Tourism

The head of a new Anchorage-based airline said the company hopes to bring hundreds of jobs and a substantial increase in tourism business to Alaska.

Rob McKinney is CEO of FLOAT Alaska LLC, which owns Ravn Alaska, and he described Northern Pacific Airways as the next evolution of the Ravn brand, after it was resurrected from a 2020 bankruptcy.

McKinney was part of the ownership group that bought some of Ravn’s assets and rebranded as Ravn Alaska.

On Wednesday, Northern Pacific unveiled its new first class lounge in the North Terminal of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. McKinney said the new airline will employ 250 people locally, bring millions of dollars in tax revenue to Alaska and, eventually, maybe even billions to the economy by extending the tourism season.

“We believe that ultimately we can take the seasonality out of tourism in Alaska,” McKinney said. “And if you think about what that translates to, I mean, everyone just goes as hard as they can for three and a half, four months, but if you can translate that to 12 months, the amount of jobs that will be created, and not be seasonal anymore, it will just be transformative for the state.”

The company’s business model relies on Anchorage being a halfway point between the major cities in eastern Asia and the U.S.

Starting early next year, McKinney said, Northern Pacific will offer flights from cities in Japan and Korea to Anchorage, and then to Lower 48 destinations. Stopping in Anchorage means saving fuel, and he expects their flights to be 20% cheaper than those of nonstop competitors. He said the travel time will be comparable, because of the much shorter customs clearance experience in Anchorage than Los Angeles or New York airports, for example.

The concept has already been proven by Icelandair, McKinney said.

“Look at the Atlantic, you can easily go nonstop across the Atlantic,” he said. “Yet Icelandair has phenomenal business. They have 50 airplanes, and they all stop in Keflavík there in Iceland. So it can be done.”

By bringing year-round travelers, McKinney said, Iceland increased their tourism 500%. If Alaska were to even double its current tourism, that could boost tourism revenue by billions of dollars, he said.

RavnAir Group operated as the largest rural carrier in Alaska, until declaring bankruptcy in April 2020 due to a reported 90% loss of revenue amid a downturn in travel due to the pandemic. The filing also came in the wake of a fatal 2019 crash in Unalaska.

Northern Pacific’s first flights will be between Los Angeles and Las Vegas starting July 14 as a proof of concept. Airline officials hope to have the trans-Pacific flights up and running by spring 2024.

JUNEAU — The city of Hoonah is again attempting to form its own borough across 10 million acres of land and water in Southeast Alaska.

Alaska’s largest Lingít village, with a population of roughly 900, has sought to create a borough for the past 30 years, with Hoonah as the hub and seat of government. The last attempt in 2019 was put on pause, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dennis Gray Jr., Hoonah’s city administrator, said with the pandemic in the rearview mirror that the city is set to redouble its efforts to form a borough. He said it would be “a great accomplishment” for the local community if the proposal is approved.

Hoonah Indian Association and Huna Totem Corp. — the local village corporation — have both submitted letters in support of the city’s efforts, citing one of the expected benefits of incorporation: additional state funding for the city’s public school.

Hoonah School District, which has just over 100 students, has an annual budget of $3.8 million. Incorporation as a borough is expected to net Hoonah’s school an additional $350,000 per year from the state, due partly to having a larger tax base, Gray said.

Nathan Moulton, Hoonah Indian Association’s tribal administrator, wrote in February that the additional funding would allow for more “scholastic opportunities, and provide other support for the K-12 student body that is so direly needed.” There could be more high school and middle school courses offered and vocational training could be reestablished after that had been pared back in recent years, Gray said.

Included in the city’s packet is the proposed charter for the new home-rule borough — a type of municipal government that has the maximum level of local control allowed under the Alaska Constitution. Gray said the charter was written to create “a truly libertarian borough.”

There would be no property taxes to fund local government; instead, Xunaa Borough would have a 6.5% sales tax inside the city of Hoonah and a 1% seasonal sales tax borough-wide. Much of that seasonal sales tax revenue is expected to be paid by visiting cruise ship passengers.

Just outside Hoonah sits Icy Strait Point on the site of a restored salmon cannery. The port, owned and operated by Huna Totem Corp., boasts two cruise ship docks, two gondolas, an enormous zipline over old-growth rainforest, and an adventure park.

Meilani Schijvens, owner of Juneau-based consulting firm Rain Coast Data, submitted documentation earlier in the year that described how the new borough would be economically viable. More than 500,000 cruise ship passengers are expected to visit Icy Strait Point this year and spend $52 million — four times as many visitors as came by cruise ship 10 years ago.

