Search & Rescue

The body of a Juneau man who’s been missing since October of last year has been found. The State Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that the body found in the Mendenhall Wetlands on March 10 is Clifford White.

White’s family reported him missing on Oct. 31. According to Juneau police, there were no search and rescue efforts for White when he was reported missing because there were no known places to search for him. 

White was 29 years old and Alaska Native. He was the fifth person to go missing in Juneau last year.

White’s cousin Davina Merchant said he was outgoing and had a big heart. She said it’s been hard having him missing for five months and she’s glad he is found.

“We wanted to say thank you to the community that helped search for my cousin Clifford,” she said on behalf of the family. “We appreciate all the help and support, because there were so many that were out there everyday looking for him just as much as I did.”

White’s case is still being investigated. Anyone with information on White’s death should contact Juneau police at (907) 586-0600 or make an anonymous tip at Juneaucrimeline.com.

This story has been updated with comments from Clifford White’s cousin.

A Homer man was walking on a piece of ice near Anchor Point on Saturday when it broke off and drifted into Cook Inlet, stranding him until a nearby charter boat came to his rescue.

Jaime Snedden, 45, was treated for hypothermia and is expected to fully recover, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

But that’s a rare happy ending for such a story, said Nate Littlejohn, a petty officer with the Coast Guard. He said it’s also an important reminder that sea ice during periods of rapid warmth can be dangerous.

“We were very happy that things turned out the way that they did,” Littlejohn said. “We’re very thankful someone was around to help out.”

According to a trooper dispatch, Alaska Wildlife Troopers learned Snedden was floating out to sea around 11:11 a.m. Saturday. He was spotted near the Anchor Point Tractor Launch, where the Anchor River meets Cook Inlet.

The Coast Guard said Snedden was walking along the shoreline of the river when the ice broke off. The water temperature at the time was about 38 degrees and the air temperature was 30 degrees, the Coast Guard said in a post.

When a trooper arrived around 11:47, he found Snedden about 300 yards offshore, submerged except for his head and arms and clinging to a piece of ice. He was not wearing a life vest.

Littlejohn said the Coast Guard was notified just after the troopers and considered sending a helicopter for the rescue. But the closest helicopter was headed out to Kodiak to refuel.

So the guard sent out a broadcast.

“It’s called an urgent marine information broadcast,” Littlejohn said. “And what that does is it alerts any mariners that can hear this broadcast the location of a person in distress. And we indicate that we’re seeking assistance from anyone in the area that can help out.”

That broadcast got the attention of the F/V Misty, a charter boat belonging to Homer-based Driftwood Charters. The boat was about four miles away with seven people aboard.

When they reached Snedden, the crew of the Misty pulled him on board and brought him to a raft the trooper had rowed about 100 yards offshore. The raft brought Snedden to Anchor Point emergency medical services waiting onshore, and he was transported to South Peninsula Hospital in Homer.

“Undoubtedly, these folks saved a life by responding,” Littlejohn said. “They got there just before an Alaska State Trooper got there. And these folks were able to rescue this guy and get him to EMS, treated for symptoms of hypothermia that he was displaying.”

Littlejohn said river ice, like the piece that broke off in this case, is unsafe this time of year due to warming temperatures. Even though it’s early in the season to be experiencing breakup, he says conditions are currently ripe for melting ice.

“We’re just encouraging folks to stay off the ice,” Littlejohn said. “Ice on lakes may be perfectly safe in lots of places still. But we’re especially asking folks to be very mindful of sea ice and associated river ice.”

Troopers said Snedden is expected to fully recover.

Authorities have recovered the body of a man who went missing in his skiff outside of a remote Southeast Alaska community last week.

83-year-old Steven Peavey lived in the hamlet of Meyers Chuck, about 50 miles south of Wrangell. Alaska State Troopers say he died after failing to return home before nightfall on Feb. 14.

Peavey was reported overdue the next morning. The U.S. Coast Guard launched a vessel and helicopter to help in the search, and a U.S. Forest Service Service boat from Prince of Wales also assisted the troopers.

