Tourism

The Denali Park Road is now closed about halfway along its 92-mile length due to a landslide associated with permafrost melting.

A thawing rock glacier underneath a 100-yard section of the road going through Polychrome Pass is causing the road to slump. And the rate at which it’s slumping has increased in recent years, making it harder to maintain for bus traffic, the most popular way for visitors to access Denali National Park and Preserve.

Dave Schirokauer, the science and resources team leader at Denali, said road crews used to be able to keep up with it. But sensors buried in the landslide — measuring its movement every hour — recently clocked the slumping at 14 inches a day.

As the park continues to plan a long-term fix, Schirokauer said the road’s engineers nearly 100 years ago didn’t know about the rock glacier and almost certainly weren’t thinking about climate change. He recently spoke about the issue with Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove.

Listen here:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Dave Schirokauer: In 1930, the road crew came up, and they kind of tickled this dragon. And so that disturbance of the road may have started the process of increasing the movement rate of this particular feature. And then, in more recent years, you throw in climate change — which across the region is clearly causing permafrost to warm and thaw — and it picks up in speed. So really, in a nutshell, it’s a combination of building a road on a potentially unstable slope and then throwing in climate change to really wake up that dragon and get it moving at what is now a pretty extreme rate.

Casey Grove: Was there ever a concern for the safety of the buses going through? Or was it more about just an inability to keep up with that slumping?

Dave Schirokauer: There’s a concern about rockfall from above as being probably the number one hazard for buses, vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists that are going through that area. As the road slips downhill, the slope above the road actually ends up getting steeper. So the amount of rockfall and debris flows that are coming from above down onto the road have increased. That’s somewhat mitigatable by a big ditch. And if you were to go out there late this season, or last season, you would have seen a giant ditch. And so we have a really nice rockfall catchment ditch that mitigates that to some extent — at least that rockfall hazard. As far as the slipping-down slope, even 12 or 13 or 14 inches a day, we don’t think that it’s just going to go and the whole thing is going to fall into the river and a bus is going to become entangled in that.

Casey Grove: Yeah, that’s interesting. That is what I was wondering, if there could be some big, catastrophic event like that.

Dave Schirokauer: It’s possible, but it’s pretty unlikely. What we’re seeing is just a real challenge keeping up with the maintenance. You know, having an industrial road for bus traffic is a little bit different than having like a four-wheel-drive road for a Jeep or something. So the grade and turning radius issues associated with a bus requires some pretty specific road specifications. And that’s what we’re aiming for when we maintain the Denali Park Road.

Casey Grove: Got it. So what’s the fix for this?

Dave Schirokauer: When we noticed this kicking up around 2018-2019, we realized that it might become unsustainable in the near future to just fill the gulch with gravel and grade the road. And I started brainstorming and thinking about what we needed to do. And recently there was a pretty deep dive into the geotechnical features of various alternatives. We looked at a north reroute and a south reroute and keeping the alignment in place. And we honed in on the idea that the best option — sort of in rough draft — was to consider building a bridge over the landslide. And so that’s where we are right now. We haven’t decided we’re building a bridge. But what we’re doing right now is a very deep dive into a geotechnical investigation, as far as the feasibility of a bridge. There’s a bunch of science work and cultural resource work, surveys going on. So that’s where we’re going. That process is going to occur this winter, probably into the spring. Hopefully by next summer we’ll have a clear path forward and we may be able to start work late next summer, or in the summer of 2023.

Responders described low cloud ceilings in Misty Fjords National Monument Wilderness in the hours after a fatal plane crash that killed six people. That’s according to a new report from federal investigators looking into the Aug. 5 crash. But officials say they have yet to determine the cause of the crash.

The National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report about the incident Wednesday. NTSB Alaska regional head Clint Johnson says it’s an early look at the basic facts about the crash.

“We were able to document the accident site and also the wreckage at the site there. We also had a chance to go ahead and document the wreckage once it was removed, and we had an aeronautical engineer basically go over the wreckage with a fine-toothed comb,” Johnson said.

The report says the Southeast Aviation tour was carrying five passengers from a Holland America cruise ship on the pilot’s second tour of the day.

Visibility was relatively good around Ketchikan’s airport. A few clouds floated at about 700 feet over Ketchikan International Airport, with a broken cloud ceiling about 1,800 feet, the report says.

