Outdoors

The state’s Board of Game unanimously voted down a proposal that would have required young hunters in Southeast to complete an education course before hunting alone.

The board decided the change could cause too much red tape in remote areas, unfairly limiting subsistence hunters while costing too much for the state’s fish and game department.

The proposal would have required all Southeast area hunters born after January 1, 2010 to be certified through an education course to hunt alone. Without that certification, they’d have to hunt with someone born before that date, or with someone already certified through the new course.

The requirement would have applied to game management units 1 through 5. That’s almost all of Southeast, including Ketchikan, Prince of Wales Island, Juneau, Petersburg, Wrangell, Haines, Skagway, Yakutat, Pelican, Hoonah and Angoon.

The proposal was brought forward by the Juneau Douglas Advisory Committee.

Kevin Maier is the committee’s chair. He told KRBD the idea started with a committee member who volunteers as a hunter education instructor. The committee wrote in their proposal that they hoped it would reduce firearm accidents in the field. The committee also wrote that online options could go a long way in making the course more available to remote communities.

“He really sees the value in the program and thinks that it’s a good avenue to introduce youth to hunting, and to do so in a safe way,” Maier said. “And so yeah, he’s been a big advocate. When we (the committee) met in the spring, he put that proposal through and, and we’re happy to support him and happy to support that idea.”

Maier said his group is aware of all the ways Juneau differs from the rest of the region.

“We’re aware that it’s easy to sit in the Capital with, you know, relatively stable broadbands,” he said. “And access to all the resources that we enjoy, and, you know, advocate for this. We think it’s a great program.”

Maier said his committee was “realistic” about their expectations, and didn’t expect it to get past the board.

“But we also recognize that there are some concerns for accessibility,” he explained. “And I think there’s also some interesting sort of cultural issues too, you know, like, I think in villages, you learn different ways, and you learn through different different methods, and we don’t intend or want to undo those or or undercut those in any way.”

Sitka-area biologist Steve Bethune explained the proposal to the Board of Game during Saturday’s deliberations. The department’s official position on the proposal was “neutral” headed into the Board of Game meeting.

“While the department is in favor of certification courses to educate hunters, and decrease firearm incidents, the logistical barriers of Southeast Alaska would make it extremely difficult to reach every hunter who would be required to complete hunter education under this regulation,” Bethune said. “Normally diligent subsistence users who live in units one through five may find it difficult to comply due to these logistics and thus the reasonable opportunity to take an animal for success for subsistence uses may be hindered.”

He said the state’s Department of Fish and Game already has a hunter education program, with eight staffers and 500 volunteers. But that might not be enough to meet the demand that the requirement would cause — especially for communities off the road system, where travel is expensive and weather-dependent much of the year.

Stosh Hoffman of Bethel is the board’s vice chair. He expressed concern about families that rely on hunting.

“In some of these very rural areas, having someone require them to get a license to feed their families is kind of contradictive it just doesn’t flow, sit well with me,” Hoffman said. “In fact, it could cause a lot of harm if we required that, so I’m not in support of it.”

Member Jake Fletcher of Talkeetna worried the regulation would prevent elders from passing on traditional knowledge.

“I think that in this state, we’re really unique,” he said. “I think we depend on our elders in our community to impart a lot of this knowledge onto our youth and take them out. And it’s really important.”

Ultimately, the board had too many concerns to pass the proposal and unanimously voted against it.

But despite voting the proposal down, the board wasn’t against increased hunter education — especially for youth.

Wasilla-based member Lynn Keogh shared an idea.

“When I was in elementary school, I went through hunter ed in school,” he said. “So it seems like it’d be at least worth a conversation for the department (of Fish and Game) to get with the various school districts around Alaska and see if maybe they can offer the program and kind of carry the ball there.”

Saturday was the beginning of the Board of Game’s deliberations on game proposals from all over Southeast Alaska. The hunter education proposal was the first deliberation the group took up, as it was at the top of the list of proposals affecting multiple regions. The board meeting runs through Tuesday in Ketchikan.