Cruise ship passengers pay the 6.5% sales tax and they would be subject to the extra 1% seasonal sales tax, which is expected to raise around $400,000 annually for the new borough.

“That’s kind of the ideal situation — where you can bring in money from the outside to supplement your local government,” Gray said. “That’s the best way to run a government, we think.”

Hoonah’s tiny outlying communities like Elfin Cove, population 24, and Game Creek, population 23, would be included in the new borough’s boundaries. Other nearby communities, like Tenakee Springs, Pelican and Gustavus, were invited to join the borough petition, but declined. Gray said the intention is that they could join the borough in the future.

The latest Xunaa Borough proposal would be over three times smaller than previous efforts. Xunaa Borough supporters have previously claimed tracts of land that are now part of Haines Borough and the City and Borough of Sitka — but not this time.

That change was made “so we could have a more easy approach with the (Local) Boundary Commission,” Gray said.

Xunaa is pronounced like Hoonah, but has a more Lingít-stylized spelling so the new borough name would reflect the region’s Alaska Native heritage. The borough’s boundaries would include the picturesque Glacier Bay, which is an area considered to be the spiritual homeland of the Huna Lingít.

The National Park Service says that Lingít cultural practices were severely curtailed within what is now Glacier Bay National Park, which strained relations with the Huna Lingít. A memorandum of understanding was signed by the park service in 2016 to establish government-to-government relations with the Hoonah Indian Association to work cooperatively on managing cultural sites and educating visitors.

In establishing a borough, the hope is that residents would have more of a voice in what happens in Glacier Bay, Gray said.

There could be challenges in getting the application approved. The Local Boundary Commission, the state board charged with considering proposals for incorporation by municipalities, gave Hoonah’s proposal an informal review in February and flagged several concerns.

Alaska regulations state that boroughs need a minimum permanent population of 1,000 people, and the Xunaa Borough would currently just be shy of that. Supporters have said that the borough would be viable — shown partly by the major expansion of Icy Strait Point and the jobs it has created locally.

Hoonah officials are planning to submit the petition for incorporation by the end of the month, with the hope of setting up the new borough government in 2025. Voters who live within the area would need to approve the creation of the new Xunaa Borough and its new charter.

The last Alaska borough to be incorporated was Petersburg Borough in 2013.

This story originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

A Ketchikan man agreed to plead guilty this month to federal charges in conjunction with a long-running scheme to sell fake Alaska Native souvenirs manufactured in the Philippines.

Travis Lee Macaset’s plea deal follows several other guilty pleas this summer that stem from a scheme to sell mislabeled products from two businesses in Ketchikan.

“It occurs more often than we would like,” said Jack Schmidt, the assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the cases.

With tourism rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, so is the market for souvenirs. In the shops along the Southeast Alaska waterfront, authentic Alaska-made items sell for many times the cost of mass-manufactured ones created overseas, and the threat of fake products appears to be growing.

“The temptation is always there,” Schmidt said.

In the United States, souvenirs sold as authentic products of tribes or tribal members and identified as coming from American Indian and Alaska Native people are specifically protected under the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

That law makes it illegal to market and sell artwork falsely labeled as created by an Alaska Native artist or a Native tribe. The act is enforced by the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board, which collects complaints and investigates violations.

Breaking that law might seem like a minor crime, said attorney Jacob Adams, but the long-term consequences are large.

“Allowing non-genuine products like that to be out there in the market, and essentially take over a lot of areas, it makes the environment that much more difficult for Indigenous craftspeople to live off of their culture, and that causes many follow-on effects,” Adams said.

“If people are unable to make use of their culture, to live off their culture … then it disincentivizes upcoming generations to pick up those crafts,” he said.

Three years ago, Adams represented Sealaska Heritage Institute, a Southeast Alaska Native cultural group, and several other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Neiman Marcus, the luxury retailer. At the time, Neiman Marcus was selling a “Ravenstail” coat that the plaintiffs said was the copyrighted work of a Native weaver.

The parties later settled the suit with an undisclosed agreement.

Statistics for the scale of the problem are hard to come by, Adams and others said.

In 2011, the federal Government Accountability Office concluded that it was impossible to gauge the size of the illegal market with available data but noted that of 649 complaints filed with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board between 2006 and 2010, almost a quarter involved apparent violations of federal law.

