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Officials say to be prepared as Juneau is expected to see frigid temperatures this week and stretching into the next couple of weeks.

The National Weather Service issued a cold weather advisory and a high wind warning starting Thursday evening.  

The forecast shows that a Taku wind event could start as early as Thursday evening. The strongest gusts of 60 miles per hour or more are predicted to blow Saturday. Wind chill temperatures could reach as low as negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Without wind chill, temperatures are expected to range from the teens to negative 3 degrees Fahrenheit through Monday.

“We could see some periods, especially where we have the higher winds, that frostbite is going to be a real danger, and that’s where dressing in layers, covering up is important,” said Jeff Garmon, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Juneau.

He said the wind could also whip up freezing ocean spray, which can cover boats in ice and make maritime travel dangerous.

Garmon said this December is on track to break weather records.

“It’s looking like the numbers are shaping up for this to be the coldest we’ve seen in over 30 years in Southeast Alaska,” he said. “It’s a little unusual to go through like a two to almost three week period and be as cold as we are.”

Garmon said cold snaps in Juneau typically last just a few days, instead of weeks. He said this one is caused by a consistent flow of strong polar air moving in from interior Alaska and Canada.

Some locals might have seen a social media post from the NOAA NWS Climate Prediction Center warning that dangerous temperatures as low as negative 40 could hit Southeast later this month and into January. The post has been deleted, and Garmon said it looks like it was an error.

“I think what happened there was somebody in Washington (D.C.) got their wires crossed,” he said.

Garmon said such low, arctic temperatures are unlikely in most of Southeast. But he said that farther north — in exposed, high elevation spots like the Klondike Highway — it’s possible to see wind chill temperatures even lower.

The National Weather Service’s extreme cold warning for Skagway and White Pass says wind chill temperatures as low as negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit are expected. But Garmon said areas near sea level would probably see somewhere around negative 10 at the coldest.

In dangerous conditions, officials say it’s important to be prepared in case utilities fail. There’s been a string of power outages in Juneau this month.

Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the emergency programs manager for the City and Borough of Juneau, said to stock up on non-perishable foods, drinking water, blankets, flashlights and batteries in case the power goes out.

“It’s really important to be careful using candles for light and to heat your home — that can pretty quickly turn into a fire hazard,” he said.

To prevent pipes from freezing and bursting, he said to keep taps dripping. And he suggests keeping extra blankets and warm clothes in the car, in case it breaks down.

O’Shaughnessy urges residents to sign up for the city’s emergency alerts. He said just under 3,000 people are signed up.

Vulnerable populations will be the most susceptible to harsh conditions. Juneau’s emergency warming shelter in Thane is open each night. Transportation is available to the Glory Hall, Juneau’s homeless shelter, which offers meals and allows people to stay warm during the day.

The city is asking those with boats docked at the harbors to check and make sure everything is secure and working properly.

Garmon said a possible snowstorm could come through Juneau around Christmas and may bring warmer, maritime air that could pull temperatures out of the negatives. But he said it’s still too far out to be confident.

An Alaska Airlines flight headed from Juneau to Sitka on Monday morning was struck by lightning just before landing. 

Passenger Kathy Fitzgerald was on board the 27-minute flight. She said the plane was briefly engulfed in a bright orange and gold flash.

“It was like a giant flashbulb going off throughout the whole plane, coming from outside,” she said. “There was this huge, bright light — there was no loud sound, there was no shimmying or shuddering of the plane.” 

In her time flying through Alaska weather, she said she had never experienced anything like it. 

Fitzgerald was originally traveling from Anchorage, where flight 62 originated, back home to Ketchikan with her family. The leg between Juneau and Sitka was part of the milk run, and was supposed to continue to Ketchikan and Seattle.

According to a spokesperson for the airline, lightning strikes are not unusual.

“Our aircraft are designed to dissipate the electrical energy of the lightning bolt without damaging the aircraft systems,” the spokesperson said. 

The plane landed safely in Sitka, and the spokesperson said maintenance technicians were inspecting the aircraft as a precaution. 

The airline eventually cancelled the flight.

Eaglecrest Ski Area’s gondola cabins are headed to Colorado next month for repairs and a paint job. Cost for the work and shipping is expected to be around $450,000. The cost to bring other gondola parts to Juneau is expected to be even higher with tariffs. 

It’s been more than three years since the city bought the used gondola system from Austria. The plan is to have it up and running by the summer of 2028, but the ski area continues to face timeline delays and financial hurdles.

