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Normally, this time of year, Juneau’s largest craft store would be full of plastic pumpkins, skeletons, ghosts, and, of course, fabric. But instead, the former Joann store in the Nugget Mall sits dark and empty — a spooky reality, say local costume makers.

Months after the chain closed across the nation, the gap in craft supplies is being put to the test at a crucially creative time of year: Halloween.

Elizabeth Bauer makes her five-year-old daughter’s Halloween costume every year, and usually, she wants to be something a bit unusual.

“Last year, she knew for months she wanted to be a white bat,” Bauer said. “So it’s like, you can’t find a white bat costume anywhere.” 

Bauer found white furry fabric at Joann, and made wings and a headband with bat ears for her daughter. 

But this year, Bauer is scrambling to find the material she needs to make another unusual costume, a hybrid jaguar and parrot from her daughter’s favorite cartoon, “Elena of Avalor.” She needs to make a pink base outfit, leopard spots, wings and a tail. And she has to find all of the materials and finish sewing by Friday. 

“But there’s not one store that you can go to and get all of those items that you’re looking for for a craft project,” she said. “You have to piece it together between all these different places.” 

Meanwhile, in Maggie Hyde’s costume closet, she held up a blue and green dress with scalloped ribbons of different colors. The shade of the fabric she bought online is not quite right. 

“I made it work, but these two shades were supposed to be a lot more different,” Hyde said. “They were not supposed to be the same shade, but on a website, they looked very different to what they look like in person.”

Hyde is a costumer. She participates in Juneau’s annual Wearable Arts show — where creators show off costumes they’ve made themselves — and she designs outfits for renaissance fairs, cosplay photoshoots and, of course, Halloween.

She said it’s a gamble to buy materials online for her creations. And she doesn’t want to support online retailers that don’t treat their employees well and often sell lower quality materials. Shipping costs are often high, if a company even ships to Alaska. 

“Now it’s this whole process of shipping, of looking and that just makes it a lot more difficult,” Hyde said. “You kind of have to adapt.”

Juneau Drag Mother Gigi Monroe said she and her fellow drag performers have been doing just that. 

“For professionals, we know how to get what we need and figure things out,” she said.

But this year, she had to pivot from a costume idea for Juneau Drag’s Halloween show because she couldn’t find more niche materials anywhere. Monroe said Joann usually had that kind of thing. 

And she said the store’s closing also impacts her methods. She would often go to the store with parts of an idea in mind, and figure out the rest based on what fabric she could touch and see in person. 

“So there’s a lot of designing that actually happens in the store, and you don’t really always have to go in knowing exactly what you need,” Monroe said. 

When they first heard the bad news, Monroe and other performers went to Joann’s closing sales and stockpiled on some heavy-hitter supplies — like rhinestone glue.

Monroe said other stores in town — including Juneau’s two quilting shops — help fill some of the gaps. 

And for Juneau’s more casual costumers, there are still options. Kathy Buell is owner of local party store Balloons by Night Moods.

“Halloween is our busiest season for anything that is not balloon-related,” she said.

The store’s shelves are stocked with ready-made costumes that fit infants, kids and as many sizes for adults Buell can find. It also has pieces that can be added to home-grown costumes. 

“We have makeup, we have wigs, we have hats,” she said. “Prosthetics that you put on with latex, blood, lots of blood.”

There is still a lot left for holiday procrastinators, she said. 

“We still have a lot of stock, because honestly, I’ve already—and it’s not even Halloween yet—I’m already buying for next year,” Buell said.

Still, the hole left by the Joann closure is a hard one to fill. But Monroe said there’s a letter-writing campaign asking national craft chain Michaels to step in. 

Alaska’s largest residential internet provider may soon come under the control of billionaire businessman John Malone, one of America’s biggest private landowners and wealthiest people.

On Oct. 3, Malone filed paperwork with the Regulatory Commission of Alaska asking for permission to take majority ownership of GCI Liberty Inc., the parent company of GCI Communications, Alaska’s largest internet company.

Malone already owns a majority of GCI Liberty’s voting shares, according to RCA filings, but until now has been limited by agreements that hold his voting power below 50%.