Anecdotally, officials and artists pointed to the number of prosecutions and actions against the sellers of fake products as a demonstration of both the problem and actions being taken to combat it via the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

“To a great extent, for the most part, we’re seeing more of its use both in the private and the criminal side in recent years, in the past decade or so,” Adams said, referring to the law.

This spring, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle prosecuted a man who sold fake American Indian and Alaska Native artwork at Pike’s Place Market.

Two years ago, the attorney’s office in Alaska prosecuted the former owner of the Arctic Treasures gift shop in Anchorage. Seven years ago, four shops were charged by federal prosecutors.

Fines for violations of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act are common, but jail time remains rare, Tribal Business News reported in 2021.

The arts board operates a special investigations unit, Schmidt said, with one investigator based out of Juneau and another out of Anchorage.

“There’s a lot of potential for fraud out there,” Schmidt said.

The state of Alaska also investigates complaints via its consumer protection unit and in 2022 filed a civil lawsuit against the owners of an Anchorage business, accusing them of shipping Alaska-bought bones and antlers to the Philippines before turning them into knives and other products there.

At the start of this year’s tourist season, the Department of Law sent a warning letter to 44 tourism businesses, warning them not to remove foreign country markings from souvenirs.

“In the past, CPU has received information indicating that some businesses serving the tourist market may be removing foreign country of origin markings from products, which confuses or misleads consumers into believing that the products were made in Alaska,” the letter said in part.

Patty Sullivan, an attorney and spokesperson for the department, said that the letters weren’t intended to target particular businesses and aren’t a sign that the state believes those businesses are doing something wrong.

“These are stores that we believe serve the tourist market. There have been allegations that this conduct is happening in stores that serve the tourist market. We may send a second round of letters to additional shops in the future,” she said.

Adams said the issue is worth continued attention.

“Many people would think this discussion is trivial, but it’s actually essential to the identity of Indigenous groups,” Adams said.

“If we are going to support not only the Indigenous people but also celebrate the idea of diversity, we have to protect and secure these types of valuable pieces of identity,” he said.

How to buy smart

Here are some tips recommended by the state of Alaska and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board if you’re looking to make sure that you’re buying something authentic:

• Shop at stores with good reputations, those linked to tribes or tribal groups, and ask for a written guarantee or written verification that what you’re buying has been made by an Alaska Native artist.
• If possible, get a receipt that includes all the information about the maker, the maker’s village or tribe, and where they’re from.
• Look for a certification tag. The board and the Alaska State Council on the Arts’ “Silver Hand” program each offer a certification process that includes a label.
• Go beyond “Made in Alaska.” Something can carry a “Made in Alaska” logo but be made by a non-Native. Instead, look for labels and explanations that something was made by a member of a particular tribe.
• Price, materials and appearance are all clues. Authentic items will cost much more than mass-produced ones. If something is advertised as hand-carved but is right next to identical pieces, be skeptical. Something advertised as soapstone might actually be made of resin — real stone is cool to the touch, plastic is warm, and stone is heavier.
• If you need to file a complaint, visit the Indian Arts and Crafts Board online or call 888-278-3253.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Miscommunication and an out-of-date navigational chart were both found to be factors when a Royal Caribbean cruise ship slammed into the dock at the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal last summer. The National Transportation Safety Board released a 14-page report on the incident late last month.

On the morning of May 9, 2022, the Radiance of the Seas was pulling into port in Sitka, when it struck a mooring dolphin. While no injuries were reported in the accident, damage to the pier was estimated at over $2 million dollars, and that part of the dock was unusable for the first half of the summer season while awaiting repair.

The 14-page NTSB report details communication between the master, pilots, and the bosun of the ship leading up to the accident. It found that the bridge team had relied heavily on electronic navigational charts to dock the vessel, which included incorrect information about the dock’s length.

The Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal dock was extended by nearly 400 feet in 2021. The NTSB found that the new length had not been reported to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which led to the navigational chart being out-of-date, and may have been a contributing factor to the accident.

The NTSB also found the master of the ship misunderstood directions and information about the boat’s distance from the pier being called out by a crewmember while the vessel was rotating.

Weather was good and conditions were clear with 10 mile visibility as the ship was approaching the pier, and the report found that the bridge team should have seen the dock extension and maneuvered the boat accordingly. They also had radar technology and cameras available to assist with their approach, but instead, relied too heavily on their electronic charts to determine the vessel’s relative position to the pier.

You can read the full NTSB report here

Nearly 70 passengers and crew were evacuated from a small cruise ship on Monday morning after an engine room fire disabled UnCruise’s Wilderness Discoverer in Glacier Bay.

