Alaska

Alaska lawmakers return to Juneau on Tuesday. Here’s what to expect.

Published

2 months ago

January 16, 2026

Alaska lawmakers return to Juneau on Tuesday. Here’s what to expect.

Lawmakers return to the Alaska State Capitol on Tuesday and, as always, they’ve got a long agenda to tackle, from health care and energy to the state’s persistent budget struggles.

Alaska Public Media’s state government reporter, Eric Stone, will be tracking the session in Juneau. He joined Wesley Early on Alaska News Nightly to give a sense of what the session will bring.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Wesley Early: So, Eric — lots to do, only four months to do it. What are lawmakers prioritizing ahead of the session?

Eric Stone: Well, Wesley, as you said, there’s a lot to do. And there will always be some surprises. But what’s not a surprise is how difficult the budget will be this year. We heard a lot last year about how this might be a painful year.

Maybe this will set the tone — last year, we had a $1,000 Permanent Fund dividend, the smallest ever when you adjust for inflation. And this year, what I keep hearing is that even a $1,000 dividend will be a challenge. Here’s Fairbanks Republican Rep. Will Stapp — he sits on the House Finance Committee.

Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks: At the current level of spending and revenue, I don’t see how that’s possible without large savings draws, and I don’t know how people are going to feel about that.

ES: This has been an issue for years, of course. Lawmakers and the governor have worked to cut state spending in a variety of areas, though there’s some dispute about how much there is left to cut.

Stapp says he’d like lawmakers to take a closer look at department budgets with something known as zero-based budgeting. Basically, rather than starting from a baseline of “what did we spend last year,” this would be starting at zero and building the budget from scratch. Stapp included an amendment in last year’s budget asking the governor’s office to try that for one department of their choice, but he says as far as he can tell, that didn’t happen.

So he says he’s renewing his efforts this year.

Stapp: Because you don’t really want to tell people the state needs a lot more money in terms of taxes … when you can’t really articulate where the money goes initially and what the money does.

ES: Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget, as usual, contains what he calls a statutory PFD, $3,800 or so. But that, and the expenses they have to catch up on from this current year, mean that the governor’s budget would require spending more than half of what the state has in savings.

But it’s a bit incomplete. The governor has said he plans to introduce a fiscal plan. Last we heard, when he released his budget in December, it was still a work in progress. But the governor has his last State of the State speech this session — usually those come pretty early in the session, so a fiscal plan would be something to watch for there. Then again, a few years ago, Dunleavy said he was planning to introduce a sales tax and never did.

Democratic Anchorage Rep. Andrew Gray says he hopes Dunleavy does propose some kind of tax.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage: He’s not running for reelection, so he can afford to take that risk …. He could, going forward into the future, have established a reliable source of revenue to fund our state. I mean, there could be no more worthy legacy for him. It would be monumental.

ES: Gray says he’d prefer an income tax — he says that would be fairer to low-income Alaskans — but if the governor proposes a sales tax, Gray says he thinks lawmakers would have to find a way to get it passed. He says he thinks lawmakers on both sides would be willing to discuss just about any solution to secure the state’s financial future.

But it’s an election year, and a fiscal plan requires some hard votes, so it’ll take some gumption for lawmakers and the governor to actually come together rather than kick the can down the road yet again.

WE: Alright, so we have the perennial budget debate with a bit more urgency this year. That’ll be something to watch. What else is on your radar?

ES: This one came up recently — health care. You might have heard of this Rural Health Transformation Program. That’ll send more than a billion dollars to the state over the next five years to, essentially, improve health care. There are a bunch of restrictions on how it can be spent, and most of that decision-making will happen inside the executive branch in the Department of Health.

But Health Commissioner Heidi Hedberg said on a call with reporters recently that there is a role for the Legislature to play. To make Alaska’s grant application more competitive, the state said it would do a bunch of things by the end of 2027. Those include expanding what pharmacists are allowed to do, and joining a variety of “license compacts” for EMS workers, nurses and a few others. The deal is, if you’re licensed in some states, you can also practice in Alaska without a need for retraining.

That’s an issue the Legislature has not made a focus in past years, though there are some pending bills. And Gray says he could see those scrambling caucus lines.

Gray: In terms of where people land and what they support, I think that it’s not going to be clear-cut. It’s not going to be a majority-versus-minority. I think that that it’s going to be all over the place.

ES: But Gray, who is also a physician assistant, says he supports the policy changes.

Stapp, for his part, says he’s on board — he says he’s still reviewing what all is needed, but he says from what he’s seen so far, he doesn’t see why those policy changes will be a problem.

WE: Finally, Eric, what about the Alaska LNG project? Are you expecting movement on that front?

