Environment

For years, a national database that tracks and maps landslides has had a major hole: Alaska.

That’s about to change. The state released a database this week that pinpoints where thousands of slides have happened in the past. The aim is to better understand the risk and prepare for the future.

It’s a crucial tool that will help communities, researchers and government agencies “start extrapolating if there are certain slope angles with certain soil types or rock types that are more susceptible than others,” said Jillian Nicolazzo, a geologist with the state’s Landslide Hazards Program.

Staff at the Alaska Department of Natural Resources created the inventory over the last three years by poring over more than 1,000 geologic reports, most of which date back to the 1950’s.

Those reports are from the state agency and the U.S. Geological Survey that were published while mapping parts of Alaska for reasons unrelated to landslides, like building roads or identifying mineral resources.

“If you want to know where to go mine a mineral, for instance, you need to know what the geology is, what kind of rocks might have that particular mineralogy that you’re looking for,” Nicolazzo said.

The reports were largely created using aerial imagery, which means they also capture where landslides have occurred. Nicolazzo helped extract that information from each report, categorize every slide, and compile the data in one spot.

“It’s a good step one, I think, to get it all in one place where it’s easy to find. And then people can start getting creative,” she said.

The new tool makes clear that Alaska is highly susceptible to landslides. It also highlights that certain types of landslides are more common in some areas than in others.

If you zoom in on Southeast Alaska, for instance, hundreds of blue dots appear throughout the region. They signify places where so-called debris flows have taken place. Meanwhile the Brooks Range, further north, is covered largely by pink dots. Those dots mark places where seasonal freeze-thaw cycles have triggered instability.

Something else that jumps out is that major swaths of the state at least appear to have no slides at all, including on the North Slope.

“It’s not that there aren’t any up there. It’s just that they haven’t been mapped yet,” Nicollazo said, noting that the state will ideally fill those gaps as it continues to map new areas.

The new inventory will feed into a national one that the USGS built using information from states. That inventory does currently include some limited information about Alaska.

But the new data will “pretty substantially change the map of Alaska that they have on their nationwide map,” Nicolazzo said.

The State of Alaska has filed criminal charges against Chilkat Valley resident Steve Kroschel two months after state agencies first raided his once-popular wildlife facility, near Haines.

The state Office of Special Prosecutions filed three felony and two misdemeanor charges against Kroschel on Thursday, alleging cruelty to animals. Each of those felony charges could result in up to a $500,000 fine and five years in prison, according to Alaska statute.

An arraignment has been scheduled in Haines for Oct. 8, the state said in a release. Reached by phone on Friday morning, Kroschel was in Central Russia and not yet aware of the charges.

“This is insane, absolutely insane,” he said. “My heart, my spirit, my mind, is all about taking care of life on Earth.”

The charges are the most recent development in a years-long battle between Kroschel and the state over the Kroschel Films Wildlife Center.

For two decades, the facility has offered thousands of visitors close-up views of wild animals. But a series of incidents and inspections over the years raised concern among state officials over animal welfare and human safety.

Those concerns, plus a lapsed federal license, eventually led to the revocation of Kroschel’s state permit. Then, in June, two state agencies executed a search warrant and seized dozens of animals as part of a criminal investigation.

Charging documents indicate the three felony charges are related to “inflicting severe or prolonged physical pain or suffering” on animals including a moose, a porcupine and a brown bear. The two misdemeanors allege Kroschel failed to care for animals including a porcupine and moose.

Kroschel remains adamant that the charges are unfair and inaccurate.

“Every animal that I’ve had that passed away was either examined in a necropsy that I requested, or the state, and it was either old age or something like that,” he said. “It was not because of negligence. But they’re trying to pin that on me as animal cruelty, that’s insane.”

Kroschel has spent much of the last two months in Russia, where he says he’s helping care for some wolf pups and two orphaned grizzly bear cubs.