According to the filings, Malone is asking for authority to increase his voting power to “a level that would constitute control of GCI Liberty and its certificated subsidiary GCICC.”

The filings also state that both GCI Liberty and Malone have asked for a waiver that would allow them to keep their financial documents confidential.

Under state law and regulation, those documents would ordinarily be available for public inspection as part of regulators’ approval process.

Public comments on the request for secrecy are due to RCA by Tuesday, Oct. 28, and the state regulator is expected to review the takeover request after that date.

The takeover would also affect United Utilities, which provides telephone and internet service in rural Alaska, including much of the Yukon-Kuskokwim river delta region, filings show.

A new online statewide directory has been launched to showcase and connect Alaska Native artists across disciplines.

The Alaska Native Arts Directory is the work of the nonprofit Alaska Native Arts Foundation. Listing is free. The directory went live last week, timing that coincided with the Alaska Federation of Natives annual convention in Anchorage.

As of Monday, about 200 artists were listed, most of them with photos and biographical information. The Alaska Native Arts Foundation said it is seeking to expand that number to more than 1,000 by next year.

The Anchorage-based foundation said it also has a goal of holding a first-ever Alaska Native Arts Economic Summit next year, bringing together artists, policymakers and other partners to work on building the Indigenous creative economy.

There are other artists’ directories in Alaska, some of them with a focus on Indigenous artists. One, the Collective49 Marketplace, enables member artists to promote and sell their work online. And there are numerous local artists directories, such as those in Ketchikan and Homer.

The Alaska Natives Art Directory, however, is intended to be more comprehensive. Along with being statewide, the directory includes writers, musicians and other performing artists along with those who create carvings, paintings and other physical works of art. It includes contemporary art forms as well as traditional Indigenous arts.

“The Alaska Native Arts Directory celebrates the full spectrum of Alaska Native creativity, visual and written arts, performance, design, and traditional practices, reflecting the diversity and vitality of Alaska’s Indigenous cultures,” Gail Schubert, chair of the Alaska Native Arts Foundation, said in a statement.

Launch of the Alaska Native Arts Directory represents a renaissance of sorts for the Alaska Native Arts Foundation.

The foundation was created in 2002 and for several years operated an ecommerce site and a gallery in Anchorage. But it shut down those operatioons in 2016 after losing state funding and encountering other financial problems.

The directory project and other new activities now have a variety of funding sources, according to the foundation’s statement. The effort is backed by grants and other support from organizations that include the Rasmuson Foundation, the U.S. Small Business Administration, the office of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Municipality of Anchorage, among others, according to the statement.

Most of the staff running three Alaska newspapers in Homer, Kenai-Soldotna and Juneau resigned in protest Monday. The decision came after the corporate owner of the Homer News, Kenai Peninsula Clarion and Juneau Empire forced revisions to a story after pressure from a Republican state lawmaker.

The four journalists — Regional Editor Erin Thompson, Clarion Sports and Features Editor Jeff Helminiak, Clarion Senior Reporter Jake Dye and Homer News Reporter Chloe Pleznac — signed a joint resignation letter castigating Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group for its decision to modify the story without consulting the reporter or editor responsible, saying it “gravely undermined” their ability to do their jobs.

“Though this decision is extremely painful for us, it is not difficult,” they wrote. “We cannot do our jobs knowing that pressure from an elected official can mean our stories are edited without prior consultation with us.”

Last Wednesday, Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance posted a letter on state letterhead to her official Facebook page objecting to a Homer News article about a memorial for the slain activist Charlie Kirk. She highlighted a paragraph that identified Kirk as a “far-right” activist with “racist and controversial views.” Vance accused the paper of bias and said she was “aware of” a campaign to boycott Homer News advertising.

In an interview, Dye said his resignation was a long time coming. He’s repeatedly complained about mismanagement since Carpenter Media bought the paper out of insolvency last year, he said. But capitulating to pressure from a state lawmaker, going over the editor’s and reporter’s heads, Dye said, was a step too far.

