Keeping up the old tradition alive, Alaskan authorities delivered Thanksgiving Turkey to residents in remote areas of Alaska by airplane this week. Esther Keim, a resident, continued a unique tradition for the third year by piloting a small plane and dropping frozen turkeys to families living in isolated, roadless areas.
Alaska’s limited road access makes travel challenging, especially in winter when roads are covered with snow and residents have to rely on planes, snowmobiles, and frozen rivers. Keim grew up on a homestead where a family friend airdropped turkeys and newspapers during the holidays.
Motivated by a family struggling to find Thanksgiving dinner, Keim revived the tradition a few years ago. “They were telling me that a squirrel for dinner did not split very far between three people,” Keim recalled. “At that moment, I thought … ‘I’m going to airdrop them a turkey,'” she added.

Social media posts have helped her expand her efforts. Keim delivered 32 turkeys this year, funded by donations through Facebook. She wraps the turkeys in plastic bags and stores them in her truck until delivery. However, weather conditions result in delays in deliveries.
Dave and Christina Luce, living 45 miles northwest of Anchorage, are among the recipients. The 90-minute snowmobile ride to the nearest town has become problematic for the senior citizen. “I’m 80 years old now, so we make fewer and fewer trips,” Dave Luce said. “The adventure has sort of gone out of it.” The delivered turkey will feed them and several neighbors. “It makes a great Thanksgiving,” Dave Luce said. “She’s been a real sweetheart, and she’s been a real good friend,” he added.
Keim flies up to 100 miles from her base north of Anchorage to deliver the turkeys, sometimes with a “turkey dropper” assisting. She contacts families beforehand and waits for them to come outside before dropping the birds to ensure they are easily found, particularly in deep snow. “We won’t drop the turkey until we see them come out of the house or the cabin, because if they don’t see it fall, they’re not going to know where to look,” she said.
While a ham has been lost, no turkeys have been damaged, as per Keim. “As far as precision and hitting our target, I am definitely not the best aim,” she joked. “I’ve gotten better, but I have never hit a house, a building, person or dog,” she added.
Keim’s long-term goal is to establish a nonprofit to expand her deliveries statewide and include other items for children. “There’s so many kids out in the villages,” she said. “It would be cool to maybe add a stuffed animal or something they can hold.”

In some of Alaska’s remotest areas this Thanksgiving, there’s a different kind of bird in the sky – a frozen turkey dropped for residents unable to pick up their own for their holiday table. 

Alaska native Esther Keim is now in her third straight year of the Alaska Turkey Bomb, a service in which she drops frozen turkeys from a small plane to remote areas of the south-central part of the state. 

Keim told the Alaska Gear Company that she remembers living on an Alaskan homestead as a child.

“I grew up in Skwentna, Alaska, which is about 50 miles northwest of Anchorage,” Keim said in a video about her efforts. “In the fall, in the freeze-up, families would be stuck out there because you can’t travel, everything would be freezing up. It’s not safe.”

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She continued, “We had a friend that would fly and drop a turkey for Thanksgiving. I just remember it being so exciting and so fun. He would drop a newspaper and inside the newspaper was a pack of gum.”

She said to a kid “that couldn’t just go to the store, a pack of gum just meant so much. You know, you can’t access the store so easily, and you have to plan in advance. “

Keim said freeze-up at the beginning of winter and breakup at the end are “three weeks minimum” when it’s hard to travel. 

Having since moved to Anchorage, she said she was inspired to start the Alaska Turkey Bomb by her childhood memories and after hearing of a neighboring family near where she lived on the homestead who were going to go without on Thanksgiving in 2022.  

“He was saying how one squirrel doesn’t split three ways very far for dinner, and I had a thought in my head when he said that that I’m going to airdrop him a turkey,” Keim told the Alaska Gear Company. 

She said it quickly turned into, “you know, ‘I’m going to do this for all the families that are stuck out there because I remember what that meant to my family and to all the rest of the families. It was pretty special.”

Keim noted that in “the bush” there are no roads and the only way to get to the home is by plane, snowmobile or boat at Thanksgiving time. “Everyone is stuck.” 

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She said airdropping the birds is efficient, “because we can get to so many families so quickly.” 

