Alaska
Permafrost expert and military pilot among 4 killed in a helicopter crash on Alaska’s North Slope
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A helicopter crash in Alaska took the lives of a permafrost expert from the Netherlands, a pilot who recently transitioned from the military to fly charter helicopters and two other scientists conducting field work in the North Slope, one of the remotest regions in the U.S.
Ronald Daanen, 51, and Justin Germann, 27, both from Fairbanks; Tori Moore, 26, of South Bend, Indiana; and pilot Bernard “Tony” Higdon, 48, of North Pole, Alaska, all perished last week when the 1996 Bell 206 helicopter they were in crashed into a lake while they were on a scientific mission.
The three passengers were employees of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, working in the Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys.
Authorities in Alaska say search and rescue divers have recovered the bodies of a helicopter pilot and three state scientists whose aircraft went down in a shallow lake last week.
A rescue and recovery dive team was deployed Saturday after a helicopter with a pilot and three state workers crashed in a large lake on Alaska’s North Slope,.
Officials say no survivors have been found after a helicopter carrying a pilot and three state workers crashed in a shallow lake in Alaska’s North Slope region.
An Alaska man on a paddleboard escaped a close encounter with a humpback whale that surfaced right in front of him.
Alaska search and rescue divers recovered the bodies of a helicopter pilot and three scientists on Sunday from the sunken wreckage of the aircraft, which went down in a shallow lake about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Utqiagvik — the northernmost city in the U.S., formerly known as Barrow. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident.
Daanen, a native of the Netherlands, had an ever-present smile and was also known as MacGyver because he could instantly fix anything that went wrong, whether it was repairing a generator or fixing a broken tent pole, colleagues said.
“He’s such a good-natured guy, he’s kind, he’s caring, he’s good humored,” said Howie Epstein, a professor in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. During summer field work, they studied permafrost and changes in Arctic tundra in Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
When working on the North Slope, Daanen brought his homemade gin flavored with spruce tips, which Epstein said was “delicious.” On a tiny island in Siberia, Daanen walked in with a chunk of gouda cheese the size of a curling stone, which they ate from at every meal for a week.
Daanen and his wife, Ina Timling, also competed in the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks. They created elaborate ice sculptures that usually had a science theme, using it as an educational opportunity to teach people about permafrost and Arctic landscapes, said Anna Liljedahl, an associate scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and an affiliate professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“We’ve lost an amazing friend and colleague,” she said of Daanen, who was a geologist for the state.
Permafrost, frozen ground and water were key components of his work, but she said he was a brilliant scientist who had wide and varied interests.
Germann was a state hydrologist with degrees from the University of North Dakota. He paid his way through college by joining the North Dakota National Guard and had to have his parents sign off because he was just a few months shy of his 18th birthday when he joined.
“He’s determined, a young man who chased his dream and accomplished a lot in his life,” his mother Karla said.
He completed an internship in Alaska and immediately made plans to return.
“I don’t think he was ever coming back to southwest North Dakota. That was his dream to be there and kayak and just hike and ride a bike in the snow, which is beyond crazy to me,” she said with a chuckle.
The family had planned to visit Germann in Alaska in September but instead will travel this week to Fairbanks, where they are planning an informal memorial. His mother has been comforted by her son’s Alaska friends, who reached out to his family after his death.
“He had a lot of amazing friends up there, and we can’t wait to meet them,” she said.
Moore was a 2019 graduate from Indiana with a degree in geological and earth sciences. She wrote on her LinkedIn page that she was “interested in biogeochemistry, planetary science, environmental science.”
Her family declined to comment on her death.
Higdon became a full-time pilot in November, going to work for Maritime Helicopters. He had over 2,000 hours combined while flying Bell 206, Bell 407 and Eurocopter EC145 helicopters.
In a statement, the company praised Higdon: “We all knew Tony as the consummate professional and a skilled pilot. He will be greatly missed.”
He previously worked in different capacities at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks after serving more than 13 years as a military police officer with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Higdon’s family were unsuccessful.
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AP researchers Jennifer Farrar and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
YAKUTAT, Alaska — Forget the open-air sleigh overloaded with gifts and powered by flying reindeer.
Santa and Mrs. Claus this week took supersized rides to southeast Alaska in a C-17 military cargo plane and a camouflaged Humvee, as they delivered toys to the Tlingit village of Yakutat, northwest of Juneau.
The visit was part of this year’s Operation Santa Claus, an outreach program of the Alaska National Guard to largely Indigenous communities in the nation’s largest state. Each year, the Guard picks a village that has suffered recent hardship — in Yakutat’s case, a massive snowfall that threatened to buckle buildings in 2022.