A day later, the story was removed, edited, stripped of a byline and reposted — without, Dye said, any consultation with the newsroom. Vance subsequently thanked Carpenter Media in a Facebook post for responding to her concerns after a discussion with the paper’s publisher.

“Sarah Vance sent one letter on a Wednesday night — she probably didn’t even put a ton of thought into it — and got our story changed,” he said. “What stops her from doing that the next time? What stops anybody?”

Vance and Carpenter Media did not respond to interview requests.

Dye hasn’t gotten answers on what Vance asked for, and what Carpenter agreed to, he said.

“I feel like I should be able to trust Carpenter Media,” he said. “That’s just not what happened in this case.”

The mass resignations leave the three papers with just two reporters: one for the Homer News and another with the Juneau Empire, Dye said.

Veteran Alaska journalist and University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Paula Dobbyn said she was shocked by the episode — not just by Vance’s pressure campaign, but Carpenter’s decision to give in.

“We pride ourselves as Americans on having freedom of the press,” she said. “For an ownership group to just go ahead and alter a news story based on a complaint by a politician without consulting the editor or the reporter, I just think was appalling, and I fully support the staff for not putting up with it.”

It’s especially alarming given the fragile state of journalism in Alaska, she said. It’s not clear what’ll happen to the papers with most of the editorial staff gone, and Dobbyn said she’s concerned the exodus will leave Kenai Peninsula communities less informed.

“I certainly hope that the Kenai is not going to become another news desert, because, you know, people have the right to be informed,” she said. “There’s a lot that’s happening down there, and we certainly need coverage of it.”

Dobbyn said she hoped another news source would fill the void. She pointed to the Juneau Independent, a nonprofit online outlet founded by the former editor of another Carpenter paper, the Juneau Empire, who also resigned over disagreements with management.

As much as he loves journalism, Dye said he’s not planning to follow a similar path.

“I don’t think the others are really interested in that. We certainly don’t have the money for that,” he said. “I, unfortunately, kind of think this is it.”

Dye hopes Carpenter Media will invest in its Alaska papers, he said, but he’s not optimistic. He said management told the newsroom that the Clarion was losing money, but had not outlined plans to turn the struggling outlet around.

“Until this last week, they (didn’t) really interact with us,” he said. “I keep asking them what the plan is, and I don’t ever get a satisfying answer.”

On Tuesday, Dye said he planned to head to the local job center for a typing test so he could apply for a job as a 911 dispatcher.

“I really think that’s going to be less stressful than what I’m doing now,” he said.

Editor’s note: Former Homer News reporter Chloe Pleznac previously worked at KTOO as a Morning Edition host from 2022 to 2024. 

Construction to get Eaglecrest Ski Area’s controversial gondola up and running is finally underway. 

The ski area announced Wednesday that work has begun to develop the access road to one of the gondola’s stations on Douglas Island. That means that the mountain will be closed off to the public beyond the main lodges for the foreseeable future. 

The road construction comes more than three years after the city bought the used gondola from Austria. 

And now, the ski area’s future is riding on it. 

In the coming years, the ski area is slated to run into a multimillion-dollar deficit. That is intentional – it’s part of a plan to repair some broken and aging infrastructure while boosting pay to employees and preparing to operate year-round. The plan to dig out of the deficit relies heavily on revenue from the gondola.

Eaglecrest General Manager Craig Cimmons said the road construction marks a major step for the ski area.

“It’s really exciting,” he said. “Like I’ve been saying all along, the summer revenue is going to change the course of Eaglecrest forever, and having these crews here working on this really solidifies that this is happening. It’s really going to be a big deal.”

Cimmons said the goal is to have the gondola up and running by the summer of 2028. This January, the ski area will celebrate 50 years of operation. 

A local Alaska Native corporation, Goldbelt Incorporated, invested $10 million in the gondola in 2022 in exchange for a revenue-sharing agreement. Goldbelt announced last fall that it plans to develop a cruise ship port a few miles north of Eaglecrest on Douglas. 

Cimmons said the ski area will provide updates regularly about the status of the closure. 

