ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The mighty Yukon is breaking up and tons of ice will be moving downstream in the coming days. It already went out at Dawson and all that ice is on the move.
At Eagle, a flood watch goes though the weekend, as the Yukon River ice is expected to break up there in the next few days.
A flood warning is in place through midday Friday for the Mosquito Fork at the Taylor Highway near Chicken. Water and ice has reached the guardrail of the bridge. The warning has been extended several times as break-up continues.
Another flood watch has been issued for the Tanana River at Manley Hot Springs. The concern is for ice jam flooding as areas upriver are releasing. Observers report the ice at Manley Hot Springs is still hard and intact.
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A large upper low spinning disturbances through the Gulf of Alaska begins to sag south and lose steam. It will still bring in a round of rain for Southeast, the north Gulf Coast and Southcentral Friday night to early Saturday.
Hot spot: Eagle with 67 degrees! No wonder the ice is rotting away at a good pace! The state’s cold spot was Buckland, Kotzebue and Selawik with 15 degrees.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Ballot Measure 2, an initiative to repeal Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system, narrowly failed in the recent election cycle, but the sponsor of the measure is not ready to give up just yet.
After a recount revealed the ballot measure failed by 743 votes, instead of the 737 originally counted, sponsor Phil Izon submitted the paperwork on Monday to get back on the ballot for 2026.
At the Absentee and Petition Office in Anchorage, Izon started the process again by submitting an initiative petition with the signatures of 214 qualified registered voters to serve as sponsors; only 100 are required.
“We have a pretty good amount of people that are really motivated … and they ultimately didn’t like the fact that we lost by small percentages,” Izon said.
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Within 60 calendar days after receipt, the office of Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom will notify the sponsor if the application is denied or certified.
After that, the signature-gathering process begins to get on the ballot officially.
Izon said the spirit of the ballot measure is the same, but some fundamental differences need to be made to the ballot language.
He said some voters found the ballot language confusing and thought a “no” vote was for repeal.
Instead, they should have been voting “yes,” Izon said.
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The ballot initiative to implement ranked-choice voting and open primaries was approved by Alaskan voters in 2020 and used for the first time in the 2022 election cycle.
He said as the sponsor, he doesn’t get the privilege to write the ballot measure language; state officials write it based on what the sponsor summarized in the written petition.
Izon said this time around, he hopes the language is written clearer; if it’s not, he is prepared to go to court over it.
“I believe language played a role in 2020, and I believe it played a role in 2024, so I do not want a repeat of that in 2026,” Izon said.
Ironically, the ballot measure’s sponsors say they want a repeal of the state’s current election system because they believe voters find it confusing.
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In the current system, the top four primary finishers advance to the general election, and then voters rank the candidates by preferred choice. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the candidate’s votes are redistributed according to each voter’s second preferred choice.
Democrat Lee Hammermeister, who joined Izon on Monday as a co-sponsor and lost a recent Eagle River Senate race this November, said it’s time for Alaska to return to a traditional system.
Like many opponents of ranked-choice voting, Hammermeister points to the number of voters who don’t rank the candidates and only vote for one.
“[There are] people either not understanding it or entirely rejecting using the ranked-choice voting system,” Hammermeister said. “It just turns into something that’s very confusing, and then it just gets very convoluted, both on the voter side and then on the candidate side as well. So I like a simple system.”
Proponents of open primaries and ranked-choice voting argue that most Alaskan voters are nonpartisan and do not identify with a political party. They believe that the current system provides voters with more choices and a greater voice beyond the limitations of the political parties.
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Izon said if the ballot measure fails in 2026, he might give one more try in 2028, but in the end, he thinks it might be something that the legislature will have to take up.
“I’ve been in a lot of communication with a bunch of legislators that have actually moved bills through the Senate and the House,” he said. “[I’ve] got a lot of support from those people, and I would love to see it go through that direction.”
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Cheyenne Taylor turned 24 years old, and on Sunday, the only gift she wanted was for her sister’s body to be found.