Craig Dahl is a special projects manager for the city. He gave an update about the city-owned ski area’s ongoing gondola project during an Eaglecrest board of directors meeting last week.

He said the gondola cabins were inspected in 2022 when the ski area purchased them and were deemed to be in good condition. But, he said the refurbishment in Colorado will make the nearly 20-year-old cabins into like-new condition. 

“We’re talking powder coating all the moving parts, replacing any parts that need repair or replace, new glass, new paint, new floors, new seats,” he said. 

The cabins are slated to be shipped out of Juneau in mid-January and Dahl said they won’t return until early 2027. The cost of the contract to refurbish the cabins is $414,000. But that doesn’t include the cost to barge and truck the cabins to Colorado to get the work done, which is an additional $37,000 cost. 

And the recent Trump Administration’s tariffs on imports could raise costs even more. Parts of the gondola still remain in Austria, most of which are made of steel. At the meeting, Dahl said estimates to ship them to Juneau are still very much up in the air, but he anticipates they will tack on a significant amount to the project’s overall cost. 

“I don’t know the amount — we’re probably going to be spending somewhere between $600,000 to $700,000 if we’re not able to eliminate the tariff.”

The ski area’s financial future is heavily riding on the gondola. In the coming years, the ski area is slated to run into a multimillion-dollar deficit to repair some broken and aging infrastructure while boosting pay to employees and preparing to operate year-round. 

A local Alaska Native corporation, Goldbelt Incorporated, invested $10 million in the gondola in 2022 in exchange for a revenue-sharing agreement, but the project’s overall cost is expected to exceed that. In that contract, it stipulates that the gondola must be up and running by the summer of 2028 or Goldbelt could reclaim its investment. 

Eaglecrest opened at a limited capacity this past weekend after an influx of snow. This year marks its 50th season as a ski area. 

Two different birds rarely seen in Sitka and much of Alaska showed up in Southeast last month. As KCAW’s Katherine Rose reports, it was exciting news for birders leading into a big month for our feathered friends–the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count.

In mid-November, the arrival of two rare birds in Sitka caught the attention of birders from around the state. Local naturalist Matt Goff said his son, a fellow naturalist, spotted them back-to-back.

“My son got ambitious about feeding birds this fall again, so [he’s] been putting out a lot of bird food, and he noticed a Harris’s sparrow in the yard, which is a bird that we’ve been looking for for a while,” Goff said.

The small brown sparrow breeds in the boreal forest of Northern Canada, but typically winters in the lower Midwest. Goff had never seen a Harris’s Sparrow in Sitka- the bird was last spotted here in the 1990s.

Just minutes later, his son spotted a second bird.

“About a half hour later, he’s like, ‘There’s another unusual bird in the in the yard,’” Goff recalls. “And he says, ‘I think I remember what it is. I can’t remember its name, but it’s like, it begins with a D, and it’s rare,’ and I said, ‘Is it a Dickcissel? And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s what it was.’”

The Dickcissel was even more unusual. Goff said the midwestern bird that winters in South America was last spotted in Juneau in 2004, and the Sitka sighting is the third on record for Alaska. Its arrival was so unexpected, it brought even more out-of-town visitors. Goff said after he posted about the sightings to the Alaska Rare Birds Facebook group, several birders from Anchorage flew down too…by plane, of course.

“There’s folks that keep track of a list, their Alaska State list, how many birds they’ve seen in the state. Some of these folks have well over 300 species. One of the people that came had over 400 species,” Goff said. “And it’s pretty difficult for them to get new birds these days, because they’ve seen most of them.”

View the group’s eBird checklist to see the birds they spotted on their Sitka visit

For some it wasn’t their first stop- one drove over five hours from Anchorage to Valdez the day before to see a Broad-winged hawk, the first spotted in Alaska.

“Some of us are mad travelers when it comes to birds,” Goff said. “Especially unusual birds.”

While the Dickcissel hasn’t been seen since late November, Goff said it’s possible the Harris’s Sparrow will stick around for the winter. If it does, it could be counted as part of the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. Victoria Vosburg is a retired Alaska Raptor Center veterinarian, and she said it’s the country’s longest running citizen science initiative.

“Way back in the beginning, people on Christmas Day used to get together and hunt. They called it a ‘side hunt,’ and it was a competition to see who could kill the most living things,” Vosburg said. “So it wasn’t just birds, it was killing everything. And then some people decided, ‘Let’s do something different. Let’s just count birds, instead of kill them.’”

