ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – At Saturday’s 17th Annual Polar Plunge for Special Olympics Alaska, participants jumped into Goose Lake’s chilly water for a cause.

“The wind today, it’s a cold one,” the organization’s President and CEO, Sarah Arts, said.

More than 800 people came out to jump into the lake, she said. They exceeded their fundraising goal by late morning.

She said it means a lot to the athletes to know that the community is behind them.

“Inclusion is such a big part of what we do, and sport is a universal language. And through sport, everyone can be included. And it’s so amazing to see the community out here,” Arts said.

She said there were hot tubs for participants to warm up in afterward they jumped into the lake.

“I have to give some shout-outs to South High School Partners Club. Those students had some very creative plunges. A couple of face plants, belly flops. We had a back flip. So, they’re really getting creative today,” she said.

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KOTZEBUE, Alaska (AP) — The low autumn light turned the tundra gold as James Schaeffer, 7, and his cousin Charles Gallahorn, 10, raced down a dirt path by the cemetery on the edge of town. Permafrost thaw had buckled the ground, tilting wooden cross grave markers sideways. The boys took turns smashing slabs of ice that had formed in puddles across the warped road.

Their great-grandfather, Roswell Schaeffer, 78, trailed behind. What was a playground to the kids was, for Schaeffer – an Inupiaq elder and prolific hunter – a reminder of what warming temperatures had undone: the stable ice he once hunted seals on, the permafrost cellars that kept food frozen all summer, the salmon runs and caribou migrations that once defined the seasons.

Now another pressure loomed. A 211-mile mining road that would cut through caribou and salmon habitat was approved by the Trump administration this fall, though the project still faces lawsuits and opposition from environmental and native groups. Schaeffer and other critics worry it could open the region to outside hunters and further devastate already declining herds. “If we lose our caribou – both from climate change and overhunting – we’ll never be the same,” he said. “We’re going to lose our culture totally.”

Still, Schaeffer insists on taking the next generation out on the land, even when the animals don’t come. It was late September and he and James would normally have been at their camp hunting caribou. But the herd has been migrating later each year and still hadn’t arrived – a pattern scientists link to climate change, mostly caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal. So instead of caribou, they scanned the tundra for swans, ptarmigan and ducks.

A lifetime of hunting

Caribou antlers are stacked outside Schaeffer’s home. Traditional seal hooks and whale harpoons hang in his hunting shed. Inside, a photograph of him with a hunted beluga is mounted on the wall beside the head of a dall sheep and a traditional mask his daughter Aakatchaq made from caribou hide and lynx fur.

He got his first caribou at 14 and began taking his own children out at 7. James made his first caribou kill this past spring with a .22 rifle. He teaches James what his father taught him: that power comes from giving food and a hunter’s responsibility is to feed the elders.

“When you’re raised an Inupiaq, your whole being is to make sure the elders have food,” he said.

But even as he passes down those lessons, Schaeffer worries there won’t be enough to sustain the next generation – or to sustain him. “The reason I’ve been a successful hunter is the firm belief that, when I become old, people will feed me,” he said. “My great-grandson and my grandson are my future for food.”

That future feels tenuous

These days, they’re eating less hunted food and relying more on farmed chicken and processed goods from the store. The caribou are fewer, the salmon scarcer, the storms more severe. Record rainfall battered Northwest Alaska this year, flooding Schaeffer’s backyard twice this fall alone. He worries about the toll on wildlife and whether his grandchildren will be able to live in Kotzebue as the changes accelerate.

“It’s kind of scary to think about what’s going to happen,” he said.

That afternoon, James ducked into the bed of Schaeffer’s truck and aimed into the water. He shot two ducks. Schaeffer helped him into waders – waterproof overalls – so they could collect them and bring them home for dinner, but the tide was too high. They had to turn back without collecting the ducks.

The changes weigh on others, too. Schaeffer’s friend, writer and commercial fisherman Seth Kantner grew up along the Kobuk River, where caribou once reliably crossed by the hundreds of thousands.

“I can hardly stand how lonely it feels without all the caribou that used to be here,” he said. “This road is the largest threat. But right beside it is climate change.”

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Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

President Donald Trump has signed bills nullifying Biden-era environmental protections in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in Northwest Alaska in an effort to promote oil and mining activity.

The actions were a win for Alaska’s congressional delegation, which sponsored the measures to open opportunities for drilling in the refuge and development of the 200-mile road through wilderness to reach the Ambler mineral district.