Peavey’s skiff was found later that day, heavily damaged on rocks outside Meyers Chuck. Searchers found Peavey’s body soon after. His next of kin have been notified of his death, troopers say.

Peavey had lived in the community of Meyers Chuck nearly his whole life, having moved there in 1949 at the age of seven. That’s according to a 2015 profile in Alaska Magazine.

Peavey and his wife, Cassy, who works as Meyers Chuck’s postmistress, were also featured in a National Public Radio profile of the small community in 2017.

An Alaska-based writer and photographer who survived an avalanche near Eagle River nearly 40 years ago — a bone-crushing event that killed his best friend and climbing partner — has won Outside Magazine’s inaugural survival stories essay contest.

But Joe Yelverton says the real survival story isn’t about making it out of the mountains alive that day. It’s about digging himself out of the post-traumatic stress and grief that buried him for years, leading to addiction and thoughts of suicide, which almost killed him long after the snow had settled.

Still, Yelverton says the most formative moments of his life and the story of his survival began that day in 1984 with his friends Steve and Barry, as they approached the top of Eagle Peak.

Listen here:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Joe Yelverton: I heard what sounded like an explosion. And Steve and I had been on this ledge that was kind of sticking out of the face. And it just sounded like thunder above us. And I looked up and saw about a probably 7- to 10-foot wave hit us. And then, of course, everything turned white. And below us was a series of small cliffs. And so we were being swept over some fairly steep terrain, consequently hitting the bottom of these cliffs and kind of getting rag-dolled through the rocks. And I just remember feeling a sense of weightlessness, and then, you know, crashing into the rocks as the avalanche was continuing down the mountain. There was one point where I came to a stop, so I was basically getting covered with avalanche debris at the bottom of a cliff. And I thought that was going to be the end of it right there, because I could feel the weight of all the avalanche debris piling on top of me. And then what happened was the avalanche just sympathetically triggered a bunch of other slopes. And so, thankfully, the slope that I was being buried on, it released. And so I ended up on top of the debris. I think Steve and I were probably carried down maybe 1,000 to 1,500 feet.

Casey Grove: And really badly injured, right? I mean, could you can you describe your injuries?

Joe Yelverton: Yeah, so I knew I was being pretty beat up in the avalanche. And I felt my I felt my leg bones snap. And it more or less felt like I was just being torn apart. So when I came to rest, I literally could just sit up. My legs were completely covered with snow. And so first thing I did was I cleared snow out of my mouth that had been packed so tightly in my mouth that I had to dig it out with my fingers, because I couldn’t breathe. And so I started looking around, and then that’s when I noticed Steve’s body was about 100 feet away from where I was. And I tried to yell for him and my voice wouldn’t work. And at that point, I tried to stand up and then my legs collapsed. So I tried to crawl over to him and I wasn’t able to even crawl. So I felt pretty helpless at that point.

I actually, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure if I was really alive. It was so surreal that I was was not really even sure if I had survived. I was really confused. I remember looking up where we had come from. And I saw a little figure, and that’s when I knew that Barry had survived. And it probably took him maybe 20 minutes or so to get down to me. He went to check on Steve first. But Steve had suffered some pretty severe injuries, and he was already dead at that point. So I think Barry just shifted his focus to trying to save me, and he really performed some superhuman feats. He literally carried my body off of the avalanche slope, down to a high pass, gave me all of his extra clothes, set me up so that I would have some food and water. And then he took off to go get help.

Casey Grove: I can’t even imagine what it was like to be waiting out there for that rescue to come. But, I mean, first of all, I just want to say, I’m sorry that that happened to you, and that it’s amazing you’re still here with us. And sorry about what happened to Steve, as well. What was it like waiting for that rescue and just the thoughts that were going through your head?