The fire was reported to the U.S. Coast Guard around 7:30 a.m.

“By the time we got there, they had put the fire out,” Coast Guard Petty Officer Ian Gray said. “All of the passengers were taken off and were in good health.”

The Sapphire Princess, a larger Princess Cruises ship that was sailing nearby, responded to radio calls from the Wilderness Discoverer and used one of its lifeboats to bring over the 51 passengers and 16 crew members. A handful of crew members stayed behind on the ship, which is being towed to a shipyard in Ketchikan.

Local and federal authorities will examine the damage in the coming days. 

“Once it’s moored up at the pier, we’ll start the investigation process,” Gray said. “We’ll get Coast Guard personnel aboard and probably more than likely the Alaska State Troopers.” 

A different UnCruise ship picked up the Wilderness Discoverer’s passengers and brought them back to the company’s headquarters in Juneau on Monday afternoon. UnCruise representatives said all of the passengers would get full refunds.

Correction: 51 passengers and 16 crew members were taken off the Wilderness Discoverer.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

By midsummer in 2026, visitors will likely be traveling over a sophisticated new bridge that clears a geologic hazard that has become a poster child of climate change in Alaska.

Until then, the National Park Service and the tourism industry will be coping with three more years of shutdowns at about the halfway point of the sole park road to avoid ongoing landslides at a steep and perilous site called Pretty Rocks.

Where there used to be a curve at about mile 45 of the 92-mile road, a site known for its spectacular views of a valley called the Plains of Murie, a section of road is now gone, leaving a nearly sheer drop-off in its place. When the sun hits the rock face on the north side, as it did on the first Friday in May, clumps of dirt and rock tumble almost incessantly down the slope.

In August of 2021, the road was closed there; that section was still intact but deemed too dangerous for public travel. By then, the perils were obvious, said Dave Schirokauer, Denali’s science and resources team leader. He pointed to a site on the now-collapsed road section.“Right over there in the corner, we could see ice. Very, very ice-rich permafrost was at the surface and was very visible,” he said during a May 5 tour.

Pretty Rocks got this way in Hemingway-like fashion: gradually, and then suddenly.

The slope was moving slightly in the 1960s and likely for decades earlier, according to the park service. But prior to 2014, it was causing little trouble beyond some occasional small cracks in the road surface, according to park officials. As the climate continued to warm, slope movement that was measured in inches per year before 2014 increased to inches per month in 2017, inches per week the following year, inches per day in 2019 and, in 2021, 0.65 inches per hour, according to park officials. A collapse in August of 2021 forced the abrupt road closure and an early end to some Denali trips.

The project to reopen the road at Pretty Rocks, expected to cost about $100 million, is challenging. The site is remote and steep. The bridge has to be suitable for permafrost terrain, strong and secure enough to carry tour buses and withstand earthquakes, subtle enough in appearance to blend in with surroundings and constructed in a way that minimizes impacts to park visitors and wildlife.

The design includes anchors to lodge vertically and at angles. It also includes 23 thermosyphons — devices that pull heat out of the ground — to preserve a pocket of ice-rich permafrost discovered 85 feet below the surface at the east end, said Steve Mandt, the park engineer coordinating the project.

Site geology pushes back road opening

The site’s geology makes any fix complex. There is permafrost overlain with a rock glacier, which is a frozen but thawing conglomeration of rock and ice. There is clay, which thaws at a lower temperature than that needed to melt ice. There is rainwater that infiltrates all that and, depending on the season, expands the ice or hastens the melt. “So you’ve got rock, you’ve got rain that freezes and you’ve got this major ice layer that’s moving,” Schirokauer said.

The clay has proved particularly problematic. A recent discovery that workers will have to remove 80,000 cubic yards of clay on the west side of the planned bridge site rather than the 30,000 previously estimated means a one-year delay in the project’s expected completion, said Denali spokesperson Sharon Stiteler.

The change from a 2025 road opening is a setback to the tourism industry.

“With the additional delay, obviously, that is disappointing,” said Jillian Simpson, president and chief executive officer of the Alaska Travel Industry Association. But the road is “a critical piece of infrastructure” and the industry understands “how important it is to get it right,” she said.

“Denali is the linchpin of tourism when it comes to exploring Alaska on land,” Simpson said.

As the bridge becomes reality, Denali will be busy with more than the usual tourist crowds.

A camp at the park’s gravel site operated over the next summer seasons will serve 50 or more workers who will shuttle back and forth, their vehicles in some places alternating with the tour buses.