But pilots searching 18 miles to the northeast, along with other sightseeing pilots flying in the area, described cloud ceilings as low as 600 feet above the ground in the valley where the aircraft was found with no survivors.

Investigators released photos of the wreckage wrapped around a tall tree at an elevation of roughly 1,750 feet in steep, heavily wooded terrain.

Investigators don’t point to a cause for the crash — that will come later, after an investigation that is likely to take at least a year. But at this point, Johnson says it doesn’t appear that the plane had anything wrong with it in the moments before impact.

“We don’t suspect any mechanical issues at this point, but we are making absolutely sure we are looking at every possibility in this accident at this point,” he said.

He says investigators will examine the engine as the investigation continues. And he says NTSB officials will also look into the operator, Southeast Aviation.

“The operations group and one of our meteorologists will be returning to Ketchikan within the next few weeks. They’re going to continue doing interviews with the operator, and probably also the FAA, and also witnesses, if we have some more witnesses there,” Johnson said. “They still have a fair amount to do.”

Southeast Aviation declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation. So far, the Ketchikan-based airline has only released a statement expressing its sympathy for the victims and their families.

The six killed this month increased the tally to at least 21 people who have died in plane crashes in the Ketchikan area since 2015. A recent investigation by KUCB and ProPublica found that Alaska is home to a growing share of the nation’s fatal accidents involving small commercial aircraft.

A significant portion of the Denali Park Road closed Tuesday for the rest of the season as a landslide caused unsafe driving conditions, the National Park Service said in a statement.

The 92-mile Denali Park Road is the only way to drive into the 4.7-million-acre park. The continuing landslide at Polychrome Pass, near Mile 42, has led to the road rapidly deteriorating in recent years, causing concern about how to maintain the road while safely accommodating visitors.

“Changing climate is driving frozen ground to thaw, resulting in unpredictable and increasing landslide movement rates at Pretty Rocks that are unprecedented in the history of the park road. We cannot safely keep up with the accelerating rate of landslide movement caused by permafrost thaw currently occurring in association with the Pretty Rocks Landslide,” Don Striker, Denali’s Superintendent, said in the statement.

The Denali Park Road normally closes past the Teklanika Rest Area at Mile 30 in mid-September.

After Tuesday, westbound traffic beyond Mile 43 will only be allowed for essential purposes, like facilitating seasonal closure of western park operations, the park service said.

The closure will impact the Wonder Lake Campground near Mile 89 and the Eielson Visitor Center at Mile 66, the park service said.

About 84 people who are camping or accessing the backcountry west of the closure on Tuesday will be relocated in the coming days, said park spokesman Paul Ollig. People at Wonder Lake Campground are being relocated by park transit buses Tuesday and Wednesday, and backcountry users will be picked up by park camper buses when they return to the road during the next few days, he said.

The visitors are not stranded, Ollig said.

“Some visitors are being relocated to campgrounds east of Polychrome, where space is available, and others are simply choosing to shorten their trips,” he said by email.

The park service said camper buses won’t be able to accommodate backcountry trips past Mile 42, effective immediately. Park tour and transit buses will continue making trips, but they will stop and turn around at Mile 42.

The Denali Visitor Center, front-country trails and backcountry access remain open, along with the Kantishna airstrip, which is located near the end of the road.

The Pretty Rocks Landslide, located around Mile 45 of the highway, has required increasing maintenance in recent years because it is changing rapidly due to climate change, the park service said.

In 2018, the landslide was causing the roadway to slump almost half an inch per day and by August of last year it had increased to 3.5 inches per day, the park service said.

“Early August rains in 2021 appear to have triggered the rate to increase significantly, with much of the landslide currently moving downhill at over ten inches per day,” the statement said.

The park service’s 2022 budget request includes funding for a construction project at Polychrome Pass to maintain access, the statement said. The project is in the planning and design stages and the park service said construction would not begin until at least 2023.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

The South Klondike Highway from Skagway to Whitehorse is one of the prettiest stretches of road in North America, but it’s been off-limits to most Americans since the pandemic-related border restrictions were announced last spring. Beginning on Aug. 9, though, fully vaccinated U.S. travelers are now allowed to cross into Canada.

Once the weekend arrived, I packed up my camper truck, grabbed my passport and vaccine card, loaded up my adventure dog Charley and hit the road.