“We need that closure so bad,” she said in an interview from her home in Tennessee.
Hawaiian authorities suspended the multi-day search for 32-year-old Lauren Cameron of Anchorage over the weekend, three days after she went missing in the waters off the north shore of Kaua’i.
Cameron was vacationing on the island of Kaua’i with her boyfriend, Anchorage resident Torin Blaker. The pair were hiking the Na Pali coast on Wednesday, Dec. 11, and had stopped at Hanakāpī‘ai Beach.
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According to a release from the Kaua’i Fire Department, rescuers responded to the area shortly after 3 p.m. on reports that Cameron had entered the water and was swept into the ocean by strong currents.
Taylor said authorities in Kaua’i — including the fire department and the Coast Guard — have been very communicative about the search, making sure friends and family members had the latest information.
She also heard from a man who said he and his wife were hiking in the area when they saw Cameron that day. Taylor said her sister was a good swimmer but knew better than to swim in dangerous waters and was only rinsing off after the hike. The man told her Cameron was in water no deeper than her ankles when he saw her.
“He said that she was just washing off, and he said he and his wife went on to walk a little bit more and they started hearing screaming for help because that’s when the wave came in and took Lauren,” Taylor said.
Taylor is also grateful for another man she hasn’t spoken to who swam out in the choppy water to try and save Cameron by delivering some sort of floatation device.
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What happened next is unclear, but Taylor said her sister wasn’t able to hang on.
“I just want to thank him, I do, he risked his own life for my sister’s life and it means a lot to us,” she said.
Taylor described her sister as adventurous, loving, and kind to all, a sentiment echoed by her long-time boyfriend, Torin Blaker.
Blaker wrote that he is devastated by the loss, and said in a tribute written to Cameron that “she loved life.”
“She loved its challenges, for a challenge equals a solution to which she could find,” the statement read. “She loved adventure, for around every bend was something new. She loved love, for it is the binding that makes us human.“
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Lauren Cameron with boyfriend Torin Blaker(Torin Blaker)
Blaker thanked first responders in Hawaii as well as the support from the Alaska Division of Forestry where he works and the Anchorage Health Department where Cameron was employed.
Blaker’s full tribute to Lauren:
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Alaskans are all too familiar with radical groups funded by out-of-state interests seeking to shut down sustainable resource development. A predictable cast of characters — including billionaire activists and extreme environmental groups — are now working to destroy a large segment of the Alaska seafood industry. This campaign to ban trawling — a sustainable fishing method responsible for a substantial majority of fishery landings in the Alaska Region and nationally —poses a direct threat to Alaska’s coastal economy, seafood sector and way of life.
If you enjoy wild seafood — fish sandwiches or shrimp; fish sticks or scallops; fish tacos or rockfish — you are enjoying seafood caught by “trawl” or “dredge” fishing gears that touch the seafloor. It’s true that these fishing methods, like every farm, aquaculture facility and fishing operation on the planet, impact the environment. But, what’s also true is that the impacts of trawl fishing in Alaska are continually monitored to ensure long-term ecosystem health.
Few food production methods anywhere in the world are more sustainable and well-regulated than fisheries in the Alaska region, a fact we should all be proud of. Fishery scientists and managers use a clear, science-based process to decide where and when fishing can happen and how many fish can be caught. This results in sustainable Alaska fisheries — fisheries that support tens of thousands of jobs and many coastal communities — producing billions of seafood meals every year to feed people in America and around the world.
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The recent commentary authored for the Alaska Beacon by Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon and David Bayes is the latest effort to demonize sustainable trawl fisheries. Like other attacks on our sector, the commentary comes from a vocal few that play fast and loose with the facts.
First, let’s talk about bycatch. The authors’ claim that trawl fisheries have “high bycatch rates” is flat out wrong. The Alaska pollock fishery, for example, is recognized by the National Marine Fisheries Service as “one of the cleanest in terms of incidental catch of other species (less than 1 percent).” By way of contrast, the fixed-gear halibut and sablefish fisheries championed by Linda Behnken — one of the commentary’s co-signatories — have bycatch rates at least 28 times higher than the Alaska pollock fishery, with discard rates ranging from 28.5% to 48%.
