Alaska
Multiple small avalanches release in Juneau after city issues evacuation advisory
Two small avalanches released on a slide path of Mount Juneau, above the Behrends neighborhood, as Ezra Strong was on a walk this morning in the pouring rain.
The city issued an evacuation advisory about an hour earlier for Juneau residents in all known slide paths downtown and along Thane Road. Strong and his wife live on Gruening Avenue with their dog. He said he’s not heeding the advisory.
“I think in part because we’re a little bit protected by a rock wall and some other things behind us, in part because we have seen slides come down before on the main slide path that didn’t even get close to us,” he said.
During an online press conference Friday morning, the City & Borough of Juneau’s new Avalanche Advisor John Bressette said that many small slides reduce the hazard by decreasing the amount of snow that could be released in a larger slide.
“So it’s actually a good thing that we’re seeing smaller slides reducing the total snow load that is capable of producing an avalanche,” Bressette said.
Some avalanches released above the Flume Trail today. The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities confirmed numerous small avalanches along Thane Road this morning. The agency expects more avalanches this evening since the forecast shows continued heavy rainfall, strong winds and warming temperatures. The closure of Thane Road could be extended multiple days.
Some residents of the Behrends neighborhood have evacuated to friends’ houses or Centennial Hall, the official shelter set up by the city and the American Red Cross.
Carlos Cadiente lives kitty-corner from Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé in the Behrends slide path. He evacuated at around 11:30 a.m. in one vehicle while his wife drove behind in another. At a stop sign, he told KTOO they were headed to a friend’s house just down the street.
“We already had a go bag going and we already had the cars loaded up and ready to roll, and so we’re rolling,” Cadiente said.
He said this is the first time they’ve heeded an avalanche evacuation advisory in the decades they’ve lived here.
“It’s kind of an extreme measure, you know, extreme weather that we’ve had,” he said. “So we’re just kind of trying to be proactive and not be a problem,” he said.
Britt Tonnessen is the community disaster program manager for the Red Cross of Alaska in Southeast. In coordination with the city, the Red Cross set up an emergency shelter at Centennial Hall downtown for residents on Friday.
At the shelter on Friday morning, she said the Red Cross has been preparing for the last week in case of an evacuation.
“We’ve seen multiple fatal landslides and avalanches in the past decade,” she said. “Evacuating to a congregate shelter is not people’s dream idea. It’s a safe place to go. We do the best to meet the needs and we have incredible, loving, warm volunteers to meet people.”
Tonnessen said that anyone from avalanche zones, as well as those who feel the load on their roof is becoming too heavy, are welcome at the shelter.
She said they are prepared to take 150 people, and around 30 people signed in by the early afternoon.
Avalanche, weather and road conditions are expected to worsen this evening.
KTOO reporter Clarise Larson contributed to this report.
Getting your audio player ready…
A buried campsite in Alaska’s Tanana Valley is offering a sharper picture of what the first migrations into North America may have looked like, right down to campfires, stone flakes, and a mammoth tusk set in time. Researchers argue that the newly analyzed evidence from the Holzman archaeological site shows people were present in Interior Alaska about 14,000 years ago, and that their tool-making traditions hint at technological continuity with the later, famous Clovis culture farther south.
The study, published in Quaternary International, doesn’t “solve” the peopling of the Americas on its own, but it strengthens a key section of the chain: what was happening in Alaska in the centuries just before Clovis appears across much of mid-continental North America. For a debate often dominated by big routes and big dates, Holzman brings the story back to the intimate scale of daily work – processing ivory, shaping stone, and returning to the same landscape across generations.
Late Pleistocene extent of glaciation at 14 and 13 ka (Dalton et al., 2020, 2023) with the Beringia landmass, and ancient archaeological sites >13 ka. Clovis sites from (Anderson and Miller, 2017).Ancient lakes at approximately 14 ka include Glacial Lake Atna at the 777 m asl level (Wiedmer et al., 2010) and in Beringia (Bond, 2019).
A 14,000-Year-Old Campsite in the Tanana Valley
The Holzman site sits in Alaska’s middle Tanana Valley, a region archaeologists consider especially important because it preserves deeply layered, well-dated traces of Late Pleistocene life. In the paper, the authors describe multiple occupation layers, with the oldest (Component 5b) dated to roughly 14,000 years ago and containing a nearly complete mammoth tusk along with evidence of hearths and stone-working debris.
Just above that, the team reports a later layer dated around 13,700 years ago that looks like a focused production episode: abundant quartz artifacts and a clear emphasis on mammoth ivory reduction. That layer also produced what the researchers describe as the earliest known ivory rod tools in the Americas, made with techniques that later become more visible in Clovis contexts, explains Phys.org.
Findings associated with the Holzman archaeological site. (Wygal et al. Quaternary International (2026)
This matters because it places people with a sophisticated organic-technology tradition (ivory working doesn’t preserve as readily as stone) in eastern Beringia earlier than or alongside the first big expansions south of the ice sheets. In other words, Alaska is not just “a corridor people passed through,” but a place where key technologies may have been refined before dispersal.
