NASA launched two rockets from Alaska this week to learn more about the electrical “circuitry” within auroras, the colorful light shows that occur when solar wind collides with Earth’s atmosphere.

The missions saw two suborbital sounding rockets launch from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska loaded with scientific equipment that will fly into the atmosphere for a short period of time to gather data.

I got up early last week to take my own advice: flying to Juneau to visit my legislators.

But in addition to representing Alaskans in Juneau, all of Alaska’s legislators are frequent flyers.

Alaska Airlines Flight 62 was full of sleepy Alaskans on a similar mission. While I was knocking on doors regarding travel issues, there were others who had their own pitch for lawmakers: Future Farmers of America, Alaska’s State School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Alaska Council on Aging and a number of other groups.

It cost me 20,000 Atmos Rewards points for a round-trip ticket. Others who bought their tickets well in advance paid around $400, while last-minute travelers can pay as much as $700 round-trip. There are a couple of plans to carve 30% off last-minute tickets. Every Alaska Airlines frequent flyer gets a Constituent Fare discount off of three- or seven-day advance purchase fares to Juneau, one time only. Every Club 49 member gets a Travel Now certificate for 30% off the walk-up fare, one time only.

Over the course of the day, I had a half-dozen appointments with legislators, with a script to stay on topic for the 15-minute visit.

But Capitol insiders will confess that much of the real action is in the stairwell and the hallways, where you bump into legislators, staffers, lobbyists and media types.

Everybody I bumped into wanted to talk about Alaska Airlines. Specifically, frequent flyers were concerned about the high cost of travel between Anchorage and Juneau. Or, they were confused about Alaska’s new Atmos Rewards program. Or both.

Earlier this month, I asked some readers to give Atmos a report card grade, A through F.

Additionally, I asked for a show of hands at a recent travel-themed party. In between I called some super-frequent flyers to get their opinions.

The results were enlightening.

To review, when the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan morphed into Atmos Rewards, they really shuffled the deck.

All the miles-related jargon was gone. Now, it’s all about the points. There are status points, which determine your elite-level tier: silver, gold, platinum and titanium. Then there are bonus points that you can use to redeem for flights.

Further, the number of status points required to achieve the top tier, titanium, is increasing by 35% this year, from 100,000 to 135,000 points.

In addition to the regular Alaska Airlines credit card with the $99 companion fare, there’s a new Summit Atmos card that costs $395 per year. Alaska has loaded it up with a few bells and whistles, including lounge passes and some rollover points to jump-start next year’s quest for elite status.

There were just two respondents who gave Atmos an A, primarily because of the extra benefits of the Summit card for super-spenders. The biggest advantage for Summit cardholders is the 50% increase in the number of status points you get from your everyday spend.

Regular Alaska Airlines cardholders, now called Ascent Atmos cards, can earn one status point for every $3 spent. Additionally, cardholders still receive one bonus point for every dollar spent.

Summit cardholders get one status mile for every $2 spent.

So if you run a company and charge a lot of stuff on your credit card, it’s easier than ever to charge your way to titanium status without ever taking a flight.

Several — 27 — of the super-frequent flyers who responded to my poll gave the program a B.

Janine Amon has flown more than 2,000,000 miles on Alaska Airlines. She gives the program a B. She’s particularly grateful for the special phone number for titanium-level elites. She’s called the number primarily for securing credit from Alaska Airlines’ numerous partner airlines, including Philippine Air and Royal Air Maroc.

As a super-frequent flyer, Amon has stories of mix-ups and snafus, particularly between Alaska and Hawaiian Air, as well as partner airlines.

Another super-flyer, Bart Parker, gives the program a B+. Even though it’s only February, Parker has amassed more than 85,000 status points.

Parker’s litmus test is upgrades. “My upgrades are still coming through,” he wrote.

Once Parker is able to upgrade to the new 787 lie-flat seats, or into business class on partner airlines, including Hawaiian, he said he’s willing to bump up his grade to an A-.

But upgrades for Alaska’s new 787s to Europe and Asia, or on Hawaiian’s South Pacific flights, are hard to come by.

Alaska Airlines has high hopes that starting in April, titanium-level flyers will be able to stand by for same-day lie-flat business class seats on Alaska, Hawaiian and partner airlines.

Chris Ross is a million-miler on both Alaska Airlines and Delta.

Ross travels around the country working with companies on leadership development, employee engagement and health and safety.

Several super-flyers, including Ross, chimed in with specific operational issues on Alaska: missed connections, mechanical issues, delays and overall reliability. The Atmos game was way down the list for many of these travelers.

Ross gave the program a D.

An A is “Happy Days,” where Atmos is offering everything you expect from a loyalty program, including some “surprise and delight” moments. A B is “High Potential,” reflecting an honest effort to accommodate both Hawaiian and Alaska Airlines in the mix, plus an increasing number of partner airlines. But there’s room for improvement.

I bumped into political pundit Jeff Landfield of the Alaska Landmine in the Capitol. He pulled me aside for a lengthy discussion on Atmos and gave the program a B.