We weren’t surprised to see the inaccuracies in the piece. Trawl critics constantly misrepresent bycatch data. For example, jellyfish — nearly 40% of the 1% bycatch in the pollock fishery — are deliberately grouped with other species in reported bycatch totals. In reality, less than 10% of trawl bycatch is made up of halibut, salmon and crab species, with pollock representing the largest component of total trawl bycatch.The dead halibut thrown overboard by the Gulf of Alaska IFQ halibut fishery exceeds the total halibut bycatch mortality from the entire Gulf of Alaska trawl fleet.
Let’s talk about monitoring. Alaska trawl fisheries lead the world in using independent observers and electronic monitoring to ensure full transparency. Across all Alaska Region trawl fisheries, 94% of the total catch was independently observed in 2023. Furthermore, Alaska’s pollock catcher vessels are implementing the largest Electronic Monitoring program in the United States, which will push North Pacific trawl vessel monitoring even higher, to almost 100%. Among the fleet that Linda Behnken represents, by contrast, just 23% of total 2023 harvests were observed by either electronic or human monitoring and there has been resistance to monitoring expansion.
Let’s talk about habitat. The emotive claim that trawl gear “scrapes the ocean’s bottom” implies permanent ecosystem harm. In reality, the Bering Sea floor is constantly subject to tidal and storm disturbance, and any additional impacts of trawling have consistently been found by experts to be “temporary and minimal”. Areas that have been regularly fished with trawl gear for decades remain some of the most diverse and productive fishing grounds on Earth.
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David Bayes, a charter fisherman and a co-author of the recent commentary, has regularly attacked our region’s sustainable trawl fisheries. The Facebook page he founded often features posts that wish death or harm toward our fellow captains and crew, our boats and our processing plants. Other posts spew hateful, personal and vengeful attacks against anyone who dares to speak up and correct misinformation about trawling or Alaska pollock. Alaskans deserve better than this.
In October, Mr. Bayes attended a meeting of billionaire environmental funders that showcased a clear anti-fishing agenda. Panels like “Bycatch: Building Power Around Alaska’s Newest Four-Letter Word” revealed a roadmap for shutting down Alaskan fisheries. Oceans 5, a key sponsor of the meeting, pools money from billionaire activists to fund campaigns displacing harvesters from their traditional fishing grounds. Their main goal? Establishing Marine Protected Areas that ban all fishing activity. If Bayes’s activist allies succeed in shutting down Alaska’s trawl fisheries, don’t think they’ll stop there. Other fisheries — and even sport fishing — could be next in their crosshairs.
We take pride in harvesting Alaska pollock and other groundfish, contributing to Alaska’s rich fishing heritage, coastal communities, and economy. Alaskans deserve honest discussions about fisheries, which often require complex trade-offs. As warming oceans — not trawl fleets — affect certain salmon and crab stocks, making informed decisions is extremely challenging. We welcome fair debates grounded in truth, transparency, and facts that can help sustain all Alaskan fisheries.
Sam Wright is a lifelong Alaskan born and raised in Homer. He has fished for over 30 years for crab, flatfish, Pacific cod and other species in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska.
Dan Carney is an Alaskan, homesteader, farmer, fisherman, 43-year Bering Sea survivor.
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Jason Chandler was born in Kodiak and is a lifelong resident. He has participated in multiple fisheries over more than 30 years and is now owner/operator of his family’s trawl vessel.
Kiley Thomson is a 32-year resident of Sand Point who fishes for salmon, crab, pollock and cod in the Gulf of Alaska. He is president of the Peninsula Fishermen’s Coalition and the Area M Seiners Association organizations, representing small vessels in Alaska groundfish and salmon fisheries respectively.
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