“This is one of the funnest things we get to do, and this is a proud moment for the National Guard,” Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard, said Wednesday.
Saxe wore a Guard uniform and a Santa hat that stretched his unit’s dress regulations.
The Humvee caused a stir when it entered the school parking lot, and a buzz of “It’s Santa! It’s Santa!” pierced the cold air as dozens of elementary school children gathered outside.
In the school, Mrs. Claus read a Christmas story about the reindeer Dasher. The couple in red then sat for photos with nearly all of the 75 or so students and handed out new backpacks filled with gifts, books, snacks and school supplies donated by the Salvation Army. The school provided lunch, and a local restaurant provided the ice cream and toppings for a sundae bar.
Student Thomas Henry, 10, said while the contents of the backpack were “pretty good,” his favorite item was a plastic dinosaur.
Another, 9-year-old Mackenzie Ross, held her new plush seal toy as she walked around the school gym.
“I think it’s special that I have this opportunity to be here today because I’ve never experienced this before,” she said.
Yakutat, a Tlingit village of about 600 residents, is in the lowlands of the Gulf of Alaska, at the top of Alaska’s panhandle. Nearby is the Hubbard Glacier, a frequent stop for cruise ships.
Some of the National Guard members who visited Yakutat on Wednesday were also there in January 2022, when storms dumped about 6 feet of snow in a matter of days, damaging buildings.
Operation Santa started in 1956 when flooding severely curtailed subsistence hunting for residents of St. Mary’s, in western Alaska. Having to spend their money on food, they had little left for Christmas presents, so the military stepped in.
This year, visits were planned to two other communities hit by flooding. Santa’s visit to Circle, in northeastern Alaska, went off without a hitch. Severe weather prevented a visit to Crooked Creek, in the southwestern part of the state, but Christmas was saved when the gifts were delivered there Nov. 16.
“We tend to visit rural communities where it is very isolated,” said Jenni Ragland, service extension director with the Salvation Army Alaska Division. “A lot of kids haven’t traveled to big cities where we typically have Santa and big stores with Christmas gifts and Christmas trees, so we kind of bring the Christmas program on the road.”
After the C-17 Globemaster III landed in Yakutat, it quickly returned to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, an hour away, because there was nowhere to park it at the village’s tiny airport. Later, it returned to pick up the Christmas crew.
Santa and Mrs. Claus, along with their tuckered elves, were seen nodding off on the flight back.
Opposition to President-elect Trump’s renewed suggestion to change the name of Alaska’s 20,310-foot mountain back to McKinley includes many Alaskans, including Indigenous people, and the state’s two Republican senators. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advocated for years to remove the name of the nation’s 25th president, who never visited the mountain or had any connection to it, the Anchorage Daily News reports. “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.
Trump brought up the idea in a speech Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, where he praised William McKinley as a fellow supporter of protective tariffs. “We’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it,” Trump said. In 2016, Trump had said he might change the name back, a notion he dropped when Alaska’s senators objected, per the AP. Denali is the Koyukon Athabascan name that was used by Indigenous people for centuries. It translates to “the high one” or “the great one.”
The federal government named it Mount McKinley in 1896, which stood until Barack Obama’s administration in 2015. That switch came after years of effort by state officials and Native groups. Sen. Dan Sullivan once told an Alaska Federation of Natives conference that Trump made the same suggestion when he and Murkowski met with him at the White House in 2017. The senators objected vehemently, he said. An aide texted the Daily News that “Sen. Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago—Denali.” (More President-elect Trump stories.)
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Coming soon to Juneau-area roads; a trio of festively-named snowplows!
After hundreds of suggested names were entered in its annual naming contest, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities announced Monday that it had narrowed its search down to three winning names for three of its snowplows.
The winning names were Berminator, Salt-O-Saurus Rex, and Ka-PLOW.
The names were chosen by DOT staff who felt they were most appropriate and represented Alaska the best, according to Eli Kesten-Brackett, a project assistant with the department.
“Since they move in formation, [DOT] thought it’d be cool to have them all named as a unit,” Kesten-Brackett said.
The Name-A-Snowplow contest that ended on Nov. 28 saw over 400 individual entries from residents around the state.
Kesten-Brackett said after noticing the popularity of similar contests in other snow-laden states in the Lower 48, the state thought a way to get people’s creative juices flowing was what Alaska needed.
“We thought this would be an awesome way to foster community engagement,” Kesten-Brackett said.
The winning name in the inaugural contest last year was Darth Blader, according to Kesten-Brackett.
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