Alaska

A view from the dunes

Published

10 months ago

May 5, 2025

The west side of the Kobuk dunes along upper Kavik Creek. (Seth Kantner)

KOTZEBUE — It’s spring here, sunny and bright, and deceptively cold. Outside it’s minus 7, with a west wind off the sea ice drifting snow and torturing the frozen air, creating fog out of clear blue sky. The sun glints on falling crystals and the endless white snow. My fingers are cracked, my nose sunburnt and frosted, and, as usual in spring, I’m packing while also still unpacking — tools, rope, mittens, muktuk and dried caribou — after weeks guiding NASA and Southwest Research Institute scientists at the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes.

In mid-March, we headed upriver with three snowmobiles and four sleds, myself and two other guides from Arctic Wild who I’d never met before, Pat Hendersen and Tim Pappas. They are big, tall, young capable white guys and I had my work cut out pretending I was even one or two of those things.

There’s a lot of snow this year, and I worried about the river above Kiana. It’s often soft and deep, with overflow and sinkholes, not the best place to be dragging heavy sleds without a trail. I had called ahead to Ambler and couldn’t stir my adopted nephews, but my niece, Andrea Kelly, offered to set off immediately, alone, to help pack a trail down the river.

The first 100 or so miles went well. The next hours were harder, with us struggling to get off the river, through willows and trees, and up a steep face onto the snow-covered sand. It was dark and late when we made it to the old Ferguson allotment on Ahnewetut Creek. We pitched tents, and in the morning stepped out into the huge awesome presence of the dunes. It wasn’t a tan sandscape like in summer — virtually no sand was exposed on the entire 25-square-mile surface. It was more like waking up on a cold, white alien planet. Through sparse spruce, just across the creek, a wall with heavy cornices towered against the sky, blocking the rising sun, and to the west, the slopes of taller dunes hid those horizons, too.

For the rest of the day, we prepared camp: making trails, cutting wood and setting up tents and woodstoves for the scientists to arrive the next morning. Tim and I scouted out a long flat inter-dune area for an airstrip, and he headed back to camp to work while I packed a 60-foot-wide and 2,000-foot-long airstrip as requested by Jared Cummings of Golden Eagle Outfitters, to land equipment and passengers in his turbine Otter on skis.

The landscape shifted colors as I snowgoed back and forth, beautiful blues and moody grays shifting under patches of moving sunlight and clouds. Along the northern horizon, the white diamonds of the Brooks Range sprawled, and closer, the Jade Mountains reached against the sky, friendly and familiar. Below the Jades, I could see a tiny line of white, the high tundra where caribou migrate south in the fall toward Onion Portage, and under that a dark line marking the timbered bluff of Paungaqtaugruk, where I was born and raised. It felt strange to be driving back and forth, going nowhere, and staring at my past only 15 miles away. I longed to head home. I pictured my family in my youth, working around our small sod igloo, shoveling snow, checking traps, feeding the dogs, hauling wood and water, and disappearing inside for the night, shutting out the cold as best we could. Was that this same person?

The next day, the feeling on the dunes changed again, with the arrival of people. Eric Sieh, of Arctic Backcountry Flying Service, landed early in his Super Cub to drop off a videographer from Smithsonian’s “Ice Airport Alaska,” who wanted to film the arrival of the NASA and SWRI scientists. Eric is a longtime friend, more than an expert at flying, and as I’d predicted, could land anywhere. Sure enough, he ignored my strip and landed beside it. It was good to see him. We joked and chatted briefly. He was in a hurry to return for the next load.

Jared arrived soon afterwards, touching down with a huge load in open snow. Tim and Pat and I helped him lower down heavy wooden crates, and we sledded loads back to camp while Eric and Jared flew two more trips each from Kotzebue, ferrying eight scientists — four women and four men — and another ton of gear. It was a cold day, with the sun hanging in the sky, and the passengers climbed down unacclimated, unaccustomed to bulky clothing and large boots, moving awkwardly at first, stumbling and sinking in the snow.

I was bundled up in my fur parka and hat, and heard someone say, “There you are.” A woman gave me a hug. A tall man followed, smiling. It was Cynthia Dinwiddie and David Stillman, two remaining members of the NASA project I guided when they first journeyed to the Arctic to study the Kobuk Sand Dunes. I hadn’t seen either since March 2010 when I snowgoed their crew to a ski-plane on the river ice.

