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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Eight cross-country skiers from Alaska are going to the 2026 Olympics in Italy next month. U.S. Ski and Snowboard announced the team Thursday morning.

Alaskans make up one half of the 16-skier U.S. cross-country ski team. All eight of the athletes ski with Alaska Pacific University’s team in Anchorage. APU coach Erik Flora said it’s unusual for so many cross-country skiers on Team USA to come from one state, and one club. He said APU is one of the biggest, strongest ski clubs in the country.

Flora said the team has been steadily improving over the last decade. This year, he said, it’s very likely that Alaskans will bring home some medals for the United States.

Gus Schumacher, Hunter Wonders, Zanden McMullen and JC Schoonmaker are skiing for the U.S. men’s team.

Rosie Brennan, Kendall Kramer, Novie McCabe and Hailey Swirbul are skiing for the U.S. women’s team.

It’s Gus Schumacher’s second Olympics. He said the skiers themselves already knew who’d made it since the criteria is pretty clear, but he’s glad the news is out.

“Fun to share with everyone, officially,” he said. “Nice to tell people and just being sure about it.”

He’s feeling good, he said, because he thinks this year he and his teammates have a real chance to help Team USA bring home a men’s cross-country medal. The only other time the U.S. men’s team medaled at the Olympics was 50 years ago, in 1976. Earlier Friday, Schumacher earned a third-place podium result in a World Cup relay sprint race with teammate Ben Ogden in Switzerland.

“It’s exciting to be feeling good, and have a big opportunity to do something that hasn’t been done in a long time,” he said. “And yeah, it’s exciting. It’s a little daunting, but just got to go there and experience it and realize how lucky we are to be able to do this.”

It’s 37-year-old Rosie Brennan’s third Olympics. But this year is different for her. Brennan has been struggling with what she calls “mysterious health issues” for over a year.

Now, she’ll have what is likely her last chance to compete in the Olympics, she said. It’s bittersweet, since she had hoped to contend for medals in Cortina but she said that’s not her reality anymore. Now, she’d just love to have a race where she feels like herself again.

“It’s been a long time since I felt like the Rosie I’m accustomed to racing with for the last 15 years,” she said.

There were times she wasn’t sure she was even going to make it to this year’s Olympics.

Now that she’s going, she’s thankful her teammates are with her, helping her stay focused.

“They’re the people that have seen everything that I’ve gone through and have been there to help me through it,” she said. “So that just gives you such a sense of comfort on the road, and especially like in big events like the Olympics.”

Hailey Swirbul didn’t have a straight path to the Olympics this year either. She quit skiing in 2023 because she wanted to experience life outside a stressful ski racing career – she was burned out.

Then, this summer, she started coaching for APU. She was skiing and feeling strong and thinking about the limited time she has to do the things she loves. The idea of competing at the Olympics bumped around in her head for a few months until she eventually decided: Let’s do it, take the risk, go for something big.

But she said she’s thinking about the Olympics differently than she did when she competed four years ago in Beijing. Taking a couple years away from competitive racing has really given her a perspective about what’s important in life.

“Sports are important but what really matters is the people that you know are there through the ups and downs,” she said.

She’s talking about her teammates, and friends and family, but also her role coaching at APU.

When the news came out that she’d made the Olympic team, a big group of her middle school skiers made a video for her, cheering and chanting her name. She said it made her heart swell when she got it.

They inspire her to work harder, she said. The real inspiration in an endurance sport like cross-country skiing comes from seeing someone’s grit, she said. It comes from watching athletes as they dig deep to push through the suffering.

“Those kids are watching and they notice and they pay attention,” she said. “And I think it’s so important to try to lead by example with your effort.”

This year, she said, her goal at the Olympics is to race in a way that inspires the kids back home.

Three Alaskans sued state election officials Thursday, alleging that language adopted by the state for a ballot measure seeking to repeal Alaska’s open primary and ranked choice voting system is “untrue, incomplete, and partisan.”

They contend that the state’s ballot language is different from the language that was provided on the signature petitions circulated by the repeal campaign.

Bringing the lawsuit in Anchorage Superior Court are Cathy Giessel, a Republican state senator; Joelle Hall, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO union federation and a Democrat; and Wáahlaal Gidaag Barbara Blake, a Juneau resident and a nonpartisan.

“Deficiencies, partisan suasion, and falsehoods in that ballot language give rise to this litigation,” their complaint says.

