. But Kathy Benner, of the Haines-based American Bald Eagle Foundation, said event organizers are considering delaying the event to increase the odds that it will overlap with cold temperatures – and lots of eagles feeding within eyeshot.

“I personally think it probably would be a great idea to try to move it a little bit closer to when the temperatures are colder,” she said.

‘No means for counting’

The Chilkat Valley gathering is often described as the world’s largest, but experts say the Harrison River in British Columbia — considered Canada’s only “salmon stronghold” river — likely deserves that title.

The area can draw as many as 15,000 eagles in November and December, said Myles Lamont, a wildlife biologist with TerraFauna, a Canadian wildlife consulting group.

The gathering in the Chilkat Valley, meanwhile, is often put at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 eagles.

Fish and Wildlife biologists used to fly over the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve to do a more comprehensive survey. But that hasn’t happened for at least 20 years, Lewis said, and it probably isn’t in the cards any time soon.

“We don’t have tons of funding no matter what,” he said. “And I don’t have a lot of funding to support that kind of specific area survey for this one population.”

Lewis said that’s unfortunate, given that he regularly hears from people in Haines who are interested in learning more about what is happening in the eagle preserve each year.

Evans, of Takshanuk, said the organization would be interested in aerial surveys, but they also lack the necessary funding. Benner, of the Bald Eagle Foundation, said the same.

“We have no means for counting at this time,” Benner said in a phone interview.

That leaves the road survey data. It’s not a perfect system; the surveys have been conducted by different people over the years, and there are a smattering of years with no data. Plus, there’s no way to see the entire valley from the road.

“It doesn’t necessarily always give you the most unbiased look at what the numbers are doing,” Lewis said. “But obviously, if there’s lots of eagles in the valley, you’re probably gonna have a higher count. If there’s not as many, you’ll probably have a lower count.”

Evans emphasized that bald eagle populations as a whole are doing quite well. So even if the Haines congregation is shifting in some way, over time, that doesn’t mean the raptors are in danger. It could just mean they’re elsewhere.

“This is not a population survey at all,” Evans said. “There’s no indication that eagle populations are diminishing.”

Lewis echoed that point. Ultimately, he said, “I’m not sure what the eagles are doing in the valley.”