Joe Yelverton: Well, I honestly didn’t think I would ever see Barry again. You know, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t survive. It wasn’t long that I started getting hypothermic. And I was passing in and out of consciousness. So to be honest, the time passed a lot faster than what you might think, because I was unconscious a lot of the time. But when I was awake, it was pretty tormenting because, you know, I could still see Steve just above me on the mountain. And I was starting to hallucinate. And I would wake up from what I thought was a dream, and I would see that his body was gone. And then I would start looking for him around me. And then I would gain consciousness, and I realized that I was having these hallucinations. So it was pretty disturbing. I was mainly focused on just trying to stay awake, knowing that my odds of surviving would be better if I tried to stay awake. And so eventually I heard a helicopter coming up the valley below me. I think I fell unconscious again. And I woke up to being dragged to the helicopter.

Casey Grove: Well, I guess maybe let’s try to take that next step and talk about how you were able to come to grips with this. And I understand it took quite a few years. what all did you go through to get to this point to be able to talk about it and write about it?

Joe Yelverton: So to make a long story short, I left Alaska, because I wanted to try and get away from my memories. And so I moved to Seattle, and I was down there working in the corporate world. And at that point, my flashbacks had morphed into much more violent episodes, involving explosions. I would see car bombs going off. Buildings exploding with me inside of them. And this was happening probably once a day, for years. And it was really anxiety and insomnia that drove me to go get counseling at the urging of my physician.

I started making some headway with a really great therapist, and I’ll never forget what she said to me. She said, “You know, you’re never going to get your old life back. This is your life. And your choice now is, what are you going to do with it?” It was really sobering. Because previous to that I felt like PTSD was whipping me around on the end of a long rope, and I had no control. And I started learning that I really was not my thoughts. She taught me techniques, basically meditation techniques, to just observe these flashback episodes, instead of reacting to them and cringing. She taught me just to kind of observe them, like standing on the edge of a river and just watching a piece of driftwood float down the river. And it proved to be incredibly effective. And so that was the beginning of me learning that dealing with this PTSD is really a lifelong process for me. It’s not, you know, there’s no Holy Grail of healing. It’s — I have to use discipline every single day. You know, I know to avoid triggers. I can’t watch violent movies. I’m very conscious of self care.

And so I started feeling better about about life, and I really started missing Alaska. So I moved back to Alaska, and it was really shortly after that, a little over 10 years ago, I met Roger Sparks, a former pararescueman, who had just finished his last deployment, a real violent deployment, and I met him at a potluck in Eagle River. And we became fast friends. I gained a window into his recovery. And I spent a lot of time with him. That eventually progressed into him doing tattooing on mostly military people, and many of whom also experienced trauma, and some of them PTSD. And so I would shoot these sessions, these tattoo sessions in his garage sometimes till 5 or 6 a.m., and I would gain insight into these people’s lives. A lot of different people, some special forces, pilots, that sort of thing, and was incredibly lucky to hear very profound things about their experience, not only, you know, in war, in deployment, but how traumatic civilian rescue was.

So fast forward a few years, I got a grant to work on an environmental portrait of the rescue squad, and I spent a year with them, going on training missions with them, and just gaining a lot of insight into that very unique community. And we were coming back from a training mission through the Chugach Range, and one of the PJ’s was in the back, and he just sort of mentioned something about a rescue that he had been on, on this peak that we just just flew by. And he was kind of describing that — how stressful that rescue was. And within minutes, we were flying right by Eagle Peak. And, strangely, the mountains and helicopters are the only places I don’t ever have flashbacks. And so that was the only time I ever had a flashback in the helicopter. And I just sort of gritted my teeth, and I got through it. And we landed, and when I walked off the tarmac over at JBER, I grabbed all my gear and went to my truck, and I immediately started writing down some thoughts about that experience. And that was really the beginning of this essay. But still, Roger was the only person at this point who had insight into how bad my PTSD was. No one knew how bad it was. I just hadn’t shared that with anyone. And so that was incredibly powerful for me to spend time with these rescuers. Because, one, they trusted me. And I felt incredibly honored and grateful that they trusted me. But what I didn’t realize was it was a gift to me, because it allowed me to slowly come to terms with being OK with telling my story.