The approach to the Pretty Rocks site is so narrow that work trucks are to be backed in because there is not enough space for large vehicles to turn around. There will be some noise, like from pile driving, though the plan is to keep that to a minimum.

For tourists, this will be another year of stopping at the site called East Fork at the road’s 43-mile point, where there is a temporary ranger station in a yurt and enough space for buses to turn around.

“This is the new Eielson,” Schirokauer said, referring to the temporarily closed Eielson Visitors Center at the road’s 66-mile point, normally a popular stopping and turnaround site.

Last year, the first full year of the closure at Pretty Rocks, visitation bounded back from extreme lows resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, though it was still only 88% of typical pre-2020 levels, according to an analysis by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Those who came to Denali were curious about the landslide, park staffers said. Many who rode the bus as far as they could, to the East Fork turnaround, walked the extra distance to see the site for themselves, Stiteler said.

This year, with Alaska on track for a record 1.6 million cruise passengers, the crowds are expected to be bigger. But Denali should be able to handle the increased traffic, even with half the road closed, said Brooke Merrell, the park’s superintendent.

“We feel like we got a good practice year last year to make sure we have it right,” she said. “We believe we’ll be able to accommodate it with the part of the road we have this year.”

It remains possible to travel around Pretty Rocks to the western half of the park.

There is temporary access provided by a steep stairway from the East Fork bus terminus to the river valley below. About 15% of the visitors who rode the shuttle bus that far last year chose to make that descent for brief walks or even more extensive hikes, according to park staff.

Backcountry users with the appropriate permits can keep going from there to explore the territory that is currently beyond park road access. Well-heeled travelers can, moreover, fly into Kantishna, the patch of private land at the end of the road, and stay at deluxe lodges where daily rates are well above $1,000.

How the construction affects Alaska tourism

The tourism industry has been adjusting to the new reality.

For local companies, last year was a “mixed bag,” with some operators able to take advantage of increased traffic resulting from the shorter bus trips but others struggling, said Vanessa Jusczak of the Denali Chamber of Commerce, based in Healy. Excursion companies had more business, but short-staffed restaurants were burdened by crowds appearing at what were normally low-volume times, she said by email.

In Anchorage this summer, Denali-bound tourists appear to be well aware of the road closure, said Jack Bonney, vice president of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“It doesn’t seem to be affecting their choice about whether they go to Denali or not,” he said. While “the closure is in the back of people’s minds,” the park continues to be seen as an attractive destination, he said.

More than people are affected by the road closure. The park service is embarking on a study of bears to see how the lack of road traffic might be affecting them, Schirokauer said. The plan is to collar 18 to 20 animals, with half on the east of Pretty Rocks and the other half on the west side where the road is closed, he said.

Landslides increasing across the north

While Pretty Rocks is a dramatic and visible case because of its location and the inconvenience it is causing, thaw-induced landslides are increasing all over the north.

Within the Denali road corridor, more than 140 landslide-prone sites have been identified.

Along other roads in Alaska, there are dangers in other national parks and sites outside of parks. Those include Slate Creek along the Parks Highway just outside Denali’s entrance, where permafrost thaw appears to be combining with extreme rainfall to create potential maintenance headaches and threats to a recently installed fiber-optic cable and other infrastructure, and the Dalton Highway, the sole land route to the North Slope oil fields, where thawing “frozen debris lobes” of ice, dirt, rock and vegetation are creeping downslope and forcing diversions and adjustments. East of Alaska, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, thaw-triggered landslides and slumps are eating away at the Dempster Highway.

Away from roads, big hazards come from thawing mountainsides, especially of coastal mountains, where dumped debris can cause localized tsunamis. One landslide hotspot is northern Southeast Alaska, where tall peaks rise dramatically from glacial fjords. There, and in neighboring parts of Canada; the pace of landslides is accelerated through  combined glacial retreat and mountain permafrost thaw that destabilizes slopes. In 2015 in Taan Fjord, a coastal area of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the side of a mountain collapsed, sending rocks and debris into the water and triggering a local tsunami that reached over 630 feet, making it the fourth highest ever recorded. No people were affected by that, but the story was different in Greenland in 2017, when a massive landslide in a glaciated area caused a tsunami that killed four people.

In Denali, the Pretty Rocks bridge will not be the end of the work. The federal funding secured for the bridge is also intended to cover a second project phase to address another unstable site less than a mile to the east called Bear Cave.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.