Outdoors

The U.S. Coast Guard had an unusual wildlife spotting off the coast of Unalaska last month: the body of a beaked whale.

The whale was found floating near Makushin Bay.

Researchers say it’s rare to see beaked whales, so even spotting a dead one provides an opportunity to learn more about the animals. The whales live in the cold ocean waters and dive more than 3,000 feet down to feed on fish and squid.

“They’re very deep divers, and we don’t know a lot about them,” said Mandy Keogh, the Alaska regional stranding coordinator for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. “When they’re done diving, they might sit at the surface for a little while, but then they’re gone again.”

Keogh said it appears the whale spotted last month was a Baird’s beaked whale, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet.

The Coast Guard had reported the whale to the 24-hour stranding hotline.

The hotline is part of a statewide program run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. People can call in to report animals that are caught in fishing nets or stranded on beaches. Or, in the case of the beaked whale, floating in the water.

When possible, a team of local volunteers responds. If the animal is injured, they do what they can to help. If it’s dead, they take measurements and samples. The data helps researchers learn about individual animals and monitor populations.

In the case of the beaked whale, the stranding network was unable to send out volunteers due to the location of the animal. But Keogh said researchers are using photographs of the whale to determine information such as species, sex and whether there are any signs of trauma.

Keogh underscored the importance of people reporting stranded mammals to the hotline. Stranding reports can act as an early alarm system that something is wrong with an entire population. Keogh said this helped NOAA realize ice seals were dying in huge numbers in the Bering Sea in 2018.

“We saw an unusually large number of ice seals being reported stranded dead along the shores. And that is particularly concerning because those animals are of subsistence importance,” she said.

You can report stranded, injured, and dead marine mammals to the 24-hour Stranding Hotline at 877-925-7773.

The used aerial gondola system that Juneau officials bought for an estimated $2 million from a ski resort in Austria is on its way.

Kristen Strom, the marketing and events manager at Eaglecrest Ski Area, said workers in Austria finished loading the last shipping container with parts of the disassembled system on Friday. She said the system should arrive in Juneau in early September.

Eaglecrest General Manager Dave Scanlan has been sharing updates about the process from Austria, where he’s been overseeing the system’s disassembly and loading since June 26. In a written report last week, Scanlan told the Eaglecrest board that the final shipping bill may come in well under the quoted price of $845,000.

Scanlan is expected back in Juneau on Monday night.

Meanwhile, city officials are negotiating a design and engineering services contract with Northwind Architects for the gondola system. Northwind was the only firm to respond to the city’s contract request last month.

Scanlan said Northwind’s tentative timeline, plus the tight market for labor and materials, means the actual construction and installation would begin in the summer of 2023 and be finished the following summer.

More technical work must be done before Eaglecrest’s leadership can decide where specifically on the mountain the gondola will go. But the preferred path calls for a loading station at the current lodge, a midway station to load and unload near Cropley Lake, and a summit house on Pitman’s Ridge.

The ski area’s leadership thinks an enclosed lift of this kind will open up more terrain to winter users and let Eagelcrest expand activities in the summer. They say those summer activities will put the city-owned enterprise on a path to financial sustainability.

The Castner Glacier ice cave off the Richardson Highway near Black Rapids attracts some 8,000 people annually. But federal officials and a University of Alaska professor are advising hikers to be careful around the ice cave because it’s gushing meltwater and slowly collapsing.

Chuck and Allison Hohnbaum drove down from North Pole on a hot and sunny day last week to take the 45-minute hike up to terminus of the Castner Glacier and check out the ice cave there.

“Been here a couple of times in the winter, where you can walk into the cave,” Chuck said, “and we figured we’d try it during the summer.”

Hohnbaum’s party parked their rig along with about a dozen others at a pull-off at the Richardson Highway bridge over the meltwater-swollen Castner Creek at milepost 217. They said they hadn’t heard there’s a torrent of water several feet deep running through the cave, and that it’s slowly collapsing. But Allison says that didn’t discourage them.

“No, we’re super-stoked!” she said. “This will be kind of cool, seeing it with the river gushing out of it.”

It is indeed gushing out of the roughly 10-by-20-foot opening at the mouth of the cave. And it’s ejecting rocks and chunks of ice — some as big as washing machines — before they’re carried downstream to melt. That’s why the federal Bureau of Land Management has posted signs on the trail leading to the glacier urging hikers to be careful when approaching the ice cave.

“You can still hike and see the Castner Glacier. The area is not closed,” says Scott Claggett, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Land Management. “We just want to make sure that people are aware and are being safe.”

Claggett says this year’s surge of runoff and meltwater is the heaviest in recent memory. And that’s why a snow and ice expert with the University of Alaska Fairbanks is urging caution for those who hike to the cave, especially if they want to take a look inside.

“People should be very aware that any tunnel in ice is temporary and there’s potential danger in it collapsing or having rocks that are in the ice above collapsing,” said Matthew Sturm, a geophysics professor with the UAF’s Geophysical Institute who heads up its Snow, Ice and Permafrost Group.

Sturm says meltwater created the ice cave, and now it’s causing it to collapse.

“Water that enters the glacier on the sides and above tends to want to work underneath the glacier at the bottom to get into a single channel,” he said in an interview last week. “And it emerges from the tip of the glacier, the terminus, leaving a tunnel.”

