SOLDOTNA — Alaska Republican Party leaders on Saturday reelected Carmela Warfield to continue serving as chair, two years after she was first chosen for the role.

The vote took place during a statewide convention in Soldotna, where more than 200 delegates from across the state gathered under garlands of Alaska and U.S. flags to update the party platform and hobnob with both elected officials and candidates.

Warfield was challenged for the chairmanship by Zackary Gottshall, who called on Alaska GOP leaders to do more to oppose elected Alaska Republicans who work across the political aisle.

Warfield beat Gottshall in a 165-45 vote, after Gottshall accused Warfield of appearing “more focused on building personal political visibility and securing endorsements for another term than organizing a serious effort to replace the seven Republican legislators caucusing with Democrats or challenge Sen. Lisa Murkowski.”

Warfield, ahead of Saturday’s vote, said “the Alaska Republican Party is stronger when we focus on what unites us instead of what divides us.”

Warfield now enters her third year at the helm of Alaska’s largest political organization. She has tightly controlled the party’s public image, declining numerous interview requests from the Daily News during her tenure.

In a departure from the norm, Warfield allowed reporters to attend only five hours out of the two-day convention, denying reporters access to debates on the party rules and a forum featuring several gubernatorial candidates.

Cheerful party staffers were stationed at the entrance to the Soldotna Field House to ensure no reporters had access to the building beyond the allotted window.

But during a brief window of access, divisions over the GOP’s direction and operations were on full display. Delegates spent roughly an hour debating whether to add a sentence to the party platform supporting “granting personhood of the unborn at conception.” The motion ultimately failed 89-109.

Factions of the Alaska GOP have long been critical of elected party members who work with Democrats or deviate from the party platform, which already formally opposes same-sex marriage and abortion access, and supports teaching “the historical Judeo-Christian foundation” of the U.S. in schools.

The party has a long history of attempting to keep its elected members in line and punishing those who stray.

Party leaders in 2021 censured Murkowski, a Republican who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2002, after she voted to impeach President Donald Trump. They also voted in 2021 to censure Republican Eagle River state lawmaker Kelly Merrick after she supported a bipartisan coalition in the Alaska House. But after both Murkowski and Merrick won reelection in 2022, defeating party-backed challengers from the right, party leaders promised to turn away from censuring GOP candidates for a period of at least two years.

Since then, the number of Republicans in the Legislature joining bipartisan legislative coalitions has grown, despite party leaders’ consternation.

In the Alaska Senate, a 14-member bipartisan majority includes five Republicans. In the House, the 21-member majority includes two Republicans. Republican leaders of the bipartisan coalitions did not attend the Saturday convention.

Under Warfield’s leadership, the Alaska Republican Party has aligned itself closely with Trump, who in turn has endorsed Warfield, along with U.S. Rep. Nick Begich and U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, who are running for reelection this year.

Trump has also voiced support for the repeal of Alaska’s open primary and ranked choice voting system, which has weakened the party’s tight control over candidate selection.

Both opponents and supporters of Alaska’s voting system, which was adopted by Alaskans in 2020 and withstood a repeal effort in 2024, say it had aided moderate political candidates who are willing to work across the political aisle, ensuring they can more easily withstand challengers from the right.

The Alaska GOP has made repealing the voting system a key tenet of its efforts in the 2026 election. A successful repeal would enable the party to again assert more control over the Republican primary process,

Party leaders on Saturday also elected Jason Perry, a Baptist pastor, as the new Alaska GOP vice chair. Perry received 161 votes in a three-way race against Paul Bauer Jr., a former Anchorage Assembly member who received 23 votes, and Jeanne Reveal, a party district chair on the Kenai Peninsula who received 22 votes.

Voting on party leaders and resolutions was almost derailed — again — by party leaders’ concerns over using an online system to tally the votes of more than 220 delegates.

Several party members said they wanted to use paper ballots instead of “clickers” that allow delegates to cast votes in real time. A similar motion was made during the 2024 convention.

But the idea this year was met with exasperation and outright derision from some longtime party members. Brett Huber — state director for Alaska’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group — openly chided some of the delegates.

“Everybody agrees on God and country. Everybody. And then we forget that and fight amongst ourselves,” said Huber.

“If we remember what brought us here — God and country — and we quit misbehaving, we may win,” he added.

Daniel Felix, 10, looks out from atop a gargantuan stump of an old-growth redwood on his tribe’s ancestral land. Once, this forest on California’s North Coast was replete with the ancient behemoths that can live beyond 2,000 years.

Only a fraction are left now, depleted by a logging company before the state acquired the forest in the 1940s.

This is unique public land, Jackson Demonstration State Forest, spanning 50,000 acres. Trees are plentiful here, but they might not live a millennium. California’s 14 demonstration forests are required to produce and sell timber to show — or “demonstrate” — sustainable practices. Money from logging — roughly $8.5 million a year — pays for management of the forests by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

Daniel’s tribe, the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, has pushed to rein in the cutting — spearheaded by his late great-grandmother, Priscilla Hunter. They’re part of a diverse coalition that includes environmental activists, local politicians and other tribes.

Now they may finally get their wish. Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa) has introduced a bill that would nix the forests’ logging mandate, instead prioritizing values such as carbon storage, wildfire resilience and biodiversity.

The bill represents the latest chapter in a region legendary for fierce battles over logging, and it marks an uncommon alliance between tribes and the environmental movement.

Under Assembly Bill 2494, there could still be logging, but it would have to support those new principles, and the forests would be funded differently.

And it proposes another significant change. It would pave the way for giving tribes a say in managing the lands for the first time since they were forcibly evicted more than a century ago, and for integrating Indigenous knowledge — like cultural burning — into the forests.

“It’s what we dreamed of,” said Polly Girvin, Hunter’s former partner and a retired lawyer focused on Native American issues. “And to have it come true? I’m used to movements that sometimes take 30 years in Indian Country to get to the justice you’re seeking.”

Some backers say the bill offers a new economic path forward for communities behind the so-called redwood curtain. With the decline of logging and cannabis, they see tourism driven by ultramarathons, mushroom foraging and other outdoor activities as a financial savior.

“If we had an increase of 10% of visitors coming to our county because of recreational opportunities, that would more than surpass all of the timber tax in our county,” Mendocino County Supervisor Ted Williams said, projecting an increase in money from a lodging tax.

But the push to reshape forest management is fiercely opposed by loggers and mill owners, who say their work is sustainable and provides blue-collar jobs in a region where they’ve dwindled. Already California imports most of its wood from Oregon, Washington and Canada.

“California has the most rules and regulations of anywhere in the world so all they’re doing is exporting the environmental impact to somewhere else, still using the product,” said Myles Anderson, owner of a logging company in Fort Bragg founded by his grandfather. “It’s pretty disgusting, really.”

Anderson believes the bill will greatly reduce logging, even stop it altogether. In his office, with photos of him and his father at a logging site decades ago, he points out it’s sponsored by the Environmental Protection Information Center. Why else would they and other environmental groups “support it if they didn’t see the same thing that I’m seeing?”

Last month, activists who have sought to rein in logging at Jackson held their first major gathering in about four years, galvanized by the bill that they see as a significant step in the right direction.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

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A new but old fight

About five years ago, community members caught wind of plans to chop down towering redwoods within Jackson, near the coastal town of Caspar. Priscilla Hunter would come out to the forest “and could hear them crying — it was our ancestors,” said her daughter Melinda Hunter, the tribe’s vice chairwoman. “Then she had to protect [the trees].”

Environmental activists and Native Americans, not historically allies in the region, joined forces to fight it. “Forest defenders” camped out high in the canopy and blocked logging equipment with their bodies. Some were arrested.

The uprising harked back to the 1980s and 1990s, when iconic environmentalist Judi Bari led Earth First! campaigns against logging in the region. Many of the old tree sitters — white-haired and brimming with stories of Bari — have come out of the woodwork for the latest battle.

For them, it was a win. Cal Fire paused new timber sales and, citing public safety, halted some that were underway — including one expected to generate millions of dollars for Myles Anderson’s logging company.

“We were left with nothing,” Anderson said.

Then, last year, Cal Fire approved the first harvest plan since that hiatus. It riled up the sizable, ecologically minded community.

Jessica Curl, 47, remembers growing up nearby “in a terrain of trunks” as trucks carried out logs. Now the redwoods are regrowing, “gorgeous” and gobbling carbon, she said.

“We’re so lucky to live in an area where we have this amazing climate-change mitigation tool, that if we would just leave it alone would do this amazing work that we’re trying to think of all these cool, inventive things to do.”

Isidro Chavez receives burning sage, or smudging, after a run in Jackson Demonstration State Forest. Smudging is a ritual used to cleanse spaces and individuals of negative energy, promote calm and improve mood.

(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)

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Tears of grief, resolve

A group of “spirit runners” — a Native American tradition of bringing prayer — sprinted through the heart of Jackson forest as rain poured through the canopy. The mid-April event marked activists’ first major gathering since protests wound down in 2022.

Attendees gathered in a circle to wait for them. Misty Cook, of the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, read a statement as eyes misted all around:

“All the living things around us, they miss us. They miss the language. They miss our touch, our hands, touching all of the things — the water, the plants. They miss the songs. They miss the beat of our footsteps and our voices, and they miss the children’s laughter and play, which was so important. They want us to gather them, to use them and to share them. Otherwise they will get sick and possibly die.”

Cal Fire launched a tribal advisory council to bring Indigenous perspective into Jackson. But some local tribes say it’s not enough because they lack decision-making power.

When the runners arrived, the circle absorbed them. Then they continued on to the site of a controversial proposed harvest, Camp Eight. They wrapped a bandana that belonged to Priscilla Hunter around a small tree — a quiet, somber act where she took her last stand. Runners took turns embracing the trunk.

Redwoods at the Capitol

In March, Rogers’ bill cleared a committee and is now in the Assembly Appropriations Committee’s suspense file. A hearing is set for Thursday.

Funding is a major point of contention. Environmentalists say funding these forests with timber operations incentivizes cutting bigger trees. Cal Fire maintains decisions are driven by forest health, not industry demand.

AB 2494 would fund the forests through a tax on lumber and engineered wood products. The shift could create “[o]ngoing state costs and cost pressures of an unknown but potentially significant amount, possibly in the low millions of dollars annually,” according to a legislative analysis.

The California Forestry Assn., a timber industry trade group, says the idea is a nonstarter.

Cal Fire declined to comment on pending legislation but Kevin Conway, the agency’s staff chief for resource protection and improvement, said its nearly 80-year history managing Jackson reflects “care and attention.” Since the state acquired the forest, “we have more trees on the landscape, more habitat and those trees are trending larger,” he said.

For the tribes who have rallied and prayed, a burning question is whether the land will again reflect their vision, or remain shaped by decisions made by others.

Buffie Campbell, executive director of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council — co-founded by Priscilla Hunter and one of the groups supporting the bill — said young people wouldn’t be able to fathom the significance of the legislation passing. Maybe that’s a good thing.

“Maybe they don’t need to know about all the fighting that we have to do before they get to go out and enjoy and be tribal guardians stewarding their land.”