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Juneau is getting a new public-use cabin, this time built by a local trail maintenance nonprofit. The cabin will be owned and maintained by the city but constructed by Trail Mix Inc., which builds and maintains trails around Juneau.

Meghan Tabacek, who leads Trial Mix, said this will be the organization’s first time building a cabin. 

“Not only are we going to build a beautiful cabin that generations of Juneau people can use for years and years to come,” she said. “But we’re also setting up trail workers who hopefully can keep those skills in the Juneau community, or wherever they take off to afterwards.”

The Juneau Assembly approved a grant to the nonprofit last month to take on the project. The money was approved by voters in 2022 in a bond package. 

The cabin will be at Amalga Meadows Park, about a mile out the road from the Shrine of St. Therese. The new cabin will be a short hike beyond the existing Amalga cabin. 

Tabacek said Trail Mix staff will build the trail to the new cabin this summer. Next summer, they’ll build the cabin itself, under the guidance of an experienced foreman who has built public-use cabins before. 

Tabacek said the new cabin will look similar to the first one, with a few improvements.

“We’re getting a longer roof over the deck — which, you know, necessary for Juneau,” she said. “Now you can actually hang out on the deck, even if it’s rainy.”

This will be the second city-owned cabin in the Juneau area. There are about a dozen Forest Service and state-owned cabins.  

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

The Alaska State Museum in Juneau houses a collection of tens of thousands of objects, from canoes and plants to the state’s last publicly accessible theater organ. But how do you maintain all of those items? That’s conservator Ellen Carrlee’s job.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ellen Carrlee: I could actually talk about what’s in this lab for hours on end. As we go past here, I’ve got these pH strips. They measure the alkalinity or acidity of surfaces. You just get these damp and you press it gently to the surface, and in that way, we’re able to understand if we’ve got crizzling on the beads, which is a deterioration phenomenon. So we’ve been sharing and teaching that technique to our study group.

I’m Ellen Carrlee. I’m the conservator here at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, and my job at the museum is to know what everything is made out of, and how it deteriorates over time, and how to make it last for as many generations as I can.

Conservator, like a museum conservator, is a strange profession that people don’t find themselves familiar with. I think there might be a grand total of five people in all of Alaska who have that job, and it’s really a combination of art and science.

So my training background is in chemistry, art history, studio art, anthropology. Our culture, my culture, my Euro-American culture, does not typically mix art and science, but it is really, for some of us that are built that way, it is a really rewarding career.

Here we are in the Alaska State Museum objects conservation lab. There’s a window into the lab right off the atrium that the eagle tree is in, so you can peek into the lab. And I usually keep a table in front of this window that has, kind of, our latest greatest projects and collaboration.

Right now, the window into the lab has some of our bead study group collaboration. We’re doing a survey of the glass beadwork in the collection, and monthly study groups with beaders and culture bearers about what the beaded items are and how to preserve them. And probably in the coming years, we’ll have a bead exhibit that might hopefully be co-curated by some of those participants.

So if we’re going to make things last for future generations, we have to know how they’re deteriorating and what our role in having them deteriorate is.

For example, up until very recently, until I had a bead worker as an intern a couple years ago, I didn’t realize that glass beads could fade, and particularly pinks and purples fade. So our previous advice had been that glass colorants are very stable, and if you put them on exhibit, you don’t have to worry too much about the light levels.

But now we know if you put glass beads on exhibit, particularly if they have pinks and purples from a certain historical period, you better be careful about the light levels, because you could fade those pinks and purples, and then what the artist had intended things to look like won’t be as obvious.

Museums know about certain kinds of deterioration mechanisms with glass, but bead artists know things that museums don’t about what’s going wrong with beads, and contemporary beads, like certain beads, have coatings and dyes and they could fade.

That’s what we have up in the window there. We have some beads hanging in the window for trying to make them fade on purpose, and we have little vials of solvents to kind of show how some of the beads are not as stable as we might think glass might be. So we’re learning that from the beaders and the bead workers.

On this table, we’ve got a couple different kinds of microscopes. We’ve got another kind of binocular microscope to look at the beadwork up close. For example, on those moccasins there, you’ll see that there’s flowers on the vamps, the kind of the toe part of the moccasin, and on the petals, there’s a certain element that’s kind of a grayish bead.

That grayish bead should be super sparkly and bright. So having it look grayish is really changing the artist’s intent of what that flower should be like. If you look at it under the microscope, you’ll see the hole in that glass bead is actually a square where the thread passes through, and it should be mirrored on the inside.

If you look at contemporary glass beads that have that square hole, they’re really sparkly. And so something has happened to those beads to make them not be sparkly. And you can really see that by looking through the microscope.

So it used to be in museums that the museum staff was the authority. You know, we went to school, we had these elaborate degrees, and we would be the deciders and the authority.

And nowadays that’s changing, and it’s changing fast, and I think the Alaska State Museum is doing a good job at realizing that all of us are smarter than any of us, and these collections belong to Alaskans, and there are experts in the Alaskan community who know a lot more than we do about these materials.

So bringing in the culture bearers, the materials experts, the artists, the folks to whom these collections matter the most, and collaboratively, together, looking at museum collections and deciding how best to care for them for the future is kind of the wave of the future.

 

Correction: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Carrlee’s name. 

June is Pride month and Juneau’s LGBTQ+ Pride month calendar is packed this year — more so than in recent memory. One organizer says she wants to create chances for people to connect with their community amid attacks by the Trump administration.

Summer Christiansen leads SEAGLA, Juneau’s LGBTQ+ nonprofit. She says, unless otherwise noted, all events are open to LGBTQ+ identifying people and allies. 

