In most visitors, Alaska inspires wonder at its beauty, awe at its wildlife, and admiration for the hardiness of those who make their lives in its vast backcountry, enduring some of the harshest conditions on earth.
Alaska
Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village
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.
Alaska
An Alaska vacation can remind Israelis the world doesn’t revolve around them | The Jerusalem Post
For Israelis, it can also inspire humility. Not because the Jewish state is smaller than Denali National Park, but because in Alaska, one is reminded that the world neither revolves around Israel nor is obsessed with it.
That realization came on a trip The Wife and I took to America’s Last Frontier last month.
“Where is your final destination today?” the woman checking us in for our flight home at the Anchorage airport asked chirpily.
“Tel Aviv,” I replied. “Where’s that?”
When I said it was in Israel, she smiled and said, “Oh.”
Lest one think this was just a fluke: on the plane a few hours later, another Alaskan asked where we were going. When we answered “Tel Aviv,” she said she had never heard of it.
Granted, two people do not a Pew Poll make, but they do offer a small corrective to the perception – fed by the media most of us follow – that the world is preoccupied with Israel, thinking about us obsessively, talking about us constantly, and cursing us unremittingly.
The last part, at least in Alaska, is also not true. During our two weeks there, we saw no “Free Palestine” graffiti, nor were we subjected to dirty looks or “child killer” comments when we said we were from Israel.
All of America, it turns out, is not Mamdani’s Manhattan, nor does social media present a proportionate picture of that country’s reality.
One of the problems with social media is that every incident of antisemitism is posted online. The incidents are real and rising at an alarming rate, but seeing them all in one place creates a disproportionate sense of how likely you are to encounter them while traveling.
Watch enough clips of a Jewish kid harassed on a New York subway or an Israeli couple berated at a hotel in California, and you begin to wonder whether the same thing awaits you when you ride an American subway or check into a hotel.
It doesn’t. Yet the cumulative effect is that you begin to wonder how open to be about your Israeliness. You don’t decide to hide it, but simply having to ask the question adds a mini-layer of apprehension before every trip.
When Israel comes along for the ride
You also learn to read the Uber.
“Honey,” I urged The Wife before we got into an Uber in Chicago during a brief layover, “you don’t have to say you’re from Israel.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I’m not going to hide who I am.”
“Wonderful sentiment,” I replied. “The driver’s name is Rabah. Humor me.”
We didn’t volunteer our place of origin, nor did he ask.
But on the entire trip, that was the only time we consciously withheld that nugget of biographical information. Everywhere else, we proudly said we were from Israel – and it was fine. More than fine: it was often a conversation starter.
On a whale-watching excursion, we sat across from a young couple from China who work at Google. They were intrigued that we lived in Israel, and even more fascinated that we passed on the chicken sandwiches being served.
Instead of looking for sea creatures, The Wife spent a good part of the trip explaining why some of the fish in the sea we can eat and others we can’t.
“Honey,” I whispered at one point, a bit annoyed. “We didn’t pay all this money for you to give an introductory lecture on kashrut. Look for the damn puffins.”
Since October 7, another layer has been added to the anxiety of travel: whether your flight will be canceled at the drop of a ballistic missile.
One doesn’t just hop over to Alaska on a whim; it takes planning and a special occasion to justify the expense. For us, it was 40 years of wedded bliss, so we booked back in October after being warned that rental cars sell out months in advance.
We chose United. But just days after the war with Iran broke out, United – typically – canceled flights until mid-June, four days after our planned departure. We acted quickly – well, The Wife acted quickly – and switched to El Al. Still, it complicated the trip further.
Then came the more serious question: Do you leave the country when one of your sons or your son-in-law is in miluim in Lebanon, Gaza, or Syria?
My first instinct was no: you don’t leave when one of your children is serving. That may have worked before Oct. 7, when reserve duty meant a few weeks a year and could be planned around.