Why Mammoth Ivory Tools Are the Real Clue
Stone tools are the durable headline, but mammoth ivory is the more surprising thread. At Holzman, the authors link clusters of quartz flakes and working areas to the carving and shaping of ivory into rods and blanks – materials that would have been valuable, portable, and useful for composite hunting tools.
Phys.org summarizes the connection the researchers are drawing: ivory rods made at Holzman (around 13,700 years ago) appear to use carving techniques later seen in Clovis contexts (around 13,000 years ago). That doesn’t mean “Clovis came from Alaska” in a simple, one-step way, but it does support the idea that some technological roots of later Paleoindian traditions could have been laid in the north during earlier movements through Beringia and Interior Alaska.
This is also where the Tanana Valley’s broader record becomes important. The region has yielded multiple stratified sites with early dates, so Holzman is being presented as part of a wider cultural landscape, one that can connect Siberian-Beringian adaptations to later expansions deeper into North America.
Beringia (the Bering Land Bridge region) once linked Asia and North America during lower sea levels. (NOAA/Public domain)
The Route South: Land Corridor, Coastline, or Both?
Migration into the Americas is not about a single “path,” but timing can still rule routes in or out. The Holzman evidence supports the idea of a southward movement of ancestral Clovis-era populations sometime between 14,000 and 13,000 years ago, after reaching and circulating within eastern Beringia.
That interior story intersects with the long-running “ice-free corridor” debate. Ancient Origins has previously reported research suggesting the ice-free corridor may not have been viable for the earliest migrations until relatively late (around 13,800 years ago for full opening, in that report), which would imply that initial entry into the Americas could have relied more heavily on coastal or other alternatives, with interior pathways becoming more usable later.
The Holzman paper itself emphasizes dispersal south of the continental ice sheets during the 14–13 ka window, but it also sits within a field where multiple routes – coastal, interior, and mixed strategies – are actively weighed against new archaeological and genetic data. Rather than closing the debate, Holzman adds weight to the idea that Interior Alaska was populated early enough to feed later expansions, at least once conditions allowed those movements.
Top image: Illustrative Alaska image, Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Valdez, Alaska. Source: Frank Fichtmüller/Adobe Stock
By Gary Manners
References
Sahir, R., 2022. Ice Wall Blocked Americas Land Route Until 13,800 years Ago. Ancient Origins. Available at: /news-history-archaeology/ice-wall-0016560
Karasavvas, T. 2018. Ancient Infant DNA Rewrites the History of Humans Entering North America. Available at: /news-history-archaeology/ancient-infant-dna-rewrites-history-humans-entering-north-america-009383
Wygal, B. T., et al. 2026. Stone and mammoth ivory tool production, circulation, and human dispersals in the middle Tanana Valley, Alaska: Implications for the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618225004306?via%3Dihub
Arnold, P., 2026. Ancient Alaskan site may help explain how the first people arrived in North America. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-ancient-alaskan-site-people-north.html
One of Alaska’s two federal judge vacancies has been filled.
The U.S. Senate voted 58-39 on Wednesday to confirm state natural resources attorney Aaron Peterson to serve as the state’s newest federal judge. In a legal notice published soon after the vote, Peterson said he would be resigning immediately from the Alaska Department of Law.
Alaska has three federal judgeships but has had only one sitting judge since Joshua Kindred resigned in July 2024 amid a misconduct scandal.
Peterson, a registered Republican, will replace Judge Tim Burgess, who retired on the last day of 2021. That vacancy was one of the oldest unfilled seats in the entire U.S. federal court system.
With only one full-time judge on staff, Alaska’s federal court has relied on judges from other states and semi-retired judges on senior status.
The margin on Peterson’s confirmation was unusually bipartisan, with six Democrats joining most of the Senate’s Republicans in favor. All 39 “no” votes were from Democrats, and three senators did not vote.
Among the Democrats voting “yes” was Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking opposition member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Durbin’s office did not respond to a question asking why he voted to confirm.
Last year, answering questions proffered by Durbin, Peterson declined to say President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and declined to opine on the legality of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, saying the issue could come before him as a judge.
Carl Tobias, Williams Chair in Law at the University of Richmond School of Law, has been following Peterson’s confirmation process.
“It wasn’t a party line vote. And so I think that means that some of the Democrats are signaling that if a person looks like he’s going to be competent, as I think Peterson will be, then they’re going to move forward and vote for that person,” he said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, organized a committee that examined Peterson’s judicial application and forwarded it to President Donald Trump for official nomination. The committee bypassed the usual procedure, which relies on advice from the Alaska Bar Association.
“I’m confident that he will be a great federal judge for our state,” he said in a prepared written statement.
In an application reviewed by the Senate’s judiciary committee, Peterson said he applied for the job after a member of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s federal transition team encouraged him to do so.
That team was formed during the changeover between President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
According to the information Peterson submitted to the U.S. Senate’s judiciary committee, he was born in Anchorage in 1981 and served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000 to 2003 before attending the University of Alaska Anchorage, graduating in 2007. He attended Gonzaga University School of Law and graduated in 2010. He was admitted to the Alaska bar that year.
