Connect with us

Alaska

Documenting an Alaska Village, Before and After the Storm That Destroyed It

Published

on

Documenting an Alaska Village, Before and After the Storm That Destroyed It


Joann Carl’s dog Rocky, a long-eared, short-legged mix the color of graham crackers, has become Alaska famous since I first met Carl in April. Over the past few months, she’s seen his photo all over Facebook, she said, rescued after Typhoon Halong wiped away more than half the homes in her coastal Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, population 700.  

At the Anchorage Daily News, we’re based in Alaska’s largest city but travel as often as we can to small communities like Kipnuk in an attempt to cover a state that’s twice the size of Texas. We try to report more than one story at a time to justify the expense of plane tickets. Flights to a remote village in a small plane cost the same as a trip to New York. But rarely do we have the chance to document a community just before the breaking news arrives. 

Maybe you didn’t hear much about the typhoon. It began as a tropical storm, dumping record rainfall in parts of Japan before swirling toward Alaska. By the time it reached our shores, the remnants of the storm still carried enough force to flood two villages, sweeping away homes and leaving as many as three people dead. 

I’m writing to you about the storm because photojournalist Marc Lester and I happened to visit Kipnuk shortly before the typhoon. Marc returned to cover the evacuation, providing a look at an Alaska village on the front lines of climate change just before and after the devastation.  

Advertisement

The story of destruction in Carl’s hometown, along with the nearby village of Kwigillingok, adds an exclamation point to long-simmering fears about the future of Alaska coastal villages. Which town will be wiped away next? Where will climate refugees live? Should their former homes be rebuilt? If not, what does it mean for the future of these communities? 

Emily Schwing, reporting for KYUK public radio in Bethel and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, wrote in May about climate refugees the government helped relocate from the Yup’ik village of Newtok. In November, while covering Alaska’s crumbling public school infrastructure, she wrote how the school in Kipnuk housed hundreds of residents as an emergency shelter during the storm surge from Halong. 

When Marc and I first visited that schoolhouse in April, we were reporting on a very different kind of story. Justine Paul, Carl’s son, spent seven years in jail charged with murder in Alaska’s glacially slow justice system, where serious cases can take a decade to resolve. Paul’s case was ultimately dismissed after the evidence against him turned out to be deeply flawed. After struggling with addiction on the streets of Anchorage upon his release, Paul returned to live with Carl in the little Kipnuk house where he grew up.

Our visit to their village before the storm gave Marc a chance to document a version of Kipnuk that no longer exists and maybe never will again.

The people we met in the spring were subsequently airlifted to emergency shelter in an evacuation unlike any the state had experienced. They arrived in Bethel via helicopters and small planes. Some stayed in the regional hub. Others were packed shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of a massive Alaska Air National Guard cargo plane bound for Anchorage. Many would end up staying for weeks in Anchorage at a convention center and a sports arena that had been transformed into emergency shelters. 

Five days after the storm, Marc toured Kipnuk on the back of an all-terrain vehicle with one of the village’s few holdouts. 

Advertisement

The floodwaters had devastated a community that’s been settling into melting permafrost like others on the coast. The central part of the village resembled a collapsed Jenga tower, rectangular homes scattered and strewn, Marc reported. Most were lifted from their pilings by the raging floodwater and deposited elsewhere. Some were surprisingly intact, but muddied, sodden, compromised and unlivable where they came to rest. Gone was the thrum and throttle of normal life we had seen earlier in the year, Marc found, replaced by an eerie vacancy.

A man stands on a boardwalk railing surrounded by piles of broken wood and debris. Houses sit crookedly behind him and the sky is cloudy.
Zacharias John looks at the devastation left by Halong in Kipnuk on Oct. 17. John decided to stay back and help the few people who remain in the village. Marc Lester/ADN

It had taken Carl’s family five hours to travel the three blocks from their house to the makeshift shelter at the school when the storm first hit. Carl’s son Raymond helped elders get over debris on the ground. Pieces of houses washed against the town’s boardwalk. She said the whole village smelled of diesel fuel — spilled stove oil.

Villagers had to ration food that had been stored at the schoolhouse for students. “One cracker and a spoonful of hashbrowns” per person, Carl said. Eventually, volunteers salvaged dried Native foods from homes that were still standing: fish, berries, moose meat.

“We fed the kids more and the mens that were doing all the work, the rescues,” Carl said. 

A volunteer pilot flew Rocky from Kipnuk to safety, she said. “Used her own gas.” 

One house floated 15 miles away, Carl said. Bodies from some of Kipnuk’s aboveground graves had been seen near the town’s airport.

Advertisement

The storm, whose impacts the Alaska Climate Research Center later linked to global warming, killed 67-year-old Ella Mae Kashatok in Kwigillingok. The home she was in broke loose and floated toward the Bering Sea, state troopers said. Two members of her family, Vernon Pavil, 71, and Chester Kashatok, 41, have not been found.

A battered one-story home leans to the side, surrounded by water.
A home came to rest on a riverbank opposite Kipnuk during Halong. Marc Lester/ADN

Paul flew to Bethel and then to Togiak, a coastal village 140 miles from Kipnuk that was less impacted by the storms. Carl, who has diabetes, said she evacuated Kipnuk on a Blackhawk helicopter. She sat next to a 2-year-old girl whose name she didn’t know and who was traveling without her parents. Carl made a show of looking out the window and appearing interested in the scenery, she said, to keep the toddler occupied and calm.

Carl said Kipnuk’s subsistence culture made the villagers especially well-equipped to survive the aftermath of the storm. Hunters regularly face life-and-death decisions, she said. Starvation times weren’t so long ago. Elders taught everyone to dry and save food.

Carl, however, is not likely to be around to experience that way of life in the village anymore.

An aerial view of a snow-covered town sitting on the edge of a body of water.
Kipnuk in April 2025. Carl doesn’t know if the village will survive after Halong’s devastation. Marc Lester/ADN

Although her home is one of the few that survived — it was built in the late 1970s or early ’80s on pilings moored deep in the tundra — she’s not optimistic about returning to the village full time. 

She burst into tears when asked if Kipnuk will exist in the future. 

“It’s probably the end,” she said over a recent lunch of Whoppers at an Anchorage Burger King. “It’s a ghost town.”

Advertisement
Two kids jump in the air for a gray basketball while two others stand on the court and watch. Behind them lie a railed boardwalk system and a few scattered one-story buildings on land covered by snow.
Kids play basketball in Kipnuk in April. Marc Lester/ADN



Source link

Alaska

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

Published

on

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.

Advertisement

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)

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

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)

Advertisement

3/11 – Hoonah (6) vs. Shishmaref (11)


3/12 – Seward (1) vs. Chevak (8)

3/12 – Metlakatla (4) vs. Cordova (5)

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

3/12 – Glennallen (3) vs. Degnan (6)


3/18 – Barrow (1) vs. Kotzebue (8)

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

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

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

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

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



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Alaska

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

Published

on

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

Image DescriptionThis 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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 7

The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 4

Image DescriptionIt 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.

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
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 9
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 8
The Alaska Wall Tent By The Alaska Gear Company 3

Images courtesy of the Alaska Gear Company



Source link

Continue Reading

Alaska

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

Published

on

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.”

Advertisement

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.

“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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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



Source link
Continue Reading

Trending