But today, when they have each logged upward of 350 days, saying you won’t leave while they are serving essentially means that you won’t leave at all.
Which, by the way, is hardly the end of the world. But what can I say? I like to travel.
So we went, even though as we were watching bears and sea otters, my youngest son was dodging drones in Lebanon.
“Go,” he said. “What are you going to be able to do by being here? And if, God forbid, something happens, you’ll come back.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “How can we enjoy it if we are worrying about you?”
“You’ll figure out a way,” he teased.
And he was right. Sure, we worried, but less than if we were here. Distance, it turns out, has its advantages. I wasn’t glued to the news, tracking every development on his front.
Perhaps that was Alaska’s greatest gift. Not the calving glaciers, surfacing whales, or foraging bears, magnificent though they were. It was the realization that while Israel is the center of our world, it is not the center of everyone else’s. Every now and then, regaining that perspective is refreshing. ■
I’m typically pretty wordy. But just watch the video.
Disclaimer: Matt Addington is a professional. These bears grazed toward him from 100 yards away while he held tight. Do not try this ever, under any circumstances, or you will likely spend the rest of your time on this earth as bear poop.
Matt Addington is an incredible professional photographer, and I can say that from personal experience. He’s captured images of me in rough shape and somehow made them stunnin’. The Minnesota-based photographer and filmmaker has built a career telling outdoor stories, and his latest bear video proves he knows exactly where to point a camera.
Places like Katmai National Park in Alaska (where this video was taken) can offer unusually close encounters with brown bears, thanks in part to abundant food and tightly managed visitor access. That doesn’t make encounters like this casual or safe to imitate.
Addington is an extremely experienced outdoorsman, and he was photographing with professional guides Scott and Jackie Stone. For people hoping to photograph bears this way, a guided wildlife photography tour is one of the safest ways to do it. Do not try this in Yellowstone or your local national forest.
The bears were grazing nearly 100 yards away when the group set up. They stayed put as the animals continued feeding and gradually moved closer, resulting in some incredible footage and a once-in-a-lifetime photo.
I can only hope he wore his brown pants under his waders.
Alaska
Black bear breaks into Alaskan mall, eats a peach and relieves itself on floor before leaving: video
Can bearly believe it!
A black bear was caught on camera seemingly running errands at a local shopping mall in Anchorage, Alaska over the weekend.
The bear entered the commissary mall at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson around 9 a.m. Sunday, KTUU reported, citing a JBER spokesperson.
Wild footage shows the young cub strolling through the commissary’s automatic doors and exploring all that the mall had to offer.
The hungry bear stole and ate a piece of fruit before emptying its bowels on the hallway floor on its way out of the building.
Kory Godbout, who works at the barber shop on the military base, was waiting for his first customer of the day when he spotted the furry intruder traveling through the automatic doors.
“My coworker, who is cutting hair in front of me, she yelled, ‘Bear!’” Godbout recalled.
“And I looked up from my phone and the bear was walking into the barber shop right in front of me,” the barber said. “And we all ran into the break room and shut the door behind us.”
After a few minutes, Godbout and his coworkers emerged from the break room and followed the out-of-place bear into the commissary, where it took a peach from the grocery store and ate it.
The barber recalled that a few onlookers were “going big to try and scare” the bear out of the grocery store.
But all of a sudden, the black bear returned to the barber shop.
“By that time, we were able to run back to the shop and then lock the door,” Godbout said.
“And then we were watching him from the window and then that’s when he decided to, you know, use the restroom in the hallway.”
Officers from Conservation Law Enforcement attended the peculiar grizzly scene and were able to direct the wild animal towards a river and into the woods, according to the JBER spokesperson.
JBER’s wildlife program manager Colette Brandt said in a press release that the bear had triggered the automatic doors and that Sunday’s events were entirely incidental, KTUU reported.
While there has been a decline in bear-related calls since the military base installed bear-resistant dumpsters, seven bears have been put down at JBER for public safety over the past year.
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