Sorted by date Results 201 - 225 of 363
The ongoing wildfire near Telegraph Creek, a small town on the Stikine River, has not yet been contained. According to Jody Lucius with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, the fire is a very powerful force of nature that will take time to put out. "We're focusing on minimizing further impact," she said. "It's going to take a significant amount of time to put out." The Telegraph Creek Fire is burning in the general direction of another wildfire occurring south of the Stikine River. Lucius...
WRANGELL — A symposium was held Wednesday night at the Nolan Center to discuss the effects of mining on Southeast Alaska’s bear population. Lance Craighead, a bear biologist, said that mining has the potential to have a very negative impact on bears. Most mining, Craighead said, occurs in nearby British Columbia but anything happening there would literally flow downstream to Alaska. “In general, Canada has some of the laxest mining regulations in the world next to China,” he said. “For that reason they’re about one of the few countries t...
The ongoing wildfire near Telegraph Creek, a small town on the Stikine River, has not yet been contained. According to Jody Lucius with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, the fire is a very powerful force of nature that will take time to put out. "We're focusing on minimizing further impact," she said. "It's going to take a significant amount of time to put out." The Telegraph Creek Fire is burning in the general direction of another wildfire occurring south of the Stikine River. Lucius... Full story
On Tuesday, new reporter Caleb Vierkant arrived on the afternoon jet from his hometown of Bullard, Texas. Home-schooled until college, he attended Texas A&M in College Station. He earned two bachelor's degrees there, double-majoring in history and journalism with minors in English and military studies. After graduating in May 2017, he went to work for his hometown paper, the Jacksonville Progress. He worked there until July 6, when he accepted a job with the Wrangell Sentinel. Vierkant had...
Sockeye salmon catches often add up to half of the value of Alaska’s total salmon fishery, and the so-called reds dominate the season’s early fisheries starting in mid-May. But sockeye catches so far range from record-setting highs at Bristol Bay to record lows nearly everywhere else. For example, the Copper River sockeye harvest of just 26,000 is the lowest in 50 years. At Kodiak just 212,000 sockeyes were taken through July 6 making it the weakest harvest in 38 years. Sockeye fishing at Yakutat has been closed due to the lowest returns in...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An Alaska state ferry was evacuated after crew members saw black smoke in a room. State transportation officials say the crew of the Columbia spotted the smoke in the bow thruster room after the vessel docked Friday in Bellingham, Washington. Crew members did not see flames. The crew deployed a carbon dioxide firefighting system. Ferry officials say no one was injured and all passengers were accounted for. They said passengers would be notified if the Columbia’s schedule would have to be modified. The Columbia at 418...
Photos by Ola Richards & Anna Palenik...
Forces are aligned for a nice pay day for Alaska’s salmon fishermen. There is no backlog from last season in cold storages, a lower harvest forecast is boosting demand, prices for competing farmed salmon have remained high all year, and a devalued U.S. dollar makes Alaska salmon more appealing to foreign customers. “Over the past year the dollar has weakened 11 percent against the euro, 9 percent against the British pound, 5 percent against the Japanese yen, and 7 percent against the Chinese yuan. That makes Alaska salmon and other seafood mor...
Gov. Bill Walker stopped in Petersburg for a brief visit Friday, making the rounds for meetings and taking some time to participate in its Little Norway festivities. "It's perfect. I can't complain about a day like today," Walker commented, noting the afternoon's cloudless sunshine. He had attended Petersburg's distinctive festival before, but this year's trip was his first since being elected as governor four years ago. "I came down obviously to meet with various folks, but I was also in the...
Anchorage, AK – Rasmuson Foundation has named 35 artists in 12 Alaska communities as Individual Artist Award recipients for 2018. This is Rasmuson Foundation’s 15th year of supporting working artists with direct grants. Ten individuals will receive $18,000 Fellowships and 25 artists will receive Project Awards of $7,500. Recipients were selected from a pool of almost 400 applicants. The artists represent all career stages. Their work spans cultures and disciplines, sustaining and expanding on traditional art forms and employing new tec...
Alaska’s 2018 salmon season officially gets underway this week with the first 12-hour opener on May 17 for sockeyes and kings returning to the Copper River. The catch there this year calls for 19,000 kings and 942,000 sockeye salmon targeted by a fleet of more than 500 drift gillnetters. Here’s a primer of how fishery managers project the rest of Alaska’s salmon season may play out: Statewide, the 2018 salmon harvest is projected at 149 million fish, down 34 percent from the 2017 take of 226 million salmon. The shortfall this season stems...
Two commercial fisheries open each spring at Upper Cook Inlet that attract little notice and few participants, but each pays big bucks to fishermen. The first is a food and bait herring fishery that runs from April 20 through the end of May. The 150 ton catch quota is small compared to most of Alaska’s other herring fisheries, but the payout is far higher than all others. “They get $1.00 to $1.50 a pound, or $2,000 to $3,000 for a short ton, and the herring goes primarily into the halibut commercial bait fishery or the sport bait fis...
The state Department of Fish and Game has announced its 2018 preseason estimates for Chinook salmon, and its all-gear harvest limit for Southeast Alaska under provisions of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. In its release last week, the department set the year’s limit at 130,000 “treaty fish,” nearly 80,000 fish lower than the preseason limit available in 2017. This also includes a 10-percent reduction in response to conservation needs for the king salmon stocks in Southeast, northern British Columbia, and their transboundary rivers. The annual all-g...