The Mendenhall Glacier is one of Alaska’s most-visited tourist attractions in summer. But on a foggy, drizzly day in January, it was quiet except for the sound of Laurie Craig’s ice cleats.

She stood in the pavilion at the edge of the parking lot, pointing past an expanse of hemlock and spruce toward Nugget Falls. Craig saw hundreds of thousands of tourists pass through here when she was the lead naturalist at the visitor’s center. Now, she’s retired.

“That waterfall is awe-inspiring for people. They can go stand in the mist. And they’re thrilled. There’s goats you can see on the mountainside above, there’s bears walking along, tucked into the trees,” Craig said. “How do we preserve that magic? While we’re hosting a million people?”

The U.S. Forest Service is asking people to help them solve that dilemma between now and Feb. 21, during the third public comment period for the Mendenhall Improvement Project.

About 700,000 visitors passed through Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area in 2017 — more people than the current visitor facilities were designed for. The Forest Service has been working on plans to upgrade the recreation area since 2019.

Ranger Tristan Fluharty says public feedback — more than 400 comments last time around — motivated the release of three new plans earlier this month.

“We’ve really tried to not just request those public comments, but also incorporate them into our alternatives,” he said.

There are also four existing plans, from earlier stages in the planning process. While the new alternatives work to address the public comments in some way, all seven plans remain on the table.

The new alternatives mainly address public concerns around the placement and design of new buildings, the presence of motorized boats on Mendenhall Lake and measures to protect local wildlife habitats.

The new plans offer three different visions for the new welcome center. Previous plans proposed a new welcome center in place of the pavilion on the edge of Mendenhall Lake. That drew concern over blocking the existing panoramic view. New alternatives preserve the view by moving the new welcome center — either by placing it on the hillside, near the existing visitor’s center, or by pulling it back from the lakeshore and making it two separate buildings.

Perhaps most significantly, alternative 6 is the only new plan that ditches motorized boats on Mendenhall Lake. During the last public comment period, the presence of boats raised concerns about visitor safety, emissions, disturbances to wildlife and more general fears about commercialization.

Alternative 6, which has the least environmental impact, also cuts carbon emissions by replacing motorized buses with electric shuttles.

But for all of these plans, Craig worries about the bears. She fears that trail expansion will break up habitats and increase potential encounters with people. Still, she says the new alternatives address many of her previous concerns, and she’s hopeful that people will keep sharing their opinions this time around.

“People get very tired of coming back and doing the same thing over and over. I’ve been there,” she said. “The important thing is when we commented the last time and said we want something different, the Forest Service listened, and is offering something new for us to consider,” she said.

There will be an open house at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center on Jan. 24, 2023 from 4:00 until 7:30 pm, and a webinar Thursday Jan. 26, from 5:30 to 7:30, for the public to learn more.

Comments can be submitted online, by fax, by mail or by hand until Feb. 21.

When Homer resident Kelsey Haas fell into an open patch of icy water earlier this winter, she didn’t panic. It was her first time falling through ice, but as a guide and avid adventurer, Haas did know a few techniques for getting out of frozen water.

None of those techniques involved the carcass of a snowshoe hare.

It was late November. Haas was skating to the Grewingk Glacier with a group of about a dozen others. The massive, 13-mile-long glacier has become a popular destination in Kachemak Bay State Park, especially in winter. After a boat ride from Homer, it’s about a two-mile trek, partly over a frozen lake, to get there.

The 29-year-old hiking and rafting guide had been there many times before, in warm and winter months, and her friends were also experienced adventurers. They had throw ropes and rescue gear in tow, and they were testing the thickness of the ice with ice screws.

While she was exploring around the glacier, Haas found the carcass of a snowshoe hare on the ice. She thought it was kind of mysterious.

“It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t super stiff, but it wasn’t like I wanted to eat it because I don’t know how it died,” she said. “It was interesting. There were no puncture wounds.”

Haas decided to hold onto the carcass. She wanted to take it home to skin it and save the fur.

Later, as the sun was about to set, Haas and her friends discovered an ice formation that Haas described as a “perfectly picturesque arch, right in the middle of an iceberg.”