When I arrived at the border station in Fraser, B.C., the Canadian border guard asked me questions about my job, where I live and what kind of bear protectant I had. I had everything in order, so he let me through after about 10 minutes

Downtown Carcross was our first stop, and I didn’t get out of the parking lot by the visitor center before I ran into Michelle Phillips, a dog musher from Tagish.

“This place has been so quiet and so empty for so long. It’s really nice to drive into Carcross today and see all the cars and the campers and different license plates and see people walking around,” said Phillips.

Apparently, Yukoners are just as excited to get to Skagway as I was to get to Canada.

“I would love to go see friends in Skagway and go to Starfire. I miss Skagway. So yeah, I really hope they open the border,” said Phillips.

And there’s something to that cross-border food craving. Phillips was craving Thai food from Starfire in Skagway, and I was excited for sushi in Whitehorse.

I stopped into Matthew Watson General Store and talked with co-owner Ron O’Conner who was working his first shift since the fall of 2019.

He said his wife and daughters had been running the store, but the girls took the weekend off, so he had to cover.

“This is our Discovery Day weekend. Monday is the holiday but there’s a lot of people from British Columbia and Alberta up here visiting right now. And then the Whitehorse crowd comes out here on the weekends,” said O’Conner.

I said my goodbyes and headed up to Whitehorse, where I ran into Tom Ely from Haines who was driving the Golden Circle. The loop goes from Haines to Skagway via ferry, a drive to Whitehorse, then down to Haines.

“Well, I’ve been waiting since the border closed to get back to the Yukon and see my friends and do some mountain biking,” said Ely.

He says flashing his passport, negative test result and vaccination card was pretty straightforward.

“So it’s pretty much about five minutes to cross. It was great,” said Ely.

I asked him what he was most excited to bring home.

“My thing is the hot banana pepper rings and Bix, dill pickles the extra garlic ones, minis,” said Ely.

Charley dog and I camped on a friend’s property, and on Sunday we went to visit the SS Klondike — the old sternwheel steamboat that used to run freight along the Yukon River.

That’s where I met Terri Bishop from Vero Beach, Florida. She stopped with Boone, her Rhodesian Ridgeback,  on her way to Interior Alaska. She says she had to Google where to get a test in Montana before she could cross into Canada.

“If you did it on Friday, and then they don’t give you the results until Monday, like that’s 72 hours right there. So it was like, okay, how’s this gonna work? But it worked,” Bishop said.

To get through the border, you’ll need your passport, your vaccination card, proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours and a completed ArriveCan application.

When coming in, the app asks you to say where you’ll quarantine if necessary. Because Bishop is traveling in a tricked-out Sprinter van, she used the border station address. She says the Canadian border guard had a laugh at that.

“And the only thing he asked me was, ‘Do you have any weapons?’” she said.

There have been some changes in the Yukon since I last visited: a new Canadian border building, the Westmark Hotel is now the Sternwheeler Hotel and some of my favorite restaurants have changed. But some things always stay the same. Tim Horton’s had Timbits, and Canadian Tire had long lines and good dog toys.

Many of the people I met wondered when the U.S. border will open to Canadians, but there’s still no official word on when that might happen.

Ketchikan has a new dock in town — well, outside of town. The first cruise ships to tie up at the two-berth Mill at Ward Cove arrived this month. That marks a milestone for the project to revitalize the former pulp mill site.

When the first cruise ship to visit Ward Cove docked on Aug. 4, passengers were greeted by rain — and the Tongass National Forest. Those trees were the first thing that Emma Murray said she noticed as she stepped off the ship.

“It was just really exciting to see for me because I’m from a desert,” she said. “Nothing’s green at all, and it was just so green and wet. I was just like, ‘Wow.’”

Murray and other passengers took refuge from the rain in an old Ketchikan pulp mill building. Before it shut down in 1997, the mill was the largest employer on the island and the center of Ketchikan’s timber industry. Now, developers hope it’ll serve as a hub for the community’s tourism economy. Ward Cove Dock Group’s John Binkley said it feels like a full-circle moment.

“It’s fired back up again and think it’s something that I hope all the community can take pride in — that the mill is back,” he said.

Binkley said that’s especially exciting after COVID-19 delayed the dock’s opening.