Cynthia was the principal investigator, then and now, coordinating this study of movements of dust and sand, and the mysteries of perched water in these dunes, searching for clues needed for any future travel to Mars, I think. She looked the same, pretty, younger than her age, and a little nervous. David, who is tall and ceaselessly good-natured, and deploys robotic projects on the Moon, was an older version of the blue-eyed, smiling young man I’d known — minus a certain amount of head hair. I kept my hat on. I knew I didn’t look the same either. Standing there smiling, I glanced quickly toward the Jades, trying to sort out which years had passed since I last saw these friends, and which were the ones further back.

I remembered Clarence Wood had rented NASA his cabin below Kavik Creek. He was old, though still roaming, and stopped in on his way from Ambler to Kivalina, to have coffee and check what the white guys were up. My lifelong friend and brother, Alvin Williams, was alive then, too, young and handsome, just 43. He brought supplies down, and his 12-year-old son Kituq came along, and his girlfriend, Pearl Gomez. Alvin and I laughed a lot, as we always did, told stories, and discussed animals, guns and our boots. I remember cooking outside on a Coleman (we all hated the cook’s sour, expired packaged food), frying caribou, muskox, lynx, rabbit and ptarmigan for the scientists, and letting them try muktuk. Later, Andrew Greene came into camp with a wolverine on his sled. After the project ended, I headed north to Midas Creek and the upper Noatak country.

Quickly, I rushed to load luggage and red and blue coolers on my sled, to get these nice cold smart people out of the way before Jared’s powerful propwash manufactured a blizzard.

• • •

Things got busy after that, and complicated. We were a big camp. Each scientist had their own specialty, and they moved back and forth unpacking crates of radar and equipment, firing up a generator and a Starlink. Tim and Pat and I had our hands full too, chopping wood, tending camp, repairing things and helping them. We settled in to long work days out in the cold — what I think of as fun.

The weather stayed cold, minus 25 some nights, sunny most days. To me it was perfect, although mornings were not as easy as when I was younger, with my food and water and everything in my tent frozen solid. The scientists had their own difficulties: a hole melted in the science tent, and the first night, the tent with two Davids — Camp David — filled with toxic smoke from air mattresses touching the stove. Pat and Tim were concerned about our first-day trajectory toward fire. Me, I had predicted difficulties; mixing nylon tents and woodstoves takes practice. In my small tent, my homemade stove was ice cold, followed by frighteningly hot. I was sympathetic and loaned the guys my spare mattress and cotton blanket, and kept my caribou hide.

I worked daily with David, setting up radar equipment. Once we had things ready, a researcher named Jani Radebaugh and her cheery young student Emma Gosselin accompanied us criss-crossing nearby dunes and inter-dunes at slow speed, dragging ground-penetrating radar. Over and over, their GPR and Ohm-Mapper units went on the blink (or no blink), and we had to return to camp to thaw things out. Cynthia joined us occasionally, though she mostly had to stay in camp and download data we gathered, to guide the drilling team.

The drill team was having a tough go of it, too, making slow and no progress with a hand auger, until finally Pat had Tim take over more cooking and wood duties, and he worked long hours to help the team get down past caving sand and frozen layers.

I kept hoping to make a trip home, glancing in that direction like a hungry wolf, but every minute was filled, mechanical difficulties plagued us, and Cynthia and David were relentless in their desire for more data. I’d been waiting 15 years for their return, and was relentless, too, in my efforts to make this work out for her and her team.

A cold evening at the NASA science camp. (Seth Kantner)

Morning and evening, we gathered in the chilly meal tent to eat great food Tim and Pat somehow cooked, compared notes, tell stories and plan out the following day’s work. Slyly, I brought along my muktuk and dried caribou, and did my best to hide my bad hip and other infirmities. I’d turned 60 the previous month, and my dad turned 90 while we were there. I was feeling a surprising number of years piling up around me, and more than once, I went ahead and took advantage of my elder status.

“You people don’t respect the cold enough,” I said, after days and days of dead batteries, blank screens, an iced-up generator, snapped wires and other difficulties.

It didn’t appear that anyone heard, or wanted to hear. Nerves were starting to fray. But David began carrying big batteries in his jacket — and in mine — and Cynthia asked me to help drag a GPR unit into her and Jani’s tent to thaw. And slowly our progress picked up.

