Category: Alaska News

When Westin Nelson of Skagway became the first Alaska hunter on record to harvest a mule deer, he may have been doing the state a favor.

Mule deer, better known as inhabitants of the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions, have been expanding their range northward, including into Alaska. As they do so, they are expanding the risks of parasites and some contagious diseases.

The most concerning issue is the winter tick, or Dermacentor albipictus. It has yet to be documented in Alaska, but it has wiped out much of the moose population in New England and started causing problems for moose populations as far north as Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories.

In recent years, nearly half of the mule deer examined in the Whitehorse area were found to be tick-infested, said Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s wildlife biologist. That is ominous for Alaska, she said.

“All it takes is one mule deer with one female tick on it to come into Alaska, and that would completely devastate our moose population,” Beckmen said.

Mule deer have been well-established in the Yukon Territory since at least the 1980s, and in Alaska, people have been spotting them on sometimes fleeting occasions for a little over a decade.

Most sightings have been in the northern part of the Southeast panhandle, but some were as far north as Interior Alaska. Three mule deer were reported in 2013 near Delta Junction, one was photographed near the Fort Knox mine outside of Fairbanks in 2016 and one was struck by a vehicle and killed in North Pole in 2017, according to the Department of Fish and Game.

Though they are related to the Sitka black-tailed deer that live in territory stretching from the British Columbia rainforest to the Kodiak Archipelago, mule deer are different from their Alaska cousins.

The contrast is striking, said Nelson, the Skagway hunter.

“These deer are big, maybe twice the size of Sitka black-tailed deer,” he said. “Mule deer have enormous ears. They have ears like a mule.”

Adult Sitka black-tailed deer generally weigh 80 to 120 pounds, according to the Department of Fish and Game, while adult mule deer often weigh more than 200 pounds.

Nelson said he has seen mule deer occasionally in the Skagway area over the past few years. He had a light-hearted competition with a friend about who would be the first to hunt one. It was not until April when circumstances came together to result in a successful hunt – right in that friend’s yard.

“I just happened to kind of get lucky,” Nelson said.

The rules for hunting mule deer in Alaska, where the species is non-native and considered “deleterious,” are liberal. There are no seasonal restrictions and no bag limits. Even though it took until this year for Nelson to become the first hunter on record to harvest a mule deer in Alaska, state officials first authorized mule deer hunting in 2019.

The caveat for mule deer hunters is that the Department of Fish and Game wants them to submit tissue samples for testing. That is to screen for signs of tick infestations and for numerous problems like brain worm, also known as “moose sickness,” chronic wasting disease, different types of hemorrhagic diseases, bluetongue, worm infestation and other diseases or parasites.

Nelson provided abundant samples to the department: the hide, head and neck, liver, heart, lungs, spleen, lower colon and two lower legs with the hooves attached, according to officials with the Department of Fish and Game.

Importantly, Beckmen with the department said, there were no signs of hair loss or breakage in the hide, indicating that any tick infestation during the past winter was unlikely.

Nelson said he has been reading up on mule deer and the state’s concerns about ticks and other dangers. But he downplayed any contributions he might have made to state wildlife safety. “I wouldn’t say I’m super-noble or anything. I just wanted to get one,” he said.

Climate change, along with factors like road-building and agricultural development, have allowed mule deer to thrive in new territory even as some habitat is lost to development, according to the Department of Fish and Game.

Climate change is also helping spread the winter tick northward and westward.

The ticks do not travel on their own. Rather, they grow from eggs that are laid on the ground in the spring that grow into larvae that climb up plants in packs to latch onto passing hosts in the fall, a process known as “questing.” If they stay attached all winter, they develop into adults that repeat the cycle by dropping from their hosts in spring to lay eggs. Shorter winters and later snowfalls are increasing opportunities for successful questing by the ticks, scientists say.

In New England, moose have been found with tens of thousands of winter ticks embedded in their skin. The blood loss they cause can be fatal, especially to young moose. In Maine, for example, biologists in 2022 found that 86% of the moose calves they had collared died from tick infestations. In New Hampshire, the moose population now is only about half of what it was in the 1990s, according to state biologists there.

While mule deer can become infested with winter ticks, they also are able to get rid of them fairly effectively through self-grooming.

Moose lack those grooming skills. That results in moose rubbing and scratching off so much of their hair that they are called “ghost moose” because their bald spots make them look white.

Mule deer are not the only species expanding their range to Alaska.

Another such species is the mountain lion, also known as cougar. The Alaska Board of Game early this year approved a first hunting and trapping season for mountain lions. It is set to start on Aug. 1 in parts of Southeast Alaska.

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There were lots of cottonwoods. Some birch and spruce. I didn’t yet know them as individuals, the shade and companionship they’d give, but they were friendly. And welcoming, in their familiarity. Like cousins, green with life. Especially the aspens, who felt the most charming and easy in a teasing way, with their flapping leaves that said, “Hello.” To me, the newcomer in town.

Last summer, walking down a small slope on the dirt path near my house felt like stepping through a portal. To life and breath and soil. Away from busy cars. Powerlines. Sidewalks. The mail-order-kit houses erected in the 1950s during the oil boom, all lined up, one after another. Away from neighbors I felt shy around and mostly didn’t know yet. In the neighborhood we’d chosen because it was known to be uncharacteristically neighborly. Where there is, however, a standing, though unenforceable, restrictive covenant, which says: “The property hereby conveyed shall not be sold or alienated in any manner whatsoever to other than Americans of the white race.”

So, as you can imagine, entering that portal meant entering the familiar world of the good nature of trees, who always welcome. And other plants that didn’t abide by often cruel, made-up human rules.

Daily walks, wherever I am, have always been important for me. My therapist friend tells me that walking is a form of somatic therapy. Body healing that calms the nervous system. Movement that allows us to process emotions and trauma. I know I need these walks, and I know I enjoy them more when I’m surrounded by the quiet of trees and growing plants that are ever-changing throughout the summer.

So I was surprised when I looked down at the forest floor of my new walking route on the trail system of Alaska’s largest city and felt like a stranger. I knew the ferns. But I didn’t yet know the difference between pushki, or cow parsnip, and devil’s club, two showy plants with leaves as big as Thanksgiving platters. I hadn’t yet realized that pushki has a soft, hollow green stem while devil’s club has a strong, dark brown, spine-covered branch-like stem. Other patterns of new-to-me plants pushed out from the soil, and I wanted to know them, too. If I knew who they were, maybe I could gather the courage to get to know some new people, too.

My introduction to having a relationship with plants wasn’t on a trail but in Gram’s kitchen, as a kid. If I had a cough or sore throat, Gram gave me a mug one-quarter full of a brown cold tea. Though we grandkids didn’t like the astringent, bitter medicine taste of sargiq, or wormwood, we drank what Gram gave us, because Gram knew best. Now I pick the tall stalks every fall to dry upside-down in my kitchen, then store them in jars to make tea for my family whenever we catch a cold or have a sore throat. And today, whether I’m walking on the Anchorage trails or back home on the river beach in Unalakleet, I am drawn to the plants, knowing that many are helpers, some are food, and a few, like rