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At 3:44 p.m. on Oct. 3 Rocky dipped her flippers back into the shoreline by Petroglyph Beach. She waded out into the stone-laden shallows, turned back to the crowd as if to say goodbye to the Wrangell residents who saved her life four months ago, and then swam out to sea. Rocky had been in the care of marine biologists at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward since June. On June 20, Wrangell resident Dan Trail found her wedged between two rocks on Petroglyph Beach. She was just a week old. At the...
The Nolan Center isn’t old enough to drink but that will not stop its supporters from raising a champagne toast to celebrate the building’s 20th birthday. The party is set for 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 14. “It’s really a cultural hub for our community,” Nolan Center Director Jeanie Arnold said of the multi-purpose waterfront building that houses the Wrangell Museum and also serves as a movie theater, stages community theater productions, provides space for conferences and is home for multiple community events and dinners every year. Admission...
The number of jobs in Southeast Alaska continued its post-pandemic recovery last year. Yet, employers remain worried about filling job vacancies amid declining — and aging — population numbers. “While jobs continue to grow in 2024, so do concerns about the lack of a sufficient workforce in the region,” according to the annual Southeast Alaska by the Numbers report. “Compared to 2010, when the population was nearly identically sized, the region now has 1,700 more jobs and 5,600 fewer workforce-aged residents,” said the report, prepared by...
Voters approved a $3 million bond issue for repairs to the water-damaged Public Safety Building by a 3-1 margin on Oct. 1. Residents re-elected Patty Gilbert as mayor over challenger David Powell; re-elected incumbent school board member Angela Allen and elected newcomer Dan Powers over incumbent board member Brittani Robbins; and re-elected Chris Buness to the port commission along with newcomer Eric Yancey over challengers Antonio Silva and Tony Guggenbickler. In a close 36-ballot margin, voters rejected a proposition to amend the municipal...
The Wrangell birthday calendar is reborn for 2025. After a one-year hiatus the chamber of commerce — under new leadership from executive director Tracey Martin — is bringing back the printed birthday calendar, which had been a community tradition since the 1950s until it was dropped for 2024. It costs just $1 to reserve a date on the calendar. Anyone can reserve a listing for a birthday, anniversary or to memorialize someone’s passing. Families do not need to pay more than $15 for listings, meaning that if a family wants to reserve 20 or 30 spo...
It doesn’t matter the value of what people toss in the trash, it’s all expensive to ship out of town to a landfill. The borough sends out about 60 to 65 40-foot-long containers filled with trash every year, at a cost budgeted for this year at $360,000. That’s up from $239,000 just three years ago. Wrangell is not alone in paying increasingly higher costs for hauling and dumping trash at an approved landfill in eastern Washington state. The trash travels by barge and then rail to the landfill. Petersburg has been hit with similar price incre...
A fire Saturday night destroyed a building in Haines that housed four businesses and four apartments. No one reported any injuries. Flames poured out of the second floor and above the roof as firefighters tried to control the blaze, which eventually took down the wood-frame building. The Haines’ Quick Shop, Outfitter Liquor, Outfitter Sporting Goods, Mike’s Bikes & Boards and the apartments occupied the two-story building across the street from the waterfront. The trouble started just before 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5, while Dan Mahoney was...
No injuries were reported from a landslide in Ketchikan on Sunday night, Oct. 6. Officials reported the slide occurred at about 8 p.m. on a section of Revilla Road near Ward Cove, north of downtown. The landslide began hundreds of feet up the mountain north of the road and brought tons of mud and trees crashing across a stretch of the road past the Ward Lake exit, according to borough officials. Slide debris blocked all lanes of Revilla Road near the slide area, cutting off a half-dozen vehicles. There were eight people in the vehicles,...
Juneau voters have rejected the Ship-Free Saturday proposition, with 3,751 votes in favor of the initiative and 5,788 against as of Oct. 4, with several hundred more ballots still to count. The Oct. 1 ballot proposition, the first of its kind in Alaska, attracted international media coverage. It would have banned cruise ships with accommodations for 250 or more passengers on Saturdays and also banned them on the Fourth of July. Opponents of the measure, led by the cruise industry and tourism businesses, waged an expensive campaign, with...