He returned to Alaska after graduation, serving first as a clerk to Judge Michael Spaan of the Anchorage Superior Court, then as a prosecutor with the Municipality of Anchorage.
Peterson worked in the Anchorage District Attorney’s office starting in 2012, including on violent felonies, such as murder and sexual assault. He moved to the Department of Law’s office of special prosecutions in 2015 before beginning work with the Department of Law’s natural resources section in 2019.
“Throughout his career, which includes military service, Aaron has demonstrated a commitment to the rule of law and federalism. Aaron is a lifelong Alaskan and knows and understands our great state and the unique federal laws that impact us,” Sullivan said.
Tobias watched Peterson’s confirmation hearings from Virginia.
“Watching his hearings and the discussion of him, it seems like —especially in Alaska — he does have that expertise on natural resource issues from pretty long experience, and so it seems like that’s a good match,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, didn’t participate in Peterson’s application process but offered her support after Trump nominated Peterson and voted for his confirmation on Wednesday.
“I look forward to Mr. Peterson hitting the ground running to help an overworked court, while working to address and reform the culture of abuse and low morale that has permeated the District Court in recent years,” Murkowski said in a prepared written statement. “Mr. Peterson is a born-and-raised Alaskan with a strong record of legal practice in our state, including in natural resources and criminal and civil law, and his leadership will be invaluable to Alaska. We now turn our focus to filling the remaining vacancy as soon as possible.”
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
JUNEAU, Alaska — House Bill 39, known as the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children’s Bill of Rights, by Rep. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River, passed the House of Representatives in a 40-0 vote Tuesday.
The legislation addresses language acquisition, parental choice and appropriate accommodation in public schools. Parents select the most suitable method of communication for their child whether that’s American Sign Language (ASL), spoken English with support or another modality. School districts would be required to deliver educational services using the parent’s chosen method.
“Deaf children are born with the same ability to acquire language as their hearing peers,” Rep. Allard said. “They have the right and capacity to be educated, graduate from high school, obtain further education and pursue meaningful careers.”
Central to HB 39 is the recognition that communication and language acquisition must be treated as a priority to prevent the devastating effects of inadequate access in the classroom, which can result in missed information during lectures and discussions, lower academic achievement and delayed language development.
Under the proposed law, children who are deaf or hard of hearing would have the right to accommodation and full access to academic instruction, school services and extracurricular activities in their primary language. This ensures that they can fully benefit from all school programs and participate meaningfully in education and society.
Recognizing Alaska’s unique rural geography, HB 39 acknowledges that some deaf or hard of hearing students may require residential services as part of their educational program to receive appropriate support.
Key provisions of House Bill 39 include:
* The right to an individualized education program (IEP) tailored to the child’s needs.
* Parental choice in determining the most appropriate method of communication.
* Identification of the child’s primary language in the IEP.
* Consideration of the prognosis for hearing loss.
* Instruction provided in the child’s primary language.
* Provision of necessary assistive devices, services and qualified personnel.
* Appropriate and timely assessments conducted in the child’s primary language.
Twenty states have already enacted similar Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children’s Bills of Rights, setting a strong precedent for protecting the educational rights of these students.
“HB 39 ensures that no child in Alaska is left behind due to barriers in communication,” Rep. Allard said. “By centering parental choice and language access, we are affirming the fundamental rights of deaf and hard of hearing children to thrive academically and socially.”
The federal law – Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – does not adequately address parental rights. HB 39 fills the gap.
Click here to watch Rep. Allard’s floor speech.
Three bystanders hospitalized after vehicle crashes into Wisconsin building
America 250: Wheeling’s Independence Hall marks birthplace of West Virginia
Wyoming child dies due to influenza
Bitcoin loses half its value in three months amid crypto crunch
State finance committee approves bill to fund homeless veterans support
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Video: Investigators Say Doorbell Camera Was Disconnected Before Nancy Guthrie’s Kidnapping
White House says murder rate plummeted to lowest level since 1900 under Trump administration
Council of Europe chief calls for political and financial backing of Ukraine Special Tribunal
Republicans pan Democrats’ demands for ICE reform in DHS funding, with little time to reach deal
LIVE: White House press briefing
-
Indiana4 days ago13-year-old rider dies following incident at northwest Indiana BMX park
-
Massachusetts5 days agoTV star fisherman, crew all presumed dead after boat sinks off Massachusetts coast
-
Tennessee6 days agoUPDATE: Ohio woman charged in shooting death of West TN deputy
-
Movie Reviews1 week agoVikram Prabhu’s Sirai Telugu Dubbed OTT Movie Review and Rating
-
Indiana3 days ago13-year-old boy dies in BMX accident, officials, Steel Wheels BMX says
-
Politics1 week agoVirginia Democrats seek dozens of new tax hikes, including on dog walking and dry cleaning
-
Austin, TX6 days ago
TEA is on board with almost all of Austin ISD’s turnaround plans
-
Texas5 days agoLive results: Texas state Senate runoff