For more than a century, the Christmas Bird Count has documented population declines and recoveries of all types of bird species, and the data collected during the count has influenced policy and conservation efforts. Sitkans began participating in the 1970s, and in just the past couple of decades, Vosburg said they’ve observed a lot.

“I started running the bird count about 20 years ago, and just since I started doing that, we’ve seen swans come back to town. We’ve seen Anna’s hummingbird start spending the winter,” Vosburg said. “We’ve seen Eurasian collared doves come to town, population explosions, disappear, and now we’re watching them on the rise again.”

Sitka’s Christmas Bird Count is December 20, and there are a number of ways to get involved. But if you’re looking to see a Dickcissel or a Harris’s Sparrow, it’ll be a lucky break. Only one of each was spotted. Goff said that’s often the case with lost birds.

“I think there’s some speculation that what might happen, in part, is their internal compass, so to speak, might be off 180 degrees or 90 degrees, or something like that, and they just go the wrong way because they orient differently,” Goff said. “Then they end up someplace that is not at all what their, sort of, biological systems are expecting.”

Goff said lost birds often look for the birds that are local and “in the know” to find food and sometimes they settle in for the winter. Sometimes not. But even if participants at the Christmas Bird Count don’t spot one of the rare birds, there are plenty of other bird species that are counting on being counted.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has landed on a solution to put an end to glacial outburst floods that have grown more destructive in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods over the past few summers. 

The agency will pursue something called a ‘lake tap.’ It’s essentially a tunnel through Bullard Mountain on the east side of the glacier that’s meant to steadily drain Suicide Basin so it can’t fill to the point of bursting and send some 16 billion gallons of water through the Valley. 

Denise Koch, the director of engineering & public works at the City and Borough of Juneau, explained it with a metaphor on Friday. 

“I just think about Suicide Basin as a proverbial bathtub,” she said. “What the lake tap is, is just leaving the drain open.” 

She said the drain will empty the water from Suicide Basin into Mendenhall Lake through a conduit somewhere between the face of Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls.

The decision comes after a three-day, closed-door meeting the Army Corps held with federal agencies, local officials and researchers in Juneau this week. Their main task was to discuss five options to prevent homes from flooding in the future. The Army Corps initially planned to host press briefings each day, but cancelled them on Tuesday. 

The city announced today that city leaders, along with the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, support the lake tap option, aligning with many of the public comments the Army Corps received last month.

Besides a lake tap, the options discussed at the meeting were a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake, a permanent levee, a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain and relocating impacted residents from the Valley. 

Koch said the group weighed the options based on risk to downstream residents, how quickly they could be built and the overall cost. 

“Ultimately, a lake tap was seen to reduce risk the most while being able to be constructed the most quickly, for the lowest amount of cost, with the least complex and least costly operation and maintenance,” Koch said. 

Koch said the tunnel could take as long as six years to excavate — the most conservative estimate. She said it could cost somewhere between $613 million and $1 billion, but that all estimates are very rough at this stage.

The Army Corps aims to finish its technical report for the lake tap in May. That will include a preliminary design, a more detailed cost estimate and a draft environmental review. There will be another public comment period once it’s complete.

To implement the solution, the Army Corps will need authorization and funding from Congress. 

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that a full draft environmental impact statement is unlikely to be drafted in the technical report.

Winter has arrived in Southeast Alaska, bringing freezing temperatures and enough snow to break daily records for some communities.

Jeff Garmon is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.

“I don’t think anybody escapes having to, you know, just make sure that we’re ready for arctic temperatures,” Garmon said. “Typically what’s over in British Columbia, we’re getting. It didn’t stop at the mountains. It decided to come for a visit in Alaska.”

Last weekend, Juneau broke its daily record for Dec. 6 with 9.6 inches of snow, the most snow recorded for that date, according to decades of data maintained by the National Weather Service.

Though there’s no consistent record of snowfall data for Wrangell, the community got over 18 inches of snow earlier this week.

And on Mitkof Island, over 15 inches of snow fell in Petersburg. The town got 7.8 inches on Monday alone, breaking the daily record for Dec. 8 by 3.8 inches. Another 7.5 inches of snow fell on Tuesday, which was a couple inches shy of that date’s daily record — a whopping 9.9 inches that fell during a historic storm in 1946.

Garmon said the average amount of snowfall for a single day is around half an inch.

“It was a significant snowfall,” said Garmon.

Looking ahead, he said freezing temperatures are forecasted throughout the region, and more snow could fall this weekend and early next week.