The Office of Special Prosecutions did not respond to multiple requests for comment but said in a statement that the charges are “only allegations and are not evidence of guilt.”

On this episode of Garden Talk, host Bostin Christopher talks with Darren Snyder about how to help your garden deal with too much rainfall.

On this episode of Garden Talk, host Bostin Christopher talks with UAF Cooperative Extension Agent Darren Snyder about how to help your garden deal with too much rainfall.

The conversation examines how excessive rain and strong winds, particularly in Juneau, affect gardens nearing the end of the growing season. Snyder offers practical advice for dealing with the current conditions, such as covering ground crops like potatoes with plastic to prevent cracking, and suggests harvesting crowded annuals to improve airflow and reduce rot. He also shares long-term strategies for future seasons, emphasizing the importance of good soil drainage and utilizing techniques such as mulching, hoop houses, and high tunnels to manage moisture effectively.

Find further resources and more information at https://www.uaf.edu/ces/garden/index.php.

In April, Julie and Dug Watkins were walking their dogs on Sandsend Beach, near their home in northern Scotland. As Julie was taking a short swim in the cold water, her husband found something unusual lying on the pebbles: an amber-colored wine bottle.

The bottle was sandy and partly covered with seaweed. Inside, they found a note saying it had been released on sea ice near Utqiagvik, on Alaska’s North Slope, six years earlier. The author had drawn a picture of a whale on the back and signed it: Craig George.

“When we read the message in the bottle and realized how significant a thing it was, we were really very excited,” Julie Watkins said.

John Craighead George was a prominent whale expert who lived in Utqiagvik for decades. He died in 2023 — three years after setting the bottle adrift — leaving behind an extensive body of research. He published studies on things like how long bowheads can live and how they can survive in cold waters.

“I suppose Craig lives on in that message,” Watkins said. “He probably lives on in so many ways, but that was just one more thing.”

Release

Originally from New York, George was instrumental in starting a bowhead whale census back in the 1970s that incorporated knowledge of Iñupiaq hunters and supported their subsistence.

Kate Stafford, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, counted whales with George in the spring of 2019. For several months, they took hour-long snowmachine rides to an observation perch built on the ice north of Utqiagvik. At the end of the census, she said they followed George’s tradition and released several bottles with messages.

“Most of the time, we put them in the lead, and they probably got crushed when the ice moved around,” she said. “We thought this time, we would put them on the sea ice.”

Over the years, George collected sturdy wine bottles and emptied them with friends during music nights – which, to Stafford, is a lovely memory in itself. She said he would write his messages on waterproof paper, seal the bottles with wax and tape, and release them after the whale census.

The only known retrieval happened when one of those bottles washed up in Point Lay, about 180 miles to the southwest. That is, until now.

“Craig was the most curious person you’d ever meet,” Stafford said. “I think it just tickled him to think about putting a message – often with a little drawing that he’d done, and the weather, and the date – putting it in a bottle and seeing where it ended up, or if it ever got recovered. He would have been so thrilled that that bottle was recovered in such an interesting spot, like the Atlantic.”

The journey

When George released the bottle near Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, he was facing a strong northeastward stream. Seth Danielson, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was also George’s colleague and friend, said the bottle most likely got caught in the Beaufort Gyre, a clockwise ocean circulation that sent it toward the East Siberian Sea.

Then, the Transpolar Current likely picked it up. That’s the same stream that helped the explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram drift from the Russian coast to Norway in the late 1800s. In the 1990s, it contributed to the global spread of rubber duckies after a spill in the North Pacific.

“There’s sort of this large ocean superhighway of ice that moves from the East Siberian Sea towards Fram Strait on the east side of Greenland,” Danielson said.

Danielson said that somewhere south of Iceland, the bottle probably drifted east and was caught by the North Atlantic Current, which carried it to its final destination: Shapinsay, one of the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland.