“We all knew it was really thin ice and that it wouldn’t be a good idea,” Haas said.

But the arch was too beautiful and tempting, and she wanted to skate through it.

If anything did happen, Haas figured there was a trained group of well-equipped people who could help. And she had extra warm clothes in her backpack. So she tempted fate and skated through the arch as fast as she could.

Instead of thin ice, she found an open hole.

Haas said her instincts kicked in after she fell in the water. Instantly cold, she knew she had to go back the way she had come, toward where the ice was at least somewhat stable. She also knew that she had to position her body horizontally to pull herself out of the water.

A dry bag she carried on her back had air inside, which helped keep her afloat. And she still had the dead hare.

“I don’t know how I didn’t let that go,” she said.

When she reached the edge, she slapped the hare forward onto a shelf of ice. The wet carcass quickly froze onto the cold surface. Haas said she used the frozen snowshoe hare like an anchor to pull herself out of the icy water.

She was out before her friends could help.

“I just looked at them, and I was like, ‘I just have to skate as fast as possible and work my body temperature back up.’”

Once she made it back to shore, there was a group waiting for her.

“It was like a pit crew, like everyone just swarmed me,” she said. “[They] took off all my clothes. I looked like a giant marshmallow.”

Haas said one of the biggest struggles was taking her ice skates off because the laces were frozen solid. She remembered three people tugging on each skate, struggling to remove them. After she was able to get her skates off, she still had a mile and a half hike to the water taxi.

“My coldest thing was my feet,” Haas said. “On the hike back, my feet were definitely pretty numb the whole way.”

While Haas said she was able to laugh about the situation immediately afterward, she said it definitely affected her days later.

“Anytime I close my eyes, I kind of have a flashback,” she said. “I didn’t sleep for a couple of days. And that’s when I realized like, ‘Okay, this was probably more traumatic than I thought at the time.’”

Haas said the most important thing is to be aware of your personal safety while exploring places like Grewingk Glacier.

“It’s so important to recognize that level of risk,” she said. “Always have dry clothes, always use a dry bag, have a throw rope, have all the things you need to get people out of that ice, and just do it really safely.”

And as for the snowshoe hare that Haas used to pull herself out of the icy water?

“I want to make slippers,” she said. “Definitely want to make slippers out of it.”

A remedy is on the way to overcome a barrier to visitor movement through one of Alaska’s premier tourist attractions. But it still will take some time to happen.

The National Park Service has selected a contractor to build a bridge over the halfway point of the sole road through Denali National Park and Preserve, a site where intensifying thaw has triggered an ongoing landslide that has made the area impassable. If all goes according to schedule, park visitors will be able to travel the full road by the summer of 2025, said Brooke Merrell, the park’s superintendent.

The site, an exposed, high-altitude, steep area called Pretty Rocks, has been closed to traffic since late August of 2021, when park managers could no longer maintain it safely. It has since slumped so far that a section of road has been obliterated.

The scheduled construction, expected to start in May, will mean the passage of three full tourist seasons without access to the second half of the Denali park road — a headache for the tourism industry, but a necessary step to ensure future access, Merrell said.

“You just can’t look at it and not immediately understand why that project is necessary,” she said.

Another reality is that climate change is reshaping the landscape and creating new hazards.

“In Alaska, the changes in geology that are happening are a ‘now’ thing. They’re not a ‘10- or 20-years-from-now’ thing,” she said.

The contract with Granite Construction, a California-based firm with an Alaska regional office and several Alaska operations, was formalized last week, Merrell said. The cost of the project is capped at $102 million, she said.

Money to complete the project has been made available by the recently passed omnibus budget bill. That $1.7 trillion package includes $1.5 billion for the National Park Service to address impacts of natural disasters, which will include the ongoing landslides in Denali, as well as wildfire and flood impacts in other parks.

While there is not a specific amount of money designated for Denali and its road fixes, there will be enough to get the work done, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who helped write and shepherd the package.