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In Bridget Cove, Meta Mesdag grows thousands of oysters arranged in rows of floating mesh bags. She owns Salty Lady Seafood Co., the only Pacific oyster farm in Juneau.

Some years, naturally occurring toxic algal blooms have shut down her farm for weeks at a time. That motivated Mesdag to ask researchers: Can she predict when it will happen? 

“It’s such a mystery,” she said. 

On Mondays, Mesdag takes samples of her oysters and sends them to the state lab in Anchorage to test for toxic algae called Alexandrium catenella. The algae produce a neurotoxin that builds up in shellfish when they eat it. Just one milligram can kill a person. Testing is federally regulated. 

If the test comes back clean, she harvests. But if the oysters test over the FDA limit for the toxin, the farm shuts down.

In 2023, Mesdag said she had to shut down for half of her 20-week harvest season. 

“When you’re not making any money, but you’re spending money on labor, that can be really expensive and hard,” she said.

Since the farm couldn’t sell oysters at the time, she said she lost clients and had to lay people off. Once a closure is in place, the farm has to pass a series of tests to reopen. 

“We just have to wait, and we don’t know how long it takes,” she said. 

That loss of sales isn’t great for business.

The federal government is invested in boosting mariculture in Alaska’s waters, and there are still questions about how the environment here affects the health and quality of oysters. The state is invested in those questions too – about a decade ago it set a goal to grow Alaska’s mariculture into a $100 million industry by 2040, with 40% of that revenue coming from oysters. 

Researchers studied Mesdag’s oyster farm between 2021 and 2023 to understand the environmental conditions there and what it might say about the challenges and opportunities for growing shellfish in Southeast Alaska. So far, 20 oyster farms have permits in the region.

The study had a humble start. Mesdag’s question about harmful algal blooms landed on Courtney Hart’s desk when she was studying paralytic shellfish poisoning as a graduate student at the University of Alaska Southeast. Now she’s a crustacean shellfish program manager with the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington. 

“The first year, I was just trying to figure out if there was an easy way to monitor for Alexandrium or harmful algal blooms on her farm so I could help warn her essentially when a bloom was coming,” Hart said. 

But she hit a dead end.

“We didn’t really solve that problem,” she said. 

Sometimes the researchers would detect the toxic algae in the water and not see it in the oysters. Other times they’d see it in the oysters but not the water. Hart said the problem is not unique to Alaska — harmful algal blooms are notoriously unpredictable.

“Whether that bloom becomes toxic for shellfish really depends on so many factors that scientists have been studying for a long time and haven’t quite pinned down,” she said. 

But Hart said the study morphed when NOAA researchers joined. They wanted to answer a bigger question: What environmental conditions impact the overall health and quality of oysters in Southeast Alaska?

The scientists found that the spring phytoplankton bloom provides oysters a feast for only a short period, and they practically starve over the winter. 

“Often it may mean that it takes three years for your oysters to reach the right size, versus just two years, which is more typical down here in Washington,” Hart said.

The research team also looked at salinity. In the summer, during the primary harvest season, freshwater flows into the cove from melting snow and ice, making Mesdag’s farm less salty. Calm seas can prevent the freshwater from mixing into the saltwater below. 

When that happens, Mesdag said she can taste the difference — sometimes her oysters aren’t briny at all. 

But there are benefits too. The consistently cold water prevents oysters from spawning, so they retain high levels of lipids — healthy fats that make for a high-quality oyster. 

“As far as health of an oyster for humans, it’s good,” Hart said. 

While environmental conditions play an important role in how the industry develops, Bobbi Hudson said reaching the market is key. 

Hudson is the executive director of the Pacific Shellfish Institute. She splits her time between Washington state and Gustavus and is working with Southeast Conference, the region’s economic development agency, on an upcoming report about investments in the mariculture industry. 

“Alaska can have tremendous goals, but at the end of the day, if there’s not a market for those products, or a really strong market for those products, they’re not going to be able to reach those goals,” she said. 

She said that scaling up production, setting up cold chain distribution networks and making paralytic shellfish toxin testing more efficient could help Alaska’s shellfish farms grow.