Keim added that she put “something special” in the turkey bomb for the three families she dropped to who have kids because “as a kid growing up out there I understand what candy meant, and the lack of it.”

Keim and her pilot Heidi Hastings flew so low when dropping the packages to the kids that she told the Associated Press she was able to see some of the children’s reactions, “and I could see their excitement.”

This year, Keim’s 30-some turkey deliveries included 80-year-old Dave Luce, who, along with his wife, lives northwest of Anchorage on the Yentna River. 

The Luces have known Keim since she was a child.  

Using her airplane that she recently rebuilt with her dad, Keim and her pilot Heidi Hastings fly over the homes until they see a person outside. Then they come around “low and slow” and drop the bird.  (Mountain Mind Media/Alaska Gear Company via AP)

They venture into the nearest town about once a month in the winter via a 90-minute snowmobile ride.

Luce said: “I’m 80 years old now, so we make fewer and fewer trips. The adventure has sort of gone out of it.”

“She’s been a real sweetheart, and she’s been a real good friend,” he added of Keim, who delivered them a 12-pound bird this year. “It makes a great Thanksgiving.”

Using her airplane that she recently rebuilt with her dad, Keim and her pilot Heidi Hastings fly over the homes until they see a person outside. Then they come around “low and slow” and drop the bird. 

Keim relies heavily on donations for the turkeys and purchases about 20 at a time, which she leaves in her truck until it’s time to fly. 

“Luckily it’s cold in Alaska, so I don’t have to worry about freezers,” she joked to the Associated Press. 

Keim said she wants to turn the Alaksa Turkey Bomb into a nonprofit. (Esther Keim via AP)

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“My vision with this is to make it into a nonprofit organization where I can get funding and more support that I can reach more parts of Alaska because there are so many families that live rural and that live off-grid,” Keim added.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

In the southeastern reaches of Alaska, landscapes are being dramatically reshaped as ice gives way to water.

Recent images released by the NASA Earth Observatory reveal striking changes to the region’s proglacial lakes, formed as glaciers retreat and meltwater pools at their fronts.

Over the past four decades, three lakes—Harlequin, Alsek and Grand Plateau—have grown at an astonishing pace, transforming the region into a burgeoning “lake district.”

The trio of glaciers feeding these lakes—Yakutat, Alsek and Grand Plateau—descend from Alaska’s inland mountains to the coastal plain southeast of Yakutat borough.

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Glaciers are massive, slow-moving rivers of ice formed from compacted layers of snow that accumulate over centuries, flowing under their own weight and reshaping the landscapes they traverse.

An analysis by glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College highlights the dramatic retreat of these glaciers between 1984 and 2024.

During this time, Yakutat Glacier’s main arm retreated 4.3 miles, and Alsek Glacier’s northern and southern arms retreated 3.3 miles and 3.4 miles, respectively.

Grand Plateau Glacier’s northern arm saw the most significant change, retreating 4.8 miles.

These changes were captured in a pair of satellite images from the Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 satellites in the summers of 1984 and 2024, revealing how water now fills the void left by ice. Together, the three lakes almost doubled in size over the 40-year period.

In 1984, the lakes spanned about 50 square miles. By 2024, they covered 90 square miles—an area larger than New York’s Seneca Lake, one of the Finger Lakes also carved by ancient glaciers.

“The lakes that are forming in this region are immense, starting at the mountains and spreading toward the coast, making this a new lake district that is unique in our nation,” Pelto said in a statement.

Pelto suggested this lake system could represent the fastest-growing collection of lakes in the U.S. in this century, reflecting the accelerated retreat of Alaska’s glaciers due to climate change.

The lakes are not only expanding but also undergoing noticeable transformations.

Alsek Lake, for instance, appears much bluer in the 2024 image compared to 1984. This shift suggests that the lake is receiving less “glacial flour”—fine-grained sediment carried by meltwater streams, according to a NASA Earth Observatory article.

As sediment levels drop, the lake’s water will continue to darken, allowing more light to penetrate and potentially fostering aquatic life and fishery development.

The pattern is one that is repeating across Alaska and the Arctic more broadly.

According to the National Park Service, glaciers within Alaska national parks shrank by 8 percent between the 1950s and the early 2000s. This pace ticked upward, with 13 percent lost from 1985 to 2020.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about glaciers? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.