Discovery

There are no bowheads in Orkney, but the area is a popular whale watching spot for orcas. Julie and Dug Watkins – the couple who found George’s bottle – shared their discovery in a local Facebook group for whale enthusiasts. They learned that another Orkney resident knew George from helping with the whale census in Alaska, back in the 1980s.

“It’s just absolutely incredible that it should travel that far and not get broken or nothing else happened to it, but also end up on this beach, on this island, where people knew about him and respected his work and things,” Julie Watkins said. “It’s unbelievable almost, but it happened.”

The note in the bottle included George’s email address. The couple reached out, to no avail. Then they contacted the City of Utqagvik, which connected them with George’s widow, Cyd Hanns.

Hanns said she was glad the couple kept trying to reach out. She wrote to them about George’s life and research, as well as Alaska whaling traditions.

“I was happy-sad because he wasn’t here,” Hanns said. “He has so many friends around the world, and still making them.”

Julie Watkins’s husband Dug died unexpectedly a month after finding the bottle. The family sent his ashes out in a small burning boat from the same beach where the bottle washed up. Losing a loved one was a point of connection between Hanns and Watkins, who have stayed in touch over email.

And Hanns said the discovery brought her family closer together, three years after her husband’s death.

“It’s a story on the ocean currents and the way loved ones can surprise us even after they’re gone,” she said.

The brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve have been packing on the pounds this summer. Starting Tuesday, you can vote online for the chunkiest bear in the annual Fat Bear Week competition. The name of the event says it all, said Katmai park ranger Sarah Bruce.

“We celebrate how fat the bears get,” she said. “Fat equals survival. A fat bear is a healthy bear.”

Fat Bear Week started as a one-day celebration over a decade ago, but has grown into an international phenomenon. Over a million people from more than 100 countries voted in the bracket-style competition last year.

Bruce called the face-off the park’s hallmark event.

“Fat Bear Week brings the park into the living room of anybody who wants to enjoy this place,” she said. “Even just this past week, we had a bear cam fan who visited the park from New Zealand.”

Bruce is originally from Maryland and she’s hooked, too.

She said it’s stunning to watch the bears transform as they feast on fish in the Bristol Bay watershed – home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.

“It really is quite a sight to see these bears go from 5, 6, 700 pounds and they come out of the den over 1,000 pounds by the end of the season,” she said.

Most bears in the area start making their way to their dens in October and November. While hibernating, bears will drop a third of their body weight because they don’t eat or drink.

Park rangers are still finalizing this year’s 12 chunky competitors but Bruce said there may be some familiar faces – like potentially Grazer, the reigning champion, along with Chunk, last year’s runner up. Online voting in the bracket-style challenge opens at explore.org Tuesday and runs through Sep. 30.

But if you want to get in on the action early, Fat Bear Week also has a junior division where the plumpest cub advances to the main bracket. Voting for the juniors starts Thursday and closes Friday.

A cruise ship passenger died in Juneau on Tuesday after falling off a steep mountainside on Mount Roberts near downtown. 

Search and rescue responders used drones to locate the body of 32-year-old Texas resident Britian Pool Tuesday night, according to a dispatch the Alaska State Troopers shared Wednesday afternoon.

His body was recovered by Troopers and Juneau Mountain Rescue after he and another man reportedly fell from the Mount Roberts trail and slid down the mountainside. Capital City Fire/Rescue assisted troopers and Juneau Mountain Rescue on a rescue near the tram, according to a department Facebook post on Tuesday night. 

Both men were passengers on a cruise ship visiting Juneau for the day. Responders were able to locate and rescue the man with Pool, who suffered minor injuries. 

According to troopers, Pool’s body is being sent to the state medical examiner’s office and his next of kin have been notified. 

Pool is the second cruise ship passenger to die from a fall on Mount Roberts this year. At least five people have died in the backcountry around Juneau this summer. 

Correction: Alaska State Troopers initially reported the wrong age for the man who died.