A C or “Curb Your Enthusiasm” reflects a lower score because of delays, frequent IT outages, or struggling with the website/app. Thirty respondents graded Atmos with a C.

Most respondents —38 — chose D or “Work in Progress.” These travelers are suffering through increased costs for point redemption, including high taxes and fees for European awards. There’s a glimmer of hope for improvement after full integration of Hawaiian and Alaska in April.

The F grade reflects “Grounds for dismissal.” These travelers, 16 of them, like most respondents, are “baked in” to the Atmos program with status, points and credit cards. But their view is it will take a shoulder-to-the-wheel effort to bring the program back on course.

Just over 50 respondents is not a huge sample. The respondents all live in Alaska and they are frequent flyers. To me, it reflects the mood of the travelers in the Capitol last week.

Thankfully, the planes in and out of Juneau were operating on time in the midst of a “wintry mix” of snow and rain with a light breeze. Several of my fellow travelers on Alaska 62 in the morning were turning around to fly home on Flight 67 in the evening. That makes for a long day, but underscores the value of face-to-face meetings for constituents in Juneau.

During a month of endless summer light, a mated pair of shorebirds teaches their four chicks how to catch insects. The babies grow fat and strong on the tundra high in northeastern Alaska. They are soon ready for their first migration.

On a random day, the male then jumps off the cushion of northern plants and, done with Alaska, flaps eastward. The female pivots and flies west.

The male whimbrel pauses for 25 days at Hudson Bay, continues over Nova Scotia and then follows the Atlantic coast on a nonstop journey to a wetland in Brazil.

The female cuts over the nose of the Seward Peninsula and stops for two weeks on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta. The fattened bird then tracks the Pacific shoreline — resting a week in San Francisco Bay and then some at the mouth of the Colorado River — until it reaches Colombia.

The whimbrels winter apart on opposite coasts of South America.

The following summer, both birds reverse course, reaching northeastern Alaska in late May.

Hopping across a green bench above the Katakturuk River, they each recognize the other’s shape, perhaps a remembered scent.

Their love blossoms anew. The female soon lays four eggs in a shallow nest.

This Valentine’s Day story arrives via a biologist who is about to learn a lot more about the whimbrels of northeastern Alaska.

Dan Ruthrauff has studied the ptarmigan-size shorebirds with roundish bodies and long, curved beaks for years. He has held them in his hands within the Kanuti Wildlife Refuge in central Alaska’s boreal forest and the tundra off the Colville River in northern Alaska.

Ruthrauff, a longtime researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, is taking over a study Shiloh Schulte initiated in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago.

Schulte, who died in a helicopter crash last summer, was in the second year of a newly funded three-year study that included monitoring a mated pair of whimbrels he had radio tagged. To the astonishment of other researchers, Schulte found that the two whimbrels — birds that probably mate for life — migrated in fall via different coasts of the Americas, and wintered in different countries.

In January 2025, Ruthrauff retired earlier than he had anticipated from the USGS Science Center in Anchorage. He was one of many scientists who left that organization of excellence due to pressure from the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.

A couple of months after a June 2025 helicopter crash near the Deadhorse airport took the life of biologist Shiloh Schulte and the helicopter’s pilot, a supervisor with Manomet Conservation Services of Massachusetts contacted Ruthrauff. He asked if Ruthrauff would consider extending Schulte’s work on the northern whimbrels, which can live to be 20 years old.

“The idea grew for me to work with the organization to help carry Shiloh’s work forward,” Ruthrauff said. “It was kind of a nice lifeline for me.”

Ruthrauff recalled a track from one of the birds he studied with his USGS colleagues. The whimbrel left a site near Quinhagak, on the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, and flew nonstop to a site in western Mexico, overflying the Baja Peninsula.

“This was over water the whole way, skipping Canada, the Lower 48, and Baja,” Ruthrauff said. “This was 5,700 kilometers nonstop, over less than three and a half days.”

Before Schulte found the mated pair that migrated via different ends of the continent, biologists thought that whimbrels that went east in fall might have been a different subspecies than the birds that headed west.

“We thought those birds were probably unlikely to breed,” Ruthrauff said.

But the birds have produced healthy chicks. Schulte found that a surprising three out of nine mated pairs of birds were composed of males that migrated by one ocean, females another.

That means two birds responsible for the same tiny nest on the tundra face dangers from the Caribbean and South America, where they are hunted for sport and food, as well as on the Pacific coast. Whimbrel numbers worldwide have declined by at least 70% over the last few decades.

“It shows the importance of these interconnected sites across the whole (Western) Hemisphere,” Ruthrauff said.

This summer, Ruthrauff will follow the whimbrels north to their nesting site near the Katakturuk River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which flows straight north from the Brooks Range into the Beaufort Sea. He wants to learn the birds’ life history and to find out where during their epic migration the birds face the most danger.

If he’s lucky, Ruthrauff may even witness the original long-distance couple that Schulte discovered, the plucky travelers once again reunited in northernmost Alaska.