ES: That one is interesting. The gas pipeline developer, Glenfarne, has yet to announce what’s known as a final investment decision — a green light to move forward. Lawmakers heard last year from its consultants about a variety of changes they could make to ensure the project is profitable enough and stable enough to go forward. We could see some movement on that — for instance, Gov. Dunleavy says he’d like to see lawmakers offer some property tax relief to the gas line project to help it pencil out. And a lot of lawmakers say they support efforts to help the gas line move forward — but I think they’ll approach that question with some caution. They don’t want their home communities to get taken to the cleaners, so to speak.

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Alaska

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 ASAA State Championship Brackets – March 10

Published

4 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 ASAA State Championship Brackets – March 10

The 2026 Alaska high school girls basketball state championships begin this week, and High School On SI has brackets for all four classifications.

The brackets will be updated with scores and matchups throughout the week.

All four classifications will play their state championship games at Alaska Airlines Center in Anchorage.

The 1A and 2A championships run March 11-14. Classes 3A and 4A play the following week, March 18-21.

Alaska High School Girls Basketball 2026 State Championship Brackets, Matchups, Schedule – March 10

3/11 – Shaktoolik (1) vs. Arlicaq (16)

3/11 – Kake (8) vs. Tri-Valley (9)

3/11 – Fort Yukon (4) vs. Andreafski (13)

3/11 – Sand Point (5) vs. Napaaqutgmiut (12)

3/11 – Scammon Bay (2) vs. Nunamiut (15)

3/11 – Akiuk Memorial (7) vs. Newhalen (10)

3/11 – Davis-Romoth (3) vs. Cook Inlet Academy (14)

3/11 – Hoonah (6) vs. Shishmaref (11)

3/12 – Seward (1) vs. Chevak (8)

3/12 – Metlakatla (4) vs. Cordova (5)

3/12 – Craig (2) vs. Susitna Valley (7)

3/12 – Glennallen (3) vs. Degnan (6)

3/18 – Barrow (1) vs. Kotzebue (8)

3/18 – Grace Christian (4) vs. Galena (5)

3/18 – Monroe Catholic (2) vs. Delta (7)

3/18 – Mt. Edgecumbe (3) vs. Kenai Central (6)

3/18 – Mountain City Christian Academy (1) vs. North Pole (8)

3/18 – Colony (4) vs. West (5)

3/18 – Bartlett (2) vs. Juneau-Douglas (7)

3/18 – Wasilla (3) vs. Service (6)

More Coverage from High School On SI

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Alaska

Made In The USA: The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company

Published

16 hours ago

March 10, 2026

Press Room

Made In The USA: The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company

This is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.

The Alaska Wall Tent comes in an array of sizes and versions, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your individual use-case. They’re all individually made in Alaska, and perhaps even more importantly, they’re all tested extensively to be able to handle local conditions.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 5

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 2

This is the Alaska Wall Tent by the Alaska Gear Company, each one is made in the United States from Sunforger 13oz DLX, a double-filled, pre-shrunk, marine-grade canvas ideal for longterm outdoor use.

History Speedrun: The Alaska Gear Company

The Alaska Gear Company was formerly known as Airframes Alaska, it’s an aviation and outdoor equipment supplier and manufacturer headquartered in Palmer, Alaska. The company is led by majority owner Sean McLaughlin, who bought the original bush airplane parts business when it had just two employees and $100,000 in annual revenue. McLaughlin has since grown it to approximately 100 employees and $20 million in annual sales.

The company can trace its early roots to a licensed maker of Piper PA-18 Super Cub fuselages at Birchwood Airport. Through a series of acquisitions, including Reeve Air Motive (an aircraft parts retailer operating out of Anchorage’s Merrill Field since 1950, Alaska Tent & Tarp, and Northern Sled Works, the company grew well beyond aviation into outdoor recreation and cold-weather gear.

That diversification ultimately drove the rebrand from Airframes Alaska to Alaska Gear Company in late 2023, as the old name no longer conveyed the full scope of what the company produces and sells.

The Alaska Gear Company now operates out of three locations – a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Palmer, a production facility in Fairbanks, and a retail store with an in-house sewing workshop at Merrill Field in Anchorage.

Its product lines span two major categories. On the aviation side, the company is best known for its hand-built Alaskan Bushwheel tundra tires, FAA-approved titanium landing gear, Super Cub fuselage modifications, and a wide range of bush plane parts. On the outdoor side, it manufactures Arctic Oven hot tents, canvas wall tents, custom freight and pulk sleds, and a modernized version of the iconic military bunny boot designed for extreme cold weather conditions.

More recently in 2024, the Alaska Gear Company was named “Made in Alaska Manufacturer of the Year” by the Alaska Department of Commerce.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company

The Alaska Canvas Wall Tent is a handmade-in-Alaska canvas tent made from 13oz Sunforger DLX double-filled, preshrunk, marine-grade cotton canvas that’s treated to resist fire, water, and mildew while still remaining breathable.