Developers didn’t know if it would be allowed to accept passengers until late May of this year, he said. That’s when the president signed a bill to temporarily allow foreign-flagged ships to sail directly to Alaska without stopping in Canada, which had banned cruise ships because of COVID-19.

“Bang, all of a sudden the season was on,” he said. “So we had to gear back up again, get our construction team back in place and go as fast as we could to try and get open in really about 70 days from when we hit the go button.”

Binkley joked he mostly just wanted to get the bathrooms of the welcome center finished in time. He said in between ships each week, they’re adding more amenities.

Norwegian Cruise Line, which invested in the dock project in exchange for priority use of its berths, brought non-paying passengers on a simulated voyage for its first trip to Ward Cove. Then, on Aug. 12, the first round of paying passengers stepped off the Norwegian Encore.

Once visitors pass through the center, they exit into a parking lot. There, they get into buses and trolleys that take them all around Ketchikan.

Ward Cove is located in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, but outside city limits, about 7 miles north of downtown. A financial impact report about the dock last year found that the City of Ketchikan could lose about $4.3 million in port fees and sales taxes annually. Binkley said the economic activity will still be on the island, but may just switch locations.

Mayor Bob Sivertsen said he thinks downtown will still have its draw for tourists docking at Ward Cove. Once the cruise ship season returns to normal, he said he also expects the number of passengers visiting Ketchikan to grow.

“I think it will be a short-term loss because I think that we’ll backfill those spaces,” he said. “We already have ships anchoring out on given days, and now they may be able to come to port.”

The shortened cruise ship season likely means those passenger numbers will look different for now. But beyond the passengers on top of the boats, there’s also a story below the ships.

As the first mega-ships begin to dock at Ward Cove, ongoing environmental concerns have been renewed. The pulp mill had discharged pollutants into the cove, and the dock now rests on a “superfund” site. That designation allows the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminants and manage the area in the long term.

The EPA completed its cleanup of the site in 2001, removing some sunken logs and the contaminated soil, as well as placing a 27-acre sand cap over some remaining contaminated wood material on the seafloor. But federal scientists say they’re worried that the construction of the dock — and the mega-ships docking — may stir up that sand cap.

Madi Novak, the EPA’s remedial project manager for Ward Cove, said it’s important to not disturb that remedy.

“The wood waste, as it breaks down, can release material that is toxic to the environment,” she said. “That sand serves to cover that material.”

Novak said the sand cap also creates a habitat for bottom-dwelling creatures. She said that the impact of the dock’s construction and operation is uncertain right now — but the EPA requires ongoing monitoring. She said they expect to have a more clear picture within the next year.

Binkley said he’s confident the cap will be protected, and that they designed the floating dock to avoid any damage.

“The propellers of the ship are so far away, they’ll be almost 1,300 feet away from the shore, in very deep water at low, low tide,” he said. “And then there’s no physical dock that they’re up against, that would divert the thrust down to the bottom.”

As developers continue to monitor the mega-ship operation with EPA oversight, Binkley said that the inside of the mill is a work in progress. He gave a sneak peek into one part of the final vision: a recreation of the Tongass National Forest inside, complete with sounds of nature.

“As you walk in, all you’ll see are the trees,” he explained.

But that will come later. For now, they’re just getting ready for the next round of ships, arriving every Thursday through Oct. 21. And it was construction noises — not nature ones — that echoed around the mill when tourists weren’t there.

At least 21 people have lost their lives in plane crashes in the Ketchikan area since 2015.

That’s after six — including five out-of-state cruise ship passengers — died in a sightseeing crash in Misty Fjords National Monument on Aug. 5.

The crash has renewed concerns about the number of fatal, small commercial aircraft accidents in Alaska, which, according to an investigation by member station KUCB and ProPublica, is growing relative to the rest of the country.

KUCB and ProPublica reporter Zoë Sobel joined Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove to talk about the issue.

Listen here:

Casey Grove: A number of these recent fatal crashes have involved sightseeing tours carrying cruise ship passengers. What can you tell me about that?

Zoë Sobel: As you’ve mentioned, since 2015, there have been three fatal accidents that have killed 21 people. And in each of these accidents, some of the people who died were cruise ship passengers. Bill Heuer lost both his sisters and their husbands in 2007 when their sightseeing plane crashed into the mountains near Ketchikan, and they were visiting Alaska on a cruise. Heuer and his family recently marked the 14th anniversary of their family tragedy.