On the morning of Aug. 9, state biologists discovered dozens of dead fish in a creek near the Kensington gold mine in northern Southeast Alaska. Scientists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game say their observations — and the fact that the die-off occurred downstream of a wastewater treatment plant at the large mine — suggest that the event stemmed from a water quality problem. Mine workers also used an unapproved explosive at Kensington a day before the dead fish were found, according to federal officials. But nearly two months lat... Full story
Alaska had a record number of drug-overdose deaths in 2023, with a total that was 44.5% higher than in 2022, the state Department of Health said in a report issued last week. The 2023 drug-overdose toll was 357, a number determined through the department’s data on deaths and diseases, the report said. The Alaska statistics buck a national trend of declining overdose deaths that was reported earlier this year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the few states with increases in overdose deaths from 2022 to 2023, Alaska h... Full story
The Ten Commandments and six other historical documents will be placed on permanent display in a lobby outside the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly chambers in Palmer, according to a resolution unanimously approved by the assembly on Oct. 1. The display will “honor historical documents” that have influenced U.S. and state law, the resolution states. It will include the Ten Commandments, a summary of the Code of Hammurabi (a Babylonian legal text composed during 1755–1750 B.C.), the Magna Carta (written in 1215 to establish the princ... Full story
Alaska had the biggest decline in average life expectancy of all U.S. states in 2021, a year when health outcomes were heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent national report. Alaska’s life expectancy in 2021 was 74.5 years, down from the average of 76.6 years in 2020, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, U.S. life expectancy declined by 0.6 years in that time, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and increases in drug overdose deaths and other unintentional i... Full story
Until about 20 years ago, little was known about the abundance of colorful cold-water corals that line sections of the seafloor around Alaska. Now an environmental group has gone to court to try to compel better protections for those once-secret gardens. The lawsuit, filed by Oceana in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, accused federal fishery managers of neglecting to safeguard Gulf of Alaska corals - and the sponges that are often found with them - from damages wreaked by bottom trawling. Botto... Full story
A new documentary, "Sugarcane," recounts the searing, traumatic history of colonization and forced assimilation of British Columbia's Indigenous people through a network of what are known as Indian residential schools. The film features former students and their descendants seeking truth, reconciliation and healing from the nation's legacy of those schools - institutions that the Canadian federal government now says carried out a "cultural genocide" through physical and sexual abuse. After... Full story
The U.S. Justice Department has announced more than $86 million in grants for American Indian and Alaska Native communities to support survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking and sex trafficking. Nearly $14 million of those dollars were awarded to Alaska tribes and tribal organizations, including the village of Kake. The news comes after Alaska lawmakers increased state funding to the state’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault to make up for a decrease in one if its federal funding sources and a... Full story
Most Wrangell students are insufficient in English language arts, math and science, according to the state standardized test scores that the Alaska Department of Education released over the summer. The results are an amalgamation of two tests: the Alaska Science Assessment, which assesses fifth, eighth and 10th graders science skills; and the AK STAR, which assesses third through ninth grade students in their English and math proficiency. The Wrangell school district’s proficiency levels are 10 percentage points above state average in both m...
“I’m picturing a fall Fourth of July,” Borough Manager Mason Villarma told staff during a planning meeting for the event. Last week, the borough released the schedule of events surrounding the harvest of the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree, also known as “The People’s Tree.” Festivities will begin on Friday, Oct. 25, and will continue for three days over the weekend. The borough, the Nolan Center, chamber of commerce, U.S. Forest Service and many local businesses all are helping to organize the weekend’s activities. The tree, which comes from a...
It could be that only two commercial tour operators that brought customers to the Petroglyph Beach State Historic Site this summer bothered to purchase the state permit required to provide tours. This was the first year the state directly asked operators to acquire the mandatory permit and collect the $6 fee. Though it had not been enforced in Wrangell, the law regarding commercial use of public property has applied to the Petroglyph Beach since it was designated a state historic site in 2000. Tour operators would be more open to buying the...
Damon Roher is transforming the old gym from a place of swishes and buckets to a chamber of skeletons and bats. Roher, an officer for the Wrangell Police Department, is organizing a haunted house that will run from 7 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 11-12, in the community gym. There is no required admission fee, but Roher recommends a $5 donation. All proceeds will go to the Wrangell Salvation Army’s youth programs. For the haunt, Roher and his team of volunteers are going all out. He custom built two 10-foot spiders, an eight-foot grim r...
Though it was important to pinpoint the exact location and extent of damage to the community’s wastewater outfall pipeline into Zimovia Strait, officials also discovered that the 12-inch plastic pipe and the seabed around it have become home to hundreds of sea cucumbers. “Over the years and years, wildlife has figured it out,” Tom Wetor, the borough’s Public Works director, said Sept. 26. Sea cucumbers, a bottom-dwelling invertebrate, proliferate around the nutrient-rich waters near the diffuser end of the outfall line, he said. “I bet there ar...
A state agency is offering for sale half a dozen parcels on the Back Channel side of Wrangell Island, averaging about 3.6 acres in size, with auction bids due by Nov. 4. The starting bid for each parcel ranges from $15,500 to $60,500. All but one of the lots are on the water of the Eastern Passage. The $15,500 parcel is about 800 feet from the shoreline. Of the six lots up for bid to the highest offer, half are about three miles south of the end of the airport runway and the other half are about three miles farther down the channel. There is...
In House District 1, which includes Ketchikan and Wrangell, there is a three-way race to replace Rep. Dan Ortiz who served as the district's House member for a decade. The race is between Republican Jeremy Bynum and independents Grant EchoHawk and Agnes Moran. All three candidates are Ketchikan residents, as is Ortiz. A Wrangell resident has not held the House seat since Peggy Wilson a decade ago. Ortiz is not seeking reelection, citing health reasons. The former educator caucused with the... Full story
The Alaska Children's Trust, a statewide nonprofit that works to prevent child abuse and neglect and advocate for children, youth and families, honored Wrangell resident Kay Larson with its Champion for Kids Award Saturday evening, Sept. 28, at the Nolan Center. Kaila Pfister, the trust's director of community engagement, who has worked with Larson the past four years, talked about the need for positive role models in the lives of children and how the award honors the contributions of such...
Federal managers shut down a major Alaska fishery Sept. 25 after two Kodiak-based boats targeting whitefish caught some 2,000 king salmon — an unintentional harvest that drew near-instant condemnation from advocates who want better protections for the struggling species. The Kodiak-based trawl fleet has caught just over one-fourth of its seasonal quota of pollock — a whitefish that’s typically processed into items like fish sticks, fish pies and surimi, the paste used to make fake crab. But about 20 boats will now be forced to end their pollo... Full story