Sturm says that dynamic process is ongoing in all Alaskan glaciers, especially those in the eastern Alaska Range, all of which are melting and receding. He says that so-called “down-wasting” is being accelerated by the warming climate and unusually warm summer weather. But he says the gravelly material the glacier that’s piled up onto its terminus helps slow the melt.

“All of the glaciers that I know of in the Alaska Range have this debris in the lower end,” he said, “and that actually is saving them from the worst of climate change because it serves as a protector and insulator against these warmer temperatures.”

Sturm also discourages those who trek up to the glacier from crossing Castner Creek, both because of the heavy flow and because of the ice chunks and other debris it’s carrying.

Starting now through mid-August, garlic plants will be ready to harvest. But master gardener Ed Buyarski says gardeners should look out for botrytis, a fungus disease that can spread throughout crops.

“It’s mostly in the soil already, assuming that we’ve been gardening for a while — or even in the wild soil.” he said.

Buyarski pulled a garlic plant that was showing signs rot due to botrytis and pointed out pinkish-red streaks running down the base of the stalk to the bulb.

“Not a good thing this time of year,” he said.

Buyarski said each leaf of the garlic plant’s stalk corresponds to a layer of protective skin over the bulb.

“If they’re rotting, they don’t protect it,” he said.

He peeled away layers of red-streaked skins from the stalk to reveal the bulb and its cloves. Those are healthy and can be eaten fresh, but they are too small to be saved for curing.

Botrytis is very common and attacks plants when conditions are right, such as too much moisture or not enough air circulation. Buyarski said that having good drainage and air flow in beds and greenhouses will help reduce the fungus, and that gardeners should set aside affected plants to prevent more contamination.

“When I am harvesting the garlic a month from now, six weeks from now, I will sort out any of these that I am suspicious of, if I see that red streak going down into the bulb,” he said.

Email Sheli Delaney if you have questions for Garden Talk.

The U.S. Coast Guard rescued two guests of a Petersburg area fishing lodge Sunday from the shore of a remote bay after their skiff sank the day before.

The Coast Guard says it found the two in Totem Bay on the southern shore of Kupreanof Island, nearly 30 miles southwest of Petersburg, just after 11:00 a.m. on Sunday.

The two boaters were reported to have left Island Point Lodge the morning before in an 18-foot aluminum skiff. They were expected back by Saturday evening.

When they had not returned Sunday morning, fellow guests at the lodge contacted the Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard sent a 29-foot response boat with a Seattle-based crew that’s deployed in Petersburg this year along with the cutter Elderberry and a Jayhawk helicopter from Air Station Sitka.

The crew of the response boat located the two on shore at 11:13 a.m. and transported them to Petersburg. Both men were reported to be in stable condition. One had a minor hand injury.

Petersburg Volunteer Fire Department spokesman David Berg said local volunteers responded to meet the Coast Guard Sunday.

“These two had been out in this lodge’s boat and were fishing,” Berg said. “The boat capsized. They spent a couple hours in the water. Fortunately they were well dressed for weather with rain gear and not a lot other emergency equipment available with them. A lot of that went down with the boat. But they were able to get a small buoy and swim to shore and spent the evening, all night on the beach.”

Berg said the two used that buoy to get the attention of rescuers. They were not transported to the local medical center but returned to the lodge.

KFSK reached out to Island Point Lodge to try to contact the boaters, but the lodge declined to comment. Island Point is one of the sport fishing lodges on the Wrangell Narrows south of Petersburg, and guests use the lodge’s skiffs for halibut and salmon fishing in the area.

For more than 60 years, sailboats dominated Bristol Bay’s commercial fishery. Motorized vessels were illegal. Then, in 1951, the federal government finally allowed motorized fishing vessels in Bristol Bay.

LaRece Egli, the director of the Bristol Bay Historical Society Museum in Naknek, says that made sailing obsolete almost immediately for the fishery.

“I think it’s literally down to 50 or 46 boats or something like that in 1954, and then they just disappear,” she said.

By 1952, powerboats outnumbered sailboats 4 to 1. In less than five years, every commercial vessel had a motor.

This year, local historians are bringing the sailing tradition back to the bay with a vessel named the Libby, McNeil & Libby No. 76.  Tim Troll is the executive director of the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust and one of the sailing crew. They launched from Homer on July 5.

“We launched this morning at about 9 (a.m.),” Troll said. “It’s a beautiful, nice, sunny day with very calm weather.”

The sailboat has crossed the Cook Inlet, sailing toward Naknek.

“The boat is on its way,” he said. “It’s sailing nicely right now. We’ve got four guys aboard, and it just looks beautiful out there.”

Troll said in an email that they made it to their first stop, Williamsport, on Wednesday night. They carried the boat across the portage to Lake Iliamna and planned to reach Pedro Bay that evening.

The crew expected to visit Iliamna and Newhalen over the weekend and then head on to Kokhanok and Igiugig. It will visit Levlock on July 17 and the vessel is scheduled to arrive in Naknek on July 19.

Egli says the journey commemorates an iconic period in the fishery’s history.

“Those sails, sailing out on the horizon of our bay, are really visual icons, and they’re one of those grounding visual markers for both our canning industry, for the labor issues, independence of our fishermen, and also for our Indigenous story in our community,” she said.

Troll plans to update KDLG on their voyage over the next few weeks. More information about their journey is available on the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust website.

The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust and the Bristol Bay Historical Society Museum have also partnered to purchase the boat.