“My hope is that if we can have events like these, you know, and we can all come together as one,” she said. “We’ll see how important that community is, and we can use that energy to do bigger and better things.”

President Trump signed multiple executive orders targeting transgender people at the beginning of his second term. Many LGBTQ+ Alaskans say they are afraid of what limits on gender-affirming care will mean for them and their loved ones. 

This month’s events include things like weekly crafting opportunities, dog park parties, and outdoor gatherings.

Christiansen says she wants these events to offer a chance for Juneau’s queer community to have fun and spend time away from the news cycle.

“That way, we as a queer community can feel the sense of belonging, the sense that we’re safe in Juneau,” she said. SEAGLA’s event calendar for June has something scheduled almost every day. The calendar also includes events put on by other Juneau mental health and community nonprofits, like an ocean dip, and the annual Juneau drag performance showcase GLITZ.

A German Shepherd who was on the lam for nearly three months has been captured and returned to her family. Juneau Animal Rescue announced that animal control officers and a volunteer helped capture Jackie last week.

“This was truly a community effort, and we can’t thank you enough for all the sightings and updates you shared with us,” JAR wrote in a statement.

Jackie slipped her leash in February and since then had stolen the hearts of Juneau residents, who posted photos and videos of her caught on doorbell cameras around town.

Juneau Animal Control officers have been tracking these sightings and setting large, pain-free traps for Jackie ever since, sometimes with cheeseburgers zip-tied to the back.

Now that she’s back home with her adoptive family, JAR said they will not be sharing any further updates.

Juneau was one of nine communities selected for an annual grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The health philanthropy group announced on Tuesday that the community was selected as a Culture of Health Prize winner for its commitment to uplifting Alaska Native culture and healing. 

For more than a decade, the foundation has highlighted and awarded grants to dozens of communities across the country that work to promote health equity and inclusion.

The Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition applied for the $250,000 grant on behalf of the community. It’s a nonprofit that offers Indigenous-based healing practices and reconciliation with the history of colonization in Juneau.

Ḵaa Yahaayí Shkalneegi Muriel Reid, a storyteller for the Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition, said the award honors decades of healing work done by the community.

“We just want to show so much gratitude to the community,” he said. “There are so many people that have put their hands into this work for generations and generations.”

The award highlights different local organizations and residents who have contributed to reviving Indigenous culture and healing generational trauma.

The nonprofit pointed to community efforts like Orange Shirt Day, which remembers the harmful legacy of Indigenous Boarding Schools, and the revitalization of local Indigenous languages happening in Juneau schools. Reid said there’s still much work to do, but it’s important to celebrate the growth already taking place. 

“There are so many places in Juneau where the only reason these wonderful moments of healing are happening is because of cross-sector work and collaboration and community, all working together towards a common goal of healing,” he said. 

Reid said the Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition will use the funding to continue to support ongoing work already happening in Juneau. 

Disclaimer: KTOO pays Haa Tóoch Lichéesh Coalition to provide language lessons to staff. 

The Juneau Assembly chose a preliminary redevelopment plan on Monday night for the downtown Telephone Hill neighborhood that — if approved — would evict residents by Oct. 1. 

The move marks a major step toward breaking ground after years of planning. But, the city would be asking for evictions before a developer has signed onto the project.

The plan would demolish all of the existing houses and structures on Telephone Hill this fall. City officials want to lay the groundwork for a developer to build newer, denser housing where the historic neighborhood once stood next summer. The city has not yet put out a formal request for proposals from potential developers.

“You might need to invest in demolition and site preparation just to be able to attract developers,” City Manager Katie Koester told Assembly members at Monday’s Committee of the Whole meeting.

Members decided to move forward with a plan that would spend $5.5 million to fund the first phase of demolition and site preparation of the downtown neighborhood.

Assembly member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs called investing in developing new housing a priority amid Juneau’s housing crunch. 

“I think if we want affordability, I think if we want them to densify in this site, it is going to require a big commitment of capital funds from the city,” Hughes-Skandijs said. 

The Assembly will take public comment and hold a final vote on the ordinance before any work can begin. That’s expected to happen on June 9. But, if approved, it would give the tenants living there about four months to move out of their units and find new housing.

Assembly member Wade Bryson said he thinks the city has given residents more than enough notice already to find a new place. 

“We’re asking these people to vacate during the easiest time of the year to find housing,” he said. “We are not being haphazard or careless, this has been talked about and has methodically gotten to this point.”

The neighborhood sits on roughly four acres of land on a hill that straddles the State Office Building downtown. It was state-owned from the 1980s until 2023 when the city took it over. The state originally intended to build a new Capitol complex there, but that never panned out. All people living there are renters. 

Last year, the Assembly voted to redevelop the neighborhood to build denser housing in response to Juneau’s ongoing housing crunch. The new plan would be an official start to the process. 

But not everyone thought it was the best idea. Assembly member Paul Kelly was the only member to vote against the plan. He said he wants a more defined plan before asking tenants to leave. 

“I don’t feel good about moving forward when we don’t have a guarantee for more housing, we’re going to be asking people to leave,” he said. “I would like us to be able to guarantee that we’re not going to have something that’s going to potentially sit idle.”

The $5.5 million slotted to fund the demolition and site preparation would be pulled from a few city funding sources. Some Assembly members were concerned that costs could skyrocket if they wait. Koester said that’s always a risk, but especially now amid the Trump Administration’s tariff policies. 

The ordinance will be introduced at an Assembly meeting on May 19. Koester said the city will send eviction notices to tenants sometime that week. 

Demolition would begin between October and December, so a developer could begin construction next summer. Developers would be on the hook for any road construction costs related to the project.