Day: April 6, 2026

One might expect the 51st Alaska Folk Festival to be a bit tamer than the landmark 50-year bash, but organizers say last year’s golden anniversary get-together set the stage for an even bigger week of music, dance and other activities this year.

“The 50th brought so many new members into the fold,” said Josh Fortenbery, president of the festival’s board, while he and others were setting up Centennial Hall on Sunday for shows starting Monday evening. “And so a lot of people that were excited about the thing last year — or maybe hadn’t been in a while, or never been before — all signed up as members last year. So we have the largest membership we’ve ever had. And so I think that allows us to keep building every year and make it keep getting bigger and better, without ever compromising the idea that it’s always going to be free.”

The festival opens at 6:30 p.m. Monday in the main Centennial Hall ballroom with a 15-minute set by the Juneau Community Chorus and is scheduled to close sometime after the 9 p.m. Sunday concert by featured guest performer Willi Carlisle with a traditional crowd singalong of “Goodnight Irene.” Other workshops and dance band events are scheduled during the week in Centennial Hall’s other rooms and the adjacent Juneau Arts and Culture Center, plus a variety of non-official and “after-hours” events at venues throughout downtown.

Among the new — or least not previously remembered — features at this year’s festival is a neon backdrop of a guitar and stars, a “50 Years of Folk Fest” that will be screened twice on Saturday at KTOO’s studios, and life-size puppets Carlisle is bringing with him as part of his act.

“We need two people to operate these backpack puppets,” said Annie Bartholomew, another festival board member and longtime Juneau musician. “I think it’s a raccoon and a king, and they fight each other.”

Carlisle, 36, who performed a 15-minute set during the 2019 festival, may also be the first person in such a slot who has returned as the festival’s guest artist, Bartholomew said.

Born in Kansas and now based in Arkansas, Carlisle performs “traditional folk music for 21st century problems,” according to a Grammy.com feature following the release of the second of his four current albums. His website proclaims “singing is healing” and “by singing together, he believes we can begin to reckon with the inevitability of human suffering and grow in love.”

Fortenberry said that kind of presence is what motivated the invitation from the festival’s board.

“I think just in the current sort of political climate — the feeling of sort of dread and civil unrest and disconnection — his joy and his model of trying to just bring everyone to the fold just really fits what we think we need sort of culturally right now,” Fortenberry said. “So it’s just a really apt pick for the times we live in.”

The rest of the lineup on the main stage features a multitude of well-known local musicians in 15-minute slots that, as usual, are fully booked with a long standby list (about 85 artists on Monday morning, according to the festival’s website).

This year’s poster was designed by Savannah LeCornu, a self-taught Ketchikan artist who is Tsimshian, Haida, and Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), according to the festival’s website. The poster features silhouetted musicians in a zig-zagging line of northern lights above Juneau’s nighttime cityscape.

Dance music is scheduled Thursday through Saturday evenings at the JACC, with four or five bands performing each night. This year’s feature dance band is The Red Hots, a quartet from North Carolina, with Connor Maguire serving as the featured guest caller for that band and some of the other dance performances.

Bartholomew said her banjo teacher, Riley Baugus, is a member of The Red Hots who has toured with musicians such as Willie Nelson and Alison Krauss.

“He’s a great teacher, and the guys he plays with are all really cool,” Bartholomew said. “It’ll be great getting him to dance and teaching people, and bringing in some authentic North Carolina, old-time dance Appalachian stuff.”

She said she’s also familiar with Maguire, having been to dances he’s called in California and Idaho.

“He looks like a lumberjack,” Bartholomew said. “I’m afraid he’ll move to Juneau because he’ll just fall in love with it. But he’s really boisterous and fun.”

Fortenbery said he was barely able to squeeze in the roughly 30 individuals or groups wanting to conduct workshops Saturday and Sunday. Offerings range from introductory sessions on music theory and square dance calling to applying for Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Awards, the latter being among the notable new additions.

“This is about the most workshop applications I’ve ever received,” he said.

This story was originally published by the Juneau Independent.

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Ketchikan is not getting a free, mile-long, 12-foot-diameter tunnel to link the community with its airport across the water.

The Ketchikan Gateway Borough had been one of 16 finalists for a national company’s offer to pay for building a tunnel but did not measure up in the final decision. The Boring Co. will be moving forward with projects in New Orleans, Baltimore and Dallas, selecting three winners rather than the original plan for a single winner of the Tunnel Vision Challenge.