Pacific halibut catches for 2018 won’t decline as severely as initially feared, but the fishery faces headwinds from several directions. Federal fishery managers announced just a few days before the March 24 start of the halibut opener that commercial catches for Alaska will be down 10 percent for a total of 17.5 million pounds. The industry was on tenterhooks awaiting the catch information, which typically is announced by the International Pacific Halibut Commission in late January. However, representatives from the U.S. and Canada could n...
Pacific halibut catches for 2018 won’t decline as severely as initially feared, but the fishery faces headwinds from several directions. Federal fishery managers announced just a few days before the March 24 start of the halibut opener that commercial catches for Alaska will be down 10 percent for a total of 17.5 million pounds. The industry was on tenterhooks awaiting the catch information, which typically is announced by the International Pacific Halibut Commission in late January. However, representatives from the U.S. and Canada could n...
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The bodies of two experienced mountain climbers who are presumed dead likely won’t be recovered for months, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers said. Megan Peters said summer is the soonest that authorities could launch a recovery effort in southeast Alaska, though even that depends on snow and ice conditions and the risk to crew members. “We like to be able to provide closure to families also,” Peters said. “There are times where unfortunately we’re just not able to do so.” The agency said earlier this week tha...
The Alaska Marine Highway System announced it has adjusted ferry service schedules for the middle of April in order to help roughly 400 students and chaperones from across Southeast travel to the Region V Music Festival in Juneau. AMHS will be rerouting the M/V LeConte to make a round-trip run through southern Southeast to pick up and return the students. With this service adjustment, students from Ketchikan, Wrangell, Metlakatla and Klawock will be able to attend the annual festival. Students from Sitka and Haines will use a...
For 27 years this weekly column has featured news for and about Alaska’s commercial fishing industry. It began in 1991 in the Anchorage Daily News and now appears in more than 20 news outlets across Alaska, nationally and in the UK. Today, Alaska fishermen and processors provide 65 percent of our nation’s wild-caught seafood, and 95 percent of the wild salmon. The industry puts more people to work than oil/gas, mining, timber and tourism combined. Alaska’s diverse fishing fleet of nearly 10,000 vessels is made up mostly of boats under 50 feet....
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An Alaska Native tribe and three environmental groups sued the U.S. government, claiming an agency granted mineral exploration permits without considering how a mine could affect a major salmon river and bald eagle preserve. The lawsuit filed Monday by the Chilkat Indian village of Klukwan calls for revocation of the permits granted to Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. upstream of the Chilkat River near the port of Haines in southeast Alaska. Tlingit Indians thrived because of the abundance of salmon in the watershed, K...
It’s going to be a tough year for many Alaska fishermen. Following on the heels of announcements of a massive drop in cod stocks, the industry learned last week that Pacific halibut catches are likely to drop by 20 percent next year, and the declines could continue for several years. That could bring the coast wide catch for 2018, meaning from Oregon to British Columbia to the Bering Sea, to about 31 million pounds. Scientists at the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) interim meeting in Seattle revealed that survey results s...
One of Southeast's primary ferries will be out of service longer than expected as it undergoes annual maintenance, affecting the winter schedule. The Alaska Marine Highway System announced last week the M/V Malaspina will be out of commission several months longer than expected. The vessel went in for its annual overhaul and certification on October 1, with the intention of returning it to service on December 22. During the overhaul engineers determined an extensive replacement of the craft's...
(JUNEAU, Alaska) – The Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS) announced Wednesday that extended repairs needed on the MV Malaspina will change winter ferry service for Southeast Alaska and Prince Rupert. The Malaspina went in for its annual overhaul and certification on October 1, 2017 and was scheduled to return to service on December 22, 2017. During the overhaul, engineers determined that extensive steel replacement was needed and that both propeller hubs must be repaired. Because shipyard space is limited and propeller hubs will take s...
SEATTLE (AP) - Harbor seals, sea lions and some fish-eating killer whales have been rebounding along the Northeast Pacific Ocean in recent decades. But that boom has come with a trade-off: They're devouring more of the salmon prized by a unique but fragile population of endangered orcas. Competition with other marine mammals for the same food may be a bigger problem than fishing, at least in recent years, for southern resident killer whales that spend time in Washington state's Puget Sound, a...
(JUNEAU) A joint letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from Alaska Governor Bill Walker and Lt. Governor Byron Mallott, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Representative Don Young emphasized the “potential catastrophic effects on Alaska’s communities” from upstream mining activities in British Columbia (B.C.) and urged the U.S. federal government to “help protect overall U.S. interests in this situation.” The letter also called the Tulsequah Chief “an example of an inadequate response by the B.C. government....
One of the state’s public ferries will help collect data on ocean acidification during its regular route. The news was announced last week by Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center at University of Alaska Southeast, which has partnered with the Alaska Marine Highway System, British Columbia’s Hakai Institute, Alaska Ocean Observing System and other federal agencies on the project. The vessel chosen for the data collection study is the M/V Columbia, which at 418 feet and a gross tonnage of 3,946 is the ferry system’s largest. On its route betwe...
