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They can't do anything about the weather, but organizers of Wrangell's Fourth of July events are preparing for the wettest and hoping for the warmest. They have made room at the covered downtown pavilion for musical groups to perform in the afternoon and evening of the Fourth. The bands need electricity, which doesn't mix very safely with rain, said Tommy Wells, executive director of the chamber of commerce, which organizes the annual holiday celebration in town. The events start with a golf tou...
A large audience turned out to hear an evolutionary biologist explain the connection between a dime-size piece of 3,000-year-old human bone found in a cave near Wrangell and present-day Alaska Natives, who welcomed the opportunity to return a distant ancestor to her final resting place. Charlotte Lindqvist, a professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Buffalo in New York, gave the presentation June 13 at the Nolan Center. The event focused on a bone fragment...
Once again, it’s that time of year to catch some fish at the lake and net some fun for the whole family. The annual Family Fishing Day will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, June 22, at Pats Lake. The event promises to have something for everyone, including casting practice and even a free lunch. The U.S. Forest Service Wrangell District and WCA Earth Branch are sponsoring the event, along with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Corree Delabrue, with the Forest Service, confirmed that special youth fishing regulations by Fish and G...
The borough will allow people to pay sales and property taxes online by credit card, though they will be charged a credit card processing fee of 2.75%. The assembly approved the credit card option and fee on a unanimous vote at its June 11 meeting. Utility customers already are allowed to pay their bills with a credit card, with no fee. The new option for tax payments will take effect July 1. Property tax bills will go out by July 1 and payments are due by Oct. 15. Businesses generally pay sales taxes quarterly, with the next round of returns...
Consumers think of seafood as a premium purchase, which is not a good image when household budgets are tight and shoppers are worried about inflation. “The problem is not the fish,” said Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. “The challenge is in the global marketplace.” Woodrow in February called the 2023 market for Alaska salmon “rock bottom” with low prices and weak demand, though maybe the industry was coming off that rocky bottom, he said then. Now, as the season is getting underway this summer, “a lo...
As the weather warms, residents of all ages will indulge in some leisure reading over the summer. At the Irene Ingle Public Library, librarian Sarah Scambler doesn’t keep track of the titles checked out by patrons but noted people read a wide variety of different subjects. “We have a pretty eclectic group of readers here at the library.” She noted one popular title on the shelves that’s been on the bestseller list for the past 10 weeks is a novel called “The Women” by Kristin Hannah, based on the true experiences of female nurses during the...
Kids of all ages will have a chance to check out some big rigs at the popular Touch-a-Truck event, from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, June 23, at the parking lot by Volunteer Park. Attendees will get to see many kinds of work vehicles, including fire trucks, police cars, bulldozers, dump trucks and more. This is the seventh such event held in Wrangell, with one year staged as a parade due to COVID restrictions. While it’s normally held on a Saturday, Parks and Recreation Coordinator Devyn Johnson said she wanted kids to be able to come to this event a...
Southeast commercial purse seine fishermen are preparing for a summer season with no confidence they will earn a good price for the pink and chum they catch. The Southeast seine fishery opened with a one-day pink salmon fishing opportunity on Sunday in areas near Sitka, with more widespread openings to come. The Department of Fish and Game has forecast a “traditional” fishery harvest of 19.2 million pink salmon by commercial seiners this year, not counting the fish netted in terminal harvest areas near hatchery release sites. That would be an...
The anticipated movement of invasive European green crab farther into Southeast Alaska was verified June 13 when 11 carapaces of the shellfish were collected on the shore of Gravina Island’s Bostwick Inlet, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The inlet, less than 10 miles southwest of downtown Ketchikan, is a popular local spot for harvesting Dungeness crab. The molted green crab carapaces were found by members of the Metlakatla Indian Community Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Alaska Sea Grant program, who were c...
As the climate warms, more Pacific salmon from Alaska are showing up in the Western Arctic waters of Canada. But residents in those Arctic Canadian communities are not catching salmon every year, which led them to ask why. Now a study by scientists from Canada and Alaska has described the ocean gateway that must open to bring salmon from the Bering Sea to those far-north sites. Conditions must line up over vast stretches of ocean for salmon to make the journey through the Bering Strait, across the Chukchi Sea and into the Canadian Beaufort Sea...
Three Northwest tribes and federal agencies are getting closer to understanding how to revive chinook and sockeye salmon runs on the upper Columbia River that were once among the most abundant in the world but were decimated by dams over the past century. Leaders from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the Spokane Tribe of Indians met with leaders from three federal agencies and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in Portland on May 22 to discuss progress on their historic agreement from l...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has tightened the sport fishing limits for Wrangell Narrows and Blind Slough Terminal Harvest Area where hatchery kings return. The new limits were put in place due to poor returns of king salmon in the area, and will be in effect Saturday, June 15, through July 31. In the Wrangell Narrows, south of Matinsens’s dock and north and east of the northern tip of Woewodski Island at the southern entrance to the narrows, the new bag and possession limit for all anglers is one king salmon. Nonresident annual l...
SEATTLE — The U.S. granted the Makah Indian Tribe in Washington state a long-sought waiver Thursday, June 13, that helps clear the way for the tribe’s first sanctioned whale hunts in a quarter-century. The Makah, a tribe of 1,500 people on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, is the only Native American tribe with a treaty that specifically mentions a right to hunt whales. But it has faced more than two decades of court challenges, bureaucratic hearings and scientific review as it seeks to resume hunting for gray whales. The dec...