Sam Curtis, a spokesperson with the Alaska Department of Law, said in a statement that the “ballot language at issue is accurate, neutral, and consistent with prior initiatives. The alternative language advanced by the plaintiffs would be confusing and inject advocacy where the law requires impartial description. We are confident the courts will uphold the state’s language.”

The plaintiffs support the state’s open primary and ranked choice voting system. It was approved by Alaska voters through an earlier ballot measure in 2020. They also support the ban on dark money contributions in state and local elections, according to the lawsuit.

Their complaint says the new ballot measure seeks to fully repeal the prior ballot measure and undo the three policies.

The complaint was filed by Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall, one of the main architects of the open primary and ranked choice system.

The state’s voting system, which includes allowing all primary candidates to appear on a single ballot, has altered the sway of political parties over election results since it was first implemented in 2022.

It changed the earlier system, where Alaskans voted in closed primaries governed by the state’s largest political parties.

The Alaska Republican Party has made repealing the current voting system one of its top goals.

Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has endorsed the repeal, asserting that the current system is difficult for voters to understand.

The complaint names as defendants the state Division of Elections; Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who administers elections in Alaska; and Carol Beecher, head of the Alaska Division of Elections.

Dahlstrom did not respond to a request for an interview placed with her office. The elections division referred questions to the Department of Law.

Last month, Dahlstrom, a Republican candidate for governor, said Repeal Now, the group seeking to repeal the open primary and ranked choice voting system, had gathered enough signatures to place the question on the ballot.

Dahlstrom said the repeal group gathered 42,837 qualified signatures, exceeding the requirement of having 34,098 total from residents of at least 30 state House districts.

The measure could appear before voters in Nov. 3 general election, or in the Aug. 20 primary, depending on when the Legislature adjourns.

Chair Judy Eledge and others with Repeal Now, the group seeking to repeal the voting system, did not respond to requests for comment.

Late last month, Dahlstrom also announced the proposed ballot title and summary for the measure that would appear on the ballot, the complaint says. That language led to the lawsuit.

The new complaint says the state created and adopted ballot language that provides “neither a ‘true’ nor ‘impartial’ summary” of the proposition that seeks to undo the current voting structure, violating state law and the Alaska Constitution.

The plaintiffs contend in the complaint that the ballot language misrepresents what the measure would do, including by saying it will “restore campaign finance laws.”

The proposed repeal measure would not restore or “add even a single campaign finance rule to Alaska’s statutes,” the complaint says.

“Rather (it) would fully repeal a litany of campaign finance disclosure requirements, and eliminate enhanced fines for certain campaign finance violations that were adopted by voters through” the earlier ballot measure, the complaint says.

The lawsuit also argues that the language adopted by the state fails to disclose that the measure would give parties the power to exclude voters who are not members of their party, including nonpartisan and undeclared voters, from voting in their primaries, Alaskans for Better Elections said in a prepared statement.

More than 60% of Alaska’s voters are not registered with either party and could be prohibited from voting in primaries, according to a statement from Alaskans for Better Elections, the group that installed the existing voting system.

“The language explaining what they’re voting on must be simple, complete, and impartial,” Giessel said in a statement from the group. “Alaska has uniquely strong dark money disclosure laws that ensure voters know who is spending money on political campaigns, and yet the current ballot language fails even to mention it would repeal these laws, along with open primaries and ranked choice voting.”

The repeal group recently reported that it has taken in $263,000 and has a deficit of about $10,000, in filings with Alaska Public Offices Commission.

The vast majority of its contributions has come from the Aurora Action Network, a political action committee registered with the Federal Election Commission, with a Wisconsin address.

A major expense in November included $59,000 for Upcard, a Florida-based signature-gathering company, according to the filing.

Protect Alaska’s Elections, a group formed to defend the open primary and ranked-choice system, recently reported raising $209,000, with $162,000 remaining.

Nearly all the money so far has come from Unite America PAC, a Denver-based group that was the largest funder of the campaign that enacted the open primary and ranked-choice system.

The group lists lawsuit plaintiffs Giessel and Hall as some of the deputy treasurers, in filings with the public offices commission.

A previous effort to repeal the open primary and ranked-choice system narrowly failed in the 2024 election.

In that election, proponents of open primaries and ranked choice voting spent millions of dollars on advertising, far outspending the grassroots effort to repeal.