The actions are part of Trump’s effort to aggressively develop U.S. oil, gas and minerals with Alaska often in the limelight.

Potential drilling in the refuge and the road to minerals are two of the standout issues in the long-running saga over resource development in Alaska, with Republican administrations seeking to open the areas to industry and Democratic administrations fighting against it.

The signings were a loss for some Alaska Native tribal members and environmental groups that had protested the bills, calling them an unprecedented attack against land and wildlife protections that were developed following extensive public input.

An Alaska Native group from the North Slope region where the refuge is located, however, said it supported the passage of the bill that could lead to oil and gas development there.

One of the bills nullifies the 2024 oil and gas leasing program that put more than half of the Arctic refuge coastal plain off-limits to development. The former plan was in contrast to the Trump administration’s interest in opening the 1.5-million-acre area to potential leasing.

The federal government has long estimated that the area holds 7.7 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” on federal lands alone, slightly more than the oil consumed in the U.S. in 2024. The refuge is not far from oil infrastructure on state land, where interest from a key Alaska oil explorer has grown.

Two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge so far have generated miniscule interest. But the budget reconciliation bill that passed this summer requires four additional oil and gas lease sales under more development friendly, Trump-era rules.

Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, a group of leaders from tribes and other North Slope entities, said in a statement that it supports the withdrawal of the 2024 rules for the refuge.

The group said cultural traditions and onshore oil and gas development can coexist, with taxes from development supporting wildlife research that support subsistence traditions.

“This deeply flawed policy was drafted without proper legal consultation with our North Slope Iñupiat tribes and Alaska Native Corporations,’ said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the group. “Yet, today’s development shows that Washington is finally listening to our voices when it comes to policies affecting our homelands.”

The second bill that Trump signed halts the resource management plan for the Central Yukon region. The plan covered 13.3 million acres, including acreage surrounding much of the Dalton Highway where the long road to the Ambler mineral district would start before heading west. The plan designated more than 3 million acres as critical environmental areas in an effort to protect caribou, salmon and tundra.

The bills relied on the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress a chance to halt certain agency regulations while blocking similar plans from being developed in the future.

U.S. Rep. Nick Begich and Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan attended the signing in the White House.

“We’ve known the road to American prosperity begins in Alaska; the rest of America now knows that as well,” Begich said in a post on social media platform X.

Begich introduced the measures. Murkowski and Sullivan sponsored companion legislation in the Senate.

They were part of five bills Trump signed Thursday to undo resource protections plans for areas in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, using the Congressional Review Act.

Trump last week also signed a bill revoking Biden-era restrictions on oil and gas activity in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, another Arctic stretch of federal lands west of the refuge. That measure was also sponsored by the Alaska delegation.

The Wilderness Society said in a statement Thursday that the bills destabilize public lands management.

“Americans deserve public lands that protect clean air and water, support wildlife and preserve the freedom of future generations to explore,” said the group’s senior legal director, Alison Flint. “Instead, the president and Congress have muzzled voices in local communities and tossed aside science-based management plans that would deliver a balanced approach to managing our public lands.”

Alaska tribal members criticize end of Central Yukon plan

The Bering Sea-Interior Tribal Commission, consisting of 40 Alaska tribes, said in a statement Thursday that it condemns the termination of the Central Yukon management plan using the Congressional Review Act.

The action dissolves more than a dozen years of federal and tribal collaboration, the group said.

The termination of the Central Yukon plan will hurt tribes that hunt caribou and other subsistence foods, the group said.

“On the heels of the seventh summer without our Yukon River salmon harvest, we are stunned at the idea our leaders would impose more uncertainty around the management of the lands that surround us,” said Mickey Stickman, former first chief of the Nulato tribal government. “The threat of losing our federal subsistence rights, and confusion over how habitat for caribou, moose, and salmon will be managed, is overwhelming.”

After the signing, federal management of the Central Yukon region will revert back to three separate old plans, removing clarity for tribes and developers and requiring the Bureau of Land Management to start again on a costly new plan, the group said.

“This decision erases years of consultation with Alaska Native governments and silences the communities that depend on these lands for food security, cultural survival, and economic stability,” said Ricko DeWilde, a tribal member from the village of Huslia, in a statement from the Defend the Brooks Range coalition. “We’re being forced to sell out our lands and way of life without the benefit of receiving anything in return.”