A new agreement between Alaska’s capital city and major cruise lines seeks to cap the daily number of cruise ship passengers arriving in Juneau starting in 2026, though a prominent critic of the cruise industry said the planned limits do not do enough. The agreement, finalized late last month, seeks a daily limit of 16,000 cruise passengers Sundays through Fridays and 12,000 on Saturdays. However, officials said that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be that many people every day. Cruise passengers numbers ramped up rapidly after two pan...
In May, the Alaska Legislature narrowly rejected a conservative talk radio host’s appointment to a highly paid position regulating the state’s commercial fisheries. Now, after the failure of that pick, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has chosen a new appointee with a similar — though not identical — background for the six-figure job at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, or CFEC. In an unannounced decision, Dunleavy selected Rick Green last month, according to a letter to Green that the governor’s office released June 12 as part of a resp...
Sales tax revenues came in under projections for the first three months of the year, an indication of a weakening economy and a worrisome sign for the community, Borough Manager Mason Villarma said last week. “We’re at that point we’re going to have to trim things down,” he told the assembly at a budget work session Wednesday, June 5. Mayor Patty Gilbert called the manager’s draft spending plan “the leanest budget” she has seen. In addition to proposing laying off two of the police department’s seven-member force of certified officers, Villa...
"Good morning Paddle to Celebration 2024! It's time to get up!" Jim Zeller's booming voice echoed through the forest. It was 4:30 a.m. and rain pattered the roof of my tent on Read Island. I could hear people in nearby tents begin to stir, along with the faint snoring of those that hadn't been roused by Zeller. We were a couple days into our seven-day canoe journey from Wrangell to Juneau, where we would arrive for Celebration, the biennial gathering of Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people. The...
A University at Buffalo, New York, professor will talk about the genetic connection between human remains thousands of years old discovered in a cave near Wrangell and Alaska Natives in the area today. The presentation, sponsored by the Wrangell Cooperative Association and the U.S. Forest Service, will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 13, at the Nolan Center. The event will be free to the public. Evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist of the university’s department of biological sciences is coming to Wrangell for the presentation. “I wil...
The draft budget before the borough assembly includes eliminating two positions from Wrangell’s seven-member force of certified police officers. The spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1, Borough Manager Mason Villarma said, is constrained by flat property tax revenues, a decline in sales tax receipts, a long list of deferred maintenance projects and declining reserve funds. The layoffs, proposed for Sept. 30, would result in the department pulling back from 24-hour coverage, Villarma explained at a borough assembly budget w...
Wrangell is among the more pessimistic towns in this year’s annual business survey conducted of Southeast communities. About half of the 35 Wrangell business leaders who responded to the survey had a negative view of the town’s economic outlook, and almost one-third expected they would need to cut jobs this year. None of that surprises Kate Thomas, the borough’s economic development director. “Our downtown district is not doing as well as it has in the past,” she said in an interview Thursday, June 6. Residents are spending more money onl...
The school district is readvertising for a full-time, in-person counselor to serve Wrangell’s 260 students starting in August. Amid pushback from faculty and at least one board member at last month’s school board meeting, the previously selected out-of-town applicant withdrew her bid to work as a remote K-12 counselor for the coming school year. The district administration last month proposed a contract for remote services with Lindsay Pinkelman, who runs Find a Way Consulting, based in Delta Junction, 95 miles southeast of Fairbanks. Tho...
In addition to focusing on big-dollar issues, assembly members at last week’s budget work session discussed a collective $50,000 question: Whether the borough should contribute money to KSTK radio, the chamber of commerce and the senior center. The issue of improving playgrounds also came up toward the end of the meeting. Unlike recent years when the borough assembly appropriated cash for the radio station, chamber and senior center, the draft budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 does not include any such direct payments. Borough M...
A Talkeetna high school student who comes to Wrangell for the Fourth of July most every year to visit family is the winner of this year's chamber of commerce competition to design an official logo for the holiday celebration. Kyla McChargue said her winning design, with boats and planes converging on Wrangell, is intended to show everyone coming to town for the Fourth. "I just wanted to show that even if you don't live in Wrangell ... it's home," she said last week. Kyla, 15, who will be a sopho...
Centennial Hall in downtown Juneau filled with energy June 5 as Alaska Natives from all over the state paraded through, singing, dancing and wearing their regalia with pride. This was the grand entrance for Celebration, the Alaska Native cultural festival held in Juneau every other year, put together by Sealaska Heritage Foundation Dakhká Khwáan Dancers (People of the Inland) from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, led the Grand Entrance on the first day, lining the stage as they kept singing and d...
Dale Eugene "Gene" Meek has been hired as Wrangell's new police chief and will start the job on July 22. He most recently served as police chief in Soldotna, on the Kenai Peninsula. Borough Manager Mason Villarma, who met with Meek several times during his visit to town over the weekend, said he and Mayor Patty Gilbert had dinner with Meek and his wife, Mechel (pronounced "mee-shell"), on Saturday. The day before, soon after his arrival on the afternoon flight on Friday, Meek met with members...