One day, I overheard Cynthia telling the group that I’d taught her to shoot a rifle and a pistol. Really? She started archery after that, she said. Faint memories drifted back: the Anchorage Museum had shown Cynthia and my photographs; they’d flown us at separate times to Anchorage to present our work. Suddenly, I realized, she’s on the cover of my fourth book! How and when had my life gotten so convoluted that I forgot all this?

“I remember you soldering broken wires on the GPR with a Bic lighter,” David said, smiling. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told that story. We were miles from camp, out in the cold and you fixed the GPR.”

Collecting samples of ancient stream beds. (Seth Kantner)

It made me feel good — trusted — and I went out and banged ice out of my sled, to haul one more load of water from the creek. When I was done, I drove to the top of a dune for a few minutes to watch the mountains settle in after sunset. I heard a buzzing. Emma’s drone hovered overhead, the little insect face staring, then the props whirred and it shot north to map another dune.

The land glowed in the evening light. I got out my iPhone to take a photo. I checked to see if the Starlink reached this far. It didn’t. The mixed scene felt incongruous and made me think of my brother Kole and I, reading science fiction novels when we were kids: Kole liked “Dune,” and “The Martian Chronicles,” and Edgar Rice Burroughs books. I read Asimov, but preferred “real” stories. I pictured us brothers skinning muskrats, eating muskrat for dinner, gnawing the boiled hairy skin off the tails. My primitive hunter-gatherer past felt close, and so incredibly distant. Even the concept of studying this ancient sand to try to understand the surface of Mars felt different, and I realized those little boys would have seen this life of mine as a science fiction.

The camp looked peaceful from there. A few stars were out, and I took one more photo of the distant mountains before I headed back down to continue my chores in the cold and falling darkness.

Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, wildlife photographer, wilderness guide and is the author of the best-selling novel “Ordinary Wolves,” and most recently, the nonfiction book “A Thousand Trails Home: Living With Caribou.” He lives in Northwest Alaska and can be reached at sethkantner.com.

Source link

Alaska

Recognizing Southeast Alaska as a mining district – Homer News

Published

5 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Press Room

Recognizing Southeast Alaska as a mining district

Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 12, 2026

Many Alaskans and folks Outside, including in Congress, do not realize that the Tongass National Forest is a Volcanic Mass Sulfide area the size of West Virginia and, accordingly, a major Alaska mining district. Patricia Roppel’s 1991 book, “Fortunes from the Earth,” catalogues over 120 legacy non-gold mines (copper, zinc, barite) throughout Southeast Alaska that were mined from the 1890s forward. The legacy gold mines throughout the Region (like the AJ and Treadwell mines) increase that number.

The Forest Service’s 2008 Tongass Land Management Plan Amendment estimated the values of discovered and undiscovered minerals on the Tongass as follows: discovered minerals: $37.1 billion (expressed as 1988 dollars) in the 1990 U.S. Bureau of Mines study, and undiscovered minerals: $28.3 billion (expressed as 1988 dollars).

I applaud Randy Ruaro, executive director of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, for organizing and holding a meeting on Dec. 19 to take a hard look at the Tongass as a mining district. The meeting participants heard from multiple technical experts about new technologies for extracting minerals from ore. These technologies hold the potential of being less expensive and more environmentally friendly than current extraction techniques. The speakers discussed applying these technologies to legacy mines in the Tongass as a means of cleaning them up and obtaining value by processing the ore at a central site. AIDEA’s plan should be aggressively executed because it will result in increased mining in Southeast Alaska.

AIDEA’s plan works hand in glove with the Dunleavy administration’s equally important efforts to obtain a legislative exemption for the Tongass from the 2001 Roadless Rule. In an Oct. 27 letter to the president, the governor correctly pointed out that the Roadless Rule remains in effect on the Tongass today due to a stay of the state’s litigation against Biden’s 2023 reimposition while the current administration’s 2025 nationwide rulemaking goes forward. The nationwide rulemaking is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2026. The governor is rightly concerned that the litigation and appeals that will follow completion of the rulemaking could last beyond the Trump administration’s term and be rescinded again.

The governor explained: “We have water access to the archipelago of islands that make up the Tongass. We just need the certainty of road access to move drills and heavy equipment across the beach into the interior of those islands to access the mineral deposits. Legislation to make that happen would provide the certainty that investors need to fund the access to critical and rare earth minerals so important to America’s national security.”

On Dec. 19 the Resource Development Corporation sent a letter to Alaska’s Congressional delegation asking its members to support the governor’s request for a legislative exemption from the rule.