“What we have done in this measure is we have ensured that the funding to support the road will be covered in full, so that we do not miss yet another season,” Murkowski said in a Dec. 23 news conference. “It’s a bigger project than anybody had ever anticipated, and so it did require additional funding.’

Previously, $25 million had been set aside for the project through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The ongoing Pretty Rocks landslide, tumbling down a high slope that overlooks some braided tributaries of Denali’s Toklat River, is part of a trend in mountainous areas all around the far north. Warmer air temperatures and more rainfall has thawed permafrost soil and loosened the ice-laden, high-altitude geologic formations known as “rock permafrost.” Additionally, in some areas, slopes are being destabilized by the melt of glaciers that buttress mountains.

Effects can be dramatic and disastrous. In Greenland, a localized tsunami produced by a thaw- and melt-induced landslide in 2017 killed four people in the fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq. In 2015, a mountainside collapsed in a remote coastal area of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, dumping enough rock and sediment into a fjord to cause the fourth-highest tsunami ever recorded. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and neighboring mountainous areas of Canada are also considered global hotspots for these thaw- and melt-related landslides.

Among the areas where frozen terrain is prone to slides, Pretty Rocks stands out.

The warming of air temperatures in Denali has accelerated. From 1950 to 2010, the increase was tracked at a rate of 4.3 degrees Celsius (7.7 degrees Fahrenheit) per century – the highest rate for that period measured at all U.S. national parks, according to the Park Service. Warming has intensified since then; temperatures in Denali rose by nearly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from 2014 to 2019, according to Park Service experts. May-to-September rainfall since 1950 has also increased, though with a lot of variation, as is the case for the state as a whole.

Geologically, the Pretty Rocks area is precarious because of its composition. It holds a conglomeration of rock glacier, permafrost, clay and other substances layered atop each other.

The location – the midpoint of the only road through one of the crown jewels of the U.S. National Park System – gives Pretty Rocks a high profile.

The slope at Pretty Rocks has actually been moving for a long time. Until the past decade, though, the movement was slow, at times even barely perceptible.

Before 2014, the Pretty Rocks’ slope movement was measured at inches per year, according to the Park Service. It sped in subsequent years to inches per month, then inches per week and then inches per day. By 2021, the rate was more than half an inch an hour, until August of that year, when a section slumped abruptly and the Park Service imposed an early end to some visitors’ Denali trips.

The past season was the first with the full-year closure at Pretty Rocks. Park visitors, generally ferried by shuttle buses, could travel no farther than the road’s first 43 of 92 total miles.

Denali had more than 400,000 visitors in 2022, Merrill said, substantially less than the record 642,809 counted in 2017, but still a busy season.  The road closure itself proved to be a subject of interest, she said. Many visitors who rode the bus to the temporary end of the line walked farther to take in a full view of the collapsing Pretty Rocks slope, seeing first-hand the impact of thaw on Alaska’s mountain terrain, Merrell said.

“It was a very popular hike. It was pretty great, actually,” she said.

This coming season, those unobstructed views won’t be available. Bridge construction will be underway, though the Park Service is striving to limit disturbances like noise and truck traffic, Merrell said.

Even when the bridge over Pretty Rocks’ sliding slope is completed, Denali’s landslide problems will continue.

There are more than 140 other identified sites in Denali where the road is affected or threatened by landslides, Merrell said. That will mean more work in the future to protect the road and visitors, she said.

“We are anticipating that we’ll have more big projects — not a Pretty Rocks, but big, still,” she said.

One project already in the queue is mitigation work at an unstable site called Bear Cave, which is near Pretty Rocks.

Other Alaska national parks also have landslide problems threatening road corridors.

One is in Wrangell-St. Elias, where visitors use the 60-mile McCarthy Road to reach the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, the town of McCarthy and other attractions. By mid-century, air temperatures along the McCarthy Road corridor are expected to average above freezing, making slides more likely, according to a study by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists.

Even far-north Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, located above the Arctic Circle, is projected to have landslide-prone conditions in the future, according to the study, published in the journal Atmosphere. Average air temperatures are on track to be above freezing along the corridor that is proposed to hold a section of a yet-to-be-built industrial road, the study said. Of the 211 miles of road proposed in the Ambler Mining District Industrial Access Project, about 20 miles would cross through the southern part of Gates of the Arctic.