The company, which was founded by Elon Musk, announced the contest winners in a late-night March 23 post on its X social media account.

Ketchikan’s 45-page entry, one of 487 submitted to the company, had proposed four options for tunnel access between Revillagigedo and Gravina islands, linking the town to the airport.

The company’s post on X said the next step for the three winners will be for The Boring Co. “and the project stakeholders (to) enter into a rigorous diligence process.” That will include meetings with “elected officials, regulators, community leaders and business leaders,” in addition to geotechnical borings and utility and subsurface infra investigation.

The company said it would pay 100% of the cost of the due-diligence effort, adding that it would build all three “if all three are feasible.” But, if only one of the tunnels is feasible, it would build just the one.

Ketchikan’s effort started in January, when Assembly Members Rodney Dial and Sharli Arntzen talked of addressing long-standing issues surrounding the aging ferry system between Revillagigedo and Gravina islands.

Dial discovered The Boring Co. contest that promised to finance and construct one mile of 12-foot diameter tunnel infrastructure for the winning project.

The interest in a hard link such as a bridge or tunnel across Tongass Narrows goes back decades. It increased with construction of the state-owned and borough-operated Ketchikan International Airport on Gravina Island in 1973.

Currently, borough-operated shuttle ferries serve the airport.

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Tickets to ride the Alaska Marine Highway System will go up a little more than 2% effective May 1, the first fare increase since 2019.

That 2019 increase instituted “dynamic pricing” of higher fares on popular routes, much like airlines and hotels price their rates to maximize revenues.

But dynamic pricing was not popular among ferry riders and the state rescinded the fare structure in 2022, leaving tickets unchanged since then.

Craig Tornga, marine director for the state ferry system, told legislators last month that it’s important for the marine highway to keep up with inflation.

The fare increase will raise the cost of a car and driver between Wrangell and Ketchikan by $6, from $213 to $219. A car and driver between Wrangell and Bellingham, Washington, will increase next month by $30, from $1,364 to $1,394.

The system’s operating budget for calendar 2026 is about $170 million, with almost half expected from the federal government and the rest from ticket sales and the general fund. The ferries have never paid their own way from the fare box, always needing state or federal dollars to cover the difference.

A new budget issue is that this year’s federal money is late, and the state may need to front tens of millions of dollars until the federal aid comes through. The Trump administration has delayed since last year opening the ferry funding program at the Federal Transit Administration to grant applications.

The ferry system has enough state money to cover its expenses into July, Dom Pannone, director of program management and administration, told the state Senate Transportation Committee on March 19.

The soonest the federal aid might come through is August or September, he told lawmakers, which would require the state to cover up to $30 million for two months until the federal check arrives.

Committee members asked Pannone how sure he was that the federal grant program would open soon enough for Alaska to receive the money by late summer or early fall, limiting the state’s risk. “We have high confidence,” he said, though he added “confidence can never be 100%.”

At the committee hearing, Tornga also briefed legislators on the ferry system’s ongoing efforts to recruit and retain more workers aboard the ships. The system has suffered from chronic crew shortages the past several years.

As of February, the ferries were short about 40 crew in licensed positions from full staffing of 336, he reported.

The state has embarked on several recruiting, training and scholarship programs to bring in more licensed crew, including investing in employees who want to attend maritime school to move up to more skilled positions.

“We want to promote our own employees to move up,” Tornga said.

In addition to dealing with crew shortages and delayed federal funding, the ferry system is managing an aging fleet.

Bids are due at the end of May for construction of a replacement ferry for the 62-year-old Tustumena, which serves Gulf of Alaska communities. The federally funded replacement had been estimated at more than $300 million, though Tornga declined to provide the Senate Transportation Committee with an updated number.

“I don’t want bidders to know,” he said. “It’s an expensive vessel.”

Until a new ship comes online, Tornga said they would try to keep the Tustumena out of rough storms that would twist the hull and risk damaging the welds that have accumulated over the years.

The Columbia, which serves Southeast Alaska, is almost as old, built in 1973. “We want to keep it going until we get a mainline replacement,” which could be eight or nine years, he told legislators.

Work will start next winter on a long list of repairs, rebuilds and maintenance aboard the Columbia, he said, starting with replacement of the “obsolete firefighting systems” and replacing leaky windows and rusted steel.

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