The governor and RDC are right. It takes 15 to 20 years to explore and develop a mine. A legislative exemption is needed to provide investors with confidence that the rules will not be constantly changing depending upon which administration holds office.

The ping-pong effect of attempting to exempt the Tongass through rulemaking has created uncertainty in the investment community. For example, the first Trump administration exempted the Tongass from the Roadless Rule through rulemaking on October 29, 2020. The Biden administration signed Executive Order 13990 on January 20, 2021, directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to review the Trump I Exemption. On June 11, 2021, USDA announced that it would repeal the Trump I Exemption through rulemaking, which it completed in January 2023. President Trump returned the favor on January 21, 2025, in paragraph 3(c) of Executive Order 14153, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.”

The AIDEA and Dunleavy initiatives should be aggressively followed up by the state and governor with the president and with the delegation because the Tongass National Forest is the most accessible of the mining districts in Alaska and could support exploration and development the soonest. We just need to obtain a more permanent exemption from the Roadless Rule than can be obtained from rulemaking. More mines in Southeast could help offset the anticipated decline in the state’s revenue. It could also help offset the decline in working age adults and their families in Southeast Alaska.

Frank H. Murkowski is a former U.S. senator and Alaska governor.

Source link

Alaska

Alaska accuses crowdfunding websites of violating law, using charities’ names without their consent

Published

18 hours ago

March 11, 2026

Press Room

Alaska accuses crowdfunding websites of violating law, using charities’ names without their consent

The home page for the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is shown on a device in New York, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)

The state of Alaska filed civil lawsuits Tuesday against six crowdfunding websites, accusing them of illegally soliciting donations for thousands of Alaska charities without consent.

In complaints filed at Anchorage Superior Court, the consumer protection unit of the Alaska Department of Law said GoFundMe, PayPal, Charity Navigator, Pledgling Technologies, JustGiving and Network For Good each violated the Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act thousands of times.

That act, in place since 1993, requires state registration for anyone who seeks donations on behalf of a charity.

The suits ask a judge to order the sites shut down the pages devoted to Alaska nonprofits and immediately disburse any donations to those nonprofits. It also asks for “separate civil penalties … of not less than $1,000 and not more than $25,000 per violation.”

According to the complaints, the six crowdfunding sites scraped IRS data to obtain the information of thousands of Alaska nonprofits, then set up donation pages for each of those nonprofits without their consent.

That scraping was part of a nationwide campaign that encompassed almost a million and a half federally registered organizations.

In some cases, the sites charged fees or encouraged “tips” to themselves during the donation process. In many cases, they poured donations into a third-party account and only released donations to charities who stepped forward to claim them, according to the complaints.

Attorney General-designee Stephen Cox said the state became aware of the issue after California reporters and state officials began investigating why GoFundMe created donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their consent or knowledge.

GoFundMe later took down pages created without consent, but other crowdfunding websites did not. On Tuesday morning, donation pages were still visible on Charity Navigator, one of the defendants named in the new Alaska lawsuits. GoFundMe has kept some pages created with the consent of charities.

Earlier this week, almost two dozen state attorney generals sent a letter to GoFundMe, demanding answers to questions about its policies.

Alaska did not sign that letter, in part because officials here believed the response was too weak.

In a prepared statement, Cox said, “Alaska law is clear: if you’re going to raise money in a charity’s name, you must first get the charity’s consent. These lawsuits are about protecting donors, protecting nonprofits, and preserving the public trust that makes charitable giving possible.”

Laurie Wolf is President and CEO of the Foraker Group, which advises Alaska nonprofits and provides them with administrative support.

The Foraker Group has been issuing warnings about the issue for months, and Wolf filed an affidavit in support of the lawsuit, as did a representative of the Bethel Community Services Foundation and Bread Line Inc., which operates a food bank in Fairbanks.

By phone on Tuesday, Wolf said the issue is a matter of consent: “They are impersonating 1.2 million nonprofits across this country, they’re impersonating them without their consent or even their knowledge.”

She said the issue became particularly important last fall, when people across the United States and the world became aware of the devastation caused by ex-Typhoon Halong in Western Alaska.

Many people, not knowing local Alaska charities, simply donated via links they found on internet searches. Some of those donations may have never reached their intended recipients.

If a crowdfunding website operates independently of the charity it intends to benefit, it might interfere with the charity’s own fundraising, she explained.

Someone might never be recognized for their gift and become angry, hurting the charity’s long-term relationship with their community.