On Valentine’s Day in 2019, Kaelyn Schneider’s mom Tracy Day went missing in Juneau. And for a long time, Schneider felt like her mom’s story disappeared, too. 

But Schneider and her family haven’t given up on finding out what happened to Day. 

“You know, my grandma wanted to find my mom so bad. And she never was able to find out what happened before she passed away,” Schneider said.

Day is Lingít from the Deisheetaan clan. Schneider said that Day’s case, like other cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, didn’t get the attention it needed from the community or law enforcement.

But one day, Schneider was scrolling through TikTok and saw Danielle Dell’Olio’s account. Dell’Olio has focused on true crime, and she featured Schneider’s mom. Schneider remembered feeling so happy that someone knew about her mom and was talking about her. 

Eventually, Dell’Olio messaged Schneider and they became friends. And she encouraged Schneider to make videos. Schneider had made makeup videos in the past — but after Day went missing, she stopped.

She decided to start making videos again to talk about her mom using TikTok. At first they didn’t get a lot of traction. She was mostly making images with text over them, not talking about it in front of a camera. And then someone commented on her video that they thought her case wasn’t real. 

“So I was like, ‘Alright, I need to sit down and make, like, a full video.’ And I sat down, and I filmed 50 videos in one go, talking about her story from beginning to end,” Schneider said. 

She got about 2,000 followers, but after that the momentum slowed down. She started doing skincare and makeup videos too. 

But it wasn’t until she started doing ASMR videos that she got a following. When Schneider started doing ASMR livestreams, she got about 40,000 followers in the course of a month. 

And she started to mention her mom during her ASMR videos. 

“What I started doing was, every time I would be doing my ASMR, right, and then as my view count would go up, I would just say, ‘Hey, guys, like, just so you know, if you’re new here, Hi, my name is Kaelyn. I’m Alaska Native, I’m Lingít. And my mom is a missing person,’” Schneider said.

Then she would go back to ASMR.

“This is ASMR. People came here to relax,” Schneider said. “A lot of the time when I talk about it, my view count goes down. But I don’t, I’ve managed to use it in a way where I just sprinkle it in.”

And people started to ask her about what happened to Tracy Day. She still does full videos about her mom. But a lot of her viewers watch ASMR videos to relax and go to bed. So she doesn’t talk too deeply about her mom in those videos. 

Schneider wishes that it didn’t take a big social media following to raise awareness about her mom. She wishes that Day’s missing persons case got the attention it needed right away.

She said she doesn’t know what else she can do besides talk about her on social media — that it’s one of the only tools she has. 

She said that even if nothing comes from it, at least she tried to do something to find her mom. And maybe it’ll help another family of a missing and murdered Indigenous person. 

On Monday, Feb. 14, the three-year anniversary of Tracy Day’s disappearance, Schneider is organizing a vigil for her and other families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons. It’s at 5 p.m. at Overstreet Park. 

Two crew members were safely rescued from a sinking fishing boat south of Sitka on Monday evening.

According to a news release, the Coast Guard was notified at 8 p.m. that the 40-foot troller Glory was in distress in Islet Passage, about 17 miles south of Sitka, near Kanga Bay.

A rescue helicopter from Air Station Sitka arrived on scene soon after the report and lowered a rescue swimmer to aid the two mariners on board the Glory. But the flooding could not be stemmed, and the boat’s engine would not start.

Although protected waters, weather conditions in the area were poor, with 5-foot seas and wind gusts to 55 miles per hour.

The swimmer advised the crew to abandon ship, and both were safely hoisted aboard the helicopter by 9 p.m.

Lt. Cmdr. Scott Woodcock, the helicopter pilot, complimented the crew of the Glory on their preparedness, with “good communication and survival gear.” He noted that the most difficult part of the rescue was the severe winds.

The Glory did not sink completely in the incident, but instead was grounded.

Petty Officer Janessa Warschkow says the owner has since returned with a second vessel to de-fuel the Glory and refloat it. The engines were restarted, and the Coast Guard is going to allow him to attempt to bring the vessel back to Sitka under its own power.