Bill Heuer: A lot of time has gone by. I’m sure people are out there, they probably see some changes. But from the outside it’s same old same.

Zoë Sobel: Heuer describes the August 5 accident as eerie because it’s around the same time and place as the crash that killed his sisters and their husbands.

Casey Grove: Do we know why these types of flights have been crashing?

Zoë Sobel: At this point, it’s way too early to know what caused the August 5 crash. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, but it’s unlikely we’ll see their final report for another year or two. The biggest similarities we see in fatal accidents around Ketchikan in recent years is that they were sightseeing flights carrying passengers from cruise ships. These accidents were all in the busy summer months, and sometimes there also is poor weather.

Casey Grove: So this had already been a major concern of the NTSB, right? What has been done or what’s being done to address these crashes?

Zoë Sobel: The NTSB has been concerned about small plane commercial aviation in Alaska for a while. Robert Sumwalt is the recently retired chairman of the NTSB, here are his thoughts on the August 5 accident.

Robert Sumwalt: It’s very, very distressing to see yet another sightseeing accident occur — very distressing. I feel that this accident shows that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Zoë Sobel: Following a roundtable meeting in 2019, focused on improving small plane aviation, the NTSB issued a safety recommendation asking the Federal Aviation Administration to review and prioritize Alaska’s aviation safety needs and ensure it’s making progress on implementing safety enhancements. The FAA says it’s made the issue a top priority. It’s even launched a new program called the Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative to look at how the agency is providing resources to the state, their effectiveness and what more can be done.

Over the years there also have been safety recommendations from the NTSB, specifically related to sightseeing accidents. Back in 2017, the NTSB asked the FAA to create more conservative rules for the Ketchikan air tour industry. It also asked the FAA to meet with Ketchikan’s air tour operators annually to review operational hazards and collaborate on ways to manage these risks. But the NTSB doesn’t just issue recommendations to the FAA. In 2017, it asked the world’s largest cruise industry trade association to encourage air tour operators that they work with to review the circumstances of a 2015 fatal Ketchikan crash. In that accident the NTSB determined the probable cause was the pilot flew into deteriorating weather and ended up flying into the side of a mountain. But the NTSB also found that the now defunct operator’s company culture endorsed flying into hazardous weather.

Casey Grove: Okay, so is the FAA being responsive to these NTSB recommendations though?

Zoë Sobel: The FAA doesn’t always move forward on NTSB recommendations and, in recent years, the agencies have disagreed more. A review of NTSB data showed that the NTSB found that the FAA didn’t take adequate action on nearly 40% of the recommendations it closed in the past decade. And that’s up from 20% in the 2000s and 15% in the 1990s.

Casey Grove: Are pilot qualifications an issue the NTSB is looking into? I mean, how experienced do these pilots have to be before flying passengers in potentially poor weather and rough terrain?

Zoë Sobel: I’m not aware that pilot qualifications are an issue the NTSB is looking into. That said, Alaska is a place where a lot of new pilots come to get their first commercial experience and build time before moving on to fly for a large air carrier like Delta, United or American Airlines. And pilots for large air carriers typically need to have at least 1,500 hours of flying experience. But pilots for small operators can have as little as 500 hours of experience. They can also fly more hours annually than pilots working for large carriers and are subject to different rest time requirements. We found that some airlines chose to have internal hiring and training standards that are higher than the FAA minimums, but that varies.

Casey Grove: Interesting. Do you know if cruise ship passengers are aware of this history when they booked the tours?

Zoë Sobel: Well, there probably are some people who do a lot of research before booking shoreside excursions. I think there also are those who sign up for a tour when they see it offered. Here’s Bill Heuer. Again, his sisters and their husbands died in a flightseeing accident in 2007 in the Misty Fjords.

Bill Heuer: I think you have a tendency to think or assume that safety is always being taken care of somehow.

Zoë Sobel: Heuer thinks taking the tour of the Misty Fjords likely was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Over the course of this reporting, one thing that has come up is that it’s very hard for non-aviation people to tell the difference between operators. When a passenger books a ticket for a flight, they expect it to be safe. But what they might not know is that the rules that govern flight operations can vary. There are much stricter rules for larger carriers like United or Alaska Airlines than there are for these on-demand sightseeing tours, and that’s something I didn’t know until I started doing this research.