Correction: The original version of the article incorrectly described the bridge. It will be a steel truss bridge, not a suspension bridge. 

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

Ellen Bradley is a professional skier, but a trip to Eaglecrest last winter was the first time she’d ever skied in her traditional homelands. Now sheʼs working to help Alaska Native youth in Juneau get the same benefits that she has from the sport.

“Spending time on the land can address so many things in a person’s life,” she said. “But I think mental health is especially one of them — to just move your body with the land.”

Bradley hosted the Native Youth Snow Sports Community Night at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall in Juneau on Friday. The event offered prizes, like a formline snowboard designed by Lingít artist James Johnson, and featured live music by Southeast Alaska favorite Ya Tseen. It’s part of a broader effort to remove some of the barriers that face Alaska Native youth who want to ski. 

Bradley, who is Lingít, learned to ski from her dad as a young child in Washington State. She says it helped her feel connected to the land, but she didnʼt see many other Indigenous people on the slopes while she was growing up. 

“I had my brother and I had my dad, and everyone else I skied with was white,” she said.

She says the sport can seem off-limits — even to people who are Indigenous to the land a ski mountain sits on. One program she hopes will start changing that offers ski trips for youth to Eaglecrest, hosted by the Douglas Indian Association. 

Benson Bullock with DIA was at the event, helping sign kids up for the trips. He says they started last spring.

“My supervisor said I should figure out a way to take kids up to Eaglecrest in March and April and get them lessons, get them gear, just get kids out on the mountain,” Bullock said.

This year, he wants the program to get even more kids on the mountain. The first trip will be in January, though the dates aren’t set yet. Another is planned for March.

Bradley thinks that efforts to get kids on skis could mean more Indigenous people in the skiing industry as a whole.

“So they can become the professional skiers, so they can become the ski instructors, the lifties. So they can eventually become the people running Eaglecrest and making the decisions about what skiing is, where it happens,” Bradley said.

Ryland Tompkins, one of dozens of kids at the event, could be one of the future pros Bradley is thinking of. He hasnʼt skied or boarded yet, but his uncle Joe Tompkins is a Paralympic ski champion.

Ryland said he wants to learn, too. 

Bradley is hopeful that more and more Indigenous kids will start participating in snow sports.

“I think the future of skiing in Alaska is Indigenous,” she said. 

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has denied entry to veteran long-distance dog musher Hugh Neff.

That’s despite having the smallest-ever field of mushers signed up for the 2023 Iditarod.

Formerly of Tok and more recently based in Fairbanks and Anchorage, Neff has finished the Iditarod 13 times, placing as high as 5th in 2011. But over the years, Neff has had trouble in both the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest, another 1,000-mile race, which he’s won twice.

A dog on Neff’s 2018 Quest team died during the race. After finding what they described as signs of poor dog care, which Neff disputed, Quest officials later announced they were banning him from entering the 2019 race.

Neff had to re-qualify and ran the 2021 Yukon Quest, which was shortened to 300 miles due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Then Neff was forced to scratch in the 2022 Iditarod — his first thousand-miler since the Quest ban — due to race officials’ concern over his dogs’ health midway through the race. Neff had been running dogs from another veteran musher, Jim Lanier.

Then, less than a month later, Neff won the Kobuk 440 with the same dog team, saying at the time it was vindication.

Neff submitted paperwork to enter the 2023 Iditarod, but the officials notified him in early December they were denying his entry. A race spokesperson said that was a decision by the Iditarod’s Qualifying Review Board and based on Neff having been asked to scratch due to the dogs’ poor health in the prior race.

“We are committed to ensuring a culture of exemplary dog care, and we demand the same commitment of all teams who enter the race,” the Iditarod said in a statement.

Asked if there was a path forward for Neff to enter the Iditarod again in the future, an Iditarod spokesperson only said that the review board looks over every musher’s application on a yearly basis for each upcoming race.

Neff did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.