“They take away the ability for the organization to make choices for itself about how it wants to build trust and relationships with its donors, and how it wants to put its brand and its mission out in the public sphere. They’ve taken away all of our choices about that,” she said.

In addition, donations may be subject to fees or never reach a charity at all, particularly if the charity is unaware that a crowdfunding website is holding money for it to collect.

The Foraker Group went so far as to conduct an experiment and had an employee donate to the group through several of the defendants’ platforms. In multiple cases, it took weeks before the donation reached its intended recipient, and in some cases, the donor’s identity was concealed, making it impossible for the charity to properly thank them.

GoFundMe was the only defendant to respond to emailed inquiries before the Beacon’s reporting deadline on Tuesday.

“GoFundMe’s mission is to help people help each other by making it easier for donors to discover and support the causes they care about. We are committed to helping nonprofits reach new supporters by connecting them with the millions of people on our platform who want to make a difference. Nonprofit Pages were created using publicly available information to help people support nonprofit organizations, with donations going to the intended nonprofit,” said Jeff Platt, communications manager for GoFundMe.

“After hearing feedback from nonprofit leaders in October, we acted quickly to make Nonprofit Pages fully opt-in, removed and de-indexed unclaimed pages, and turned off search engine optimization by default. The immediate changes we made directly addressed the concerns of the nonprofit community, and reflect our continued commitment to transparency, accountability, and partnership with the nonprofit sector,” he said.

This week’s lawsuits in state court rely in large part on the 1993 Alaska Charitable Solicitations Act.

That bill passed the Alaska Legislature amid a surge of concern about telemarketers soliciting donations by phone.

Then-Rep. Ron Larson, a Democrat from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, sponsored the act and told fellow lawmakers at the time that “lookalike organizations” were “ripping off” legitimate charities.

The act made no mention of donations by internet, and in state law, it’s still labeled as “Telephonic solicitations,” but it goes on to state that under any circumstances it is unlawful to use a charity’s name or symbol without their permission.

“Alaskans are generous people. But generosity depends on trust,” Cox said in his prepared statements. “GoFundMe and similar platforms used nonprofits’ good names to solicit donations without coordinating with the organizations actually doing the charitable work. That means some Alaskans may have donated thinking they were supporting a specific charity, when the charity never authorized the page and may never have received the donation — or may have received less than donors intended because of fees.”

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.

Source link

Alaska

Jessie Holmes wins Alaska Air Transit Spirit of Iditarod Award

Published

1 day ago

March 11, 2026

Press Room

Jessie Holmes wins Alaska Air Transit Spirit of Iditarod Award

Veteran musher Jessie Holmes (bib # 7 ), of Brushkana, Alaska was the first musher to reach the McGrath checkpoint at 8:03 p.m. today with 16 dogs in harness, winning the Alaska Air Transit Spirit of Iditarod Award.

First presented in 2019 and given to the first musher to reach the McGrath checkpoint, this award is presented by Lead Dog partner, Alaska Air Transit. First introduced in 2019, this award honors the first musher to arrive at the McGrath Checkpoint. The McGrath community shares deep ties to the Iditarod, and the award reflects that connection, featuring beaver fur mushers mitts with Athabaskan beadwork on moose hide, handcrafted by Loretta Maillelle of McGrath, along with a beaver fur hat made by Rosalie Egrass of McGrath. The award was presented to Holmes by Jessica Beans-Vaeao, Charter Coordinator for Alaska Air Transit

“Our team is excited to present this Spirit of Iditarod award in McGrath again this year. The Beaded Moose Hide and Beaver Mitts were made by Loretta Maillelle of McGrath, and the hand sewn Beaver Hat was made by Rosalie Egrass of McGrath. Rosalie Egrass was able to fly home on our plane that took our crew and the award to McGrath, which made for a pretty special trip! We are proud to be providing service to McGrath, and feel that all local Air Carriers represent the spirit of Iditarod throughout Alaska on a daily basis. It is great to be a part of the air carriers that service the state with essential supplies and transportation, and to be a part of the Iditarod in a meaningful way,” said Josie Owen, owner of Alaska Air Transit.

This is Alaska Air Transit’s eighth year sponsoring the Iditarod and seventh year presenting the Spirit of Iditarod Award. Alaska Air Transit offers crucial flight support statewide via air charter and provides scheduled service to the Upper Kuskokwim communities of Nikolai, McGrath, Takotna and Tatalina as well as the Prince William Sound communities of Tatitlek and Chenega.

Source link