It comes in four sizes, including 8×10, 10×12, 12×14, and 14×16 feet, all with 5-foot wall heights, and it’s available either unframed (starting at $1,295) or with a frame (starting at $2,300). The unframed version can be constructed in the field using lengths of wood sourced from the area, reducing the initial pack weight – this is crucial for trips into the wilderness by bush plane where every pound of weight is critical.

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The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 4

All tents include a 4.5 inch oval stove jack for use with wood or propane stoves, as well as a 56 inch triangular rear window with insect screening, an 18oz vinyl sod cloth around the base to block drafts and moisture, ridgepole openings at both ends, rope-reinforced eaves, brass grommets, overlapping door flaps with ties, a heavy-duty zippered door, and 100 feet of sisal rope for tie-downs.

The tents are now available to buy direct from the Alaska Gear Company here, and at the time of writing they have stock ready to ship out immediately.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 10

Images courtesy of the Alaska Gear Company

Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.

Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

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Alaska

Lakes are growing in Alaska. That’s not entirely a bad thing

Published

1 day ago

March 9, 2026

Press Room

Lakes are growing in Alaska. That’s not entirely a bad thing

The St. Elias Mountains in southeast Alaska are dotted with over 100 lakes where glaciers crumble into milky, turquoise water. Those lakes are expanding at an ever-quickening pace.

The lakes will quadruple in size over the next century or two, scientists report March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This growth will transform landscapes, create new salmon habitat and may even change the course of a major river.

“We are seeing the great age of ice retreat” in Alaska, says Daniel McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “These glaciers are just peeling back from the landscape,” revealing deep grooves they carved in the Earth, where lakes are now forming.

Glacial hydrologist Eran Hood of the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, who was not part of the study, adds that “understanding where these lakes are going to emerge is important” because it “changes the whole nature of the downstream ecosystem.”

Hugging the coastline along the Alaska-Canada border, the tiny mountainous region that includes the St. Elias Mountains is losing 60 cubic kilometers of ice per year. Because lakes absorb solar heat, the glaciers that shed ice into lakes are shrinking faster than those that terminate on dry land. Across southeast Alaska, these lakes attached to glaciers have expanded by 60 percent since 1986, reaching a combined area of 1,300 square kilometers.

McGrath and his colleagues wondered how far this runaway expansion might go. So, they combined satellite images with estimates of ice thickness — mapping deeply eroded grooves that are still hidden under glaciers.

The results were “eye-opening,” McGrath says. The team identified 4,200 square kilometers of glacier-covered grooves adjacent to existing lakes.

He and his colleagues predict that the lakes will continue to expand — causing rapid ice retreat — until they fill those grooves, reaching a combined size of around 5,500 square kilometers, an area the size of Delaware.

Growing lakes, retreating glaciers

From 1984 to 2024, Alaska’s Grand Plateau Glacier (right) retreated out of Alsek Lake. As this glacier retreats several more kilometers in the next few decades, Alsek Lake and Grand Plateau Lake will merge. This will provide the Alsek River with an easier route to the ocean, potentially causing it to shift course and flow into the ocean in a new place 25 kilometers away. Move the sliding bar back and forth to see how much these glaciers retreated and these lakes expanded in this time.

“By the end of this century, all of these lakes will probably be more or less fully developed,” says study coauthor Louis Sass III, a glaciologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. But those growing lakes are already reshaping entire landscapes in a way that is often overlooked in public discourse around glacier retreat.

Many of Alaska’s glaciers terminate on dry land, and their meltwater often creates barren, rocky floodplains downstream, where the streams alternate between trickles and floods — constantly branching and shifting course as they lay down sediment released by the glacier.

“Those habitats are fairly inhospitable for a lot of fish,” including some salmon, says Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist with Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. The water is too cold, and fish eggs “get swept out or buried by the floods every year.”

But as glaciers retreat into lakes and those lakes expand, their meltwater has time to drop its sediment and warm a few degrees in the lake before spilling into a river. Rivers that carry less sediment are less prone to shifting channels.

A 2025 study by Moore and remote sensing scientist Diane Whited of the University of Montana found that as glacial lakes expanded over 38 years in southeast Alaska, the downstream river channels stabilized, allowing willows and bushes to spread across floodplains.

“It creates salmon habitat,” Hood says. A 2021 study by Moore and Hood predicted that by 2100, glacial retreat in southeast Alaska will transform 6,000 kilometers of river channels into decent habitat for some local species of salmon. The lakes themselves will create spawning grounds for sockeye salmon — an important commercial species.

But these changes will come with upheaval.

For instance, one major river, the Alsek, will probably shift its course as retreating glaciers cause two lakes to merge, providing an easier path to the ocean.

People in Juneau are feeling another dramatic effect of expanding lakes. At least once per year, a lake dammed by the nearby Mendenhall Glacier spills out in a flash flood that gushes through town, forcing some residents to build protective levees around their homes.

These ecosystems “are going to be transformed,” Moore says. “But that transformation is going to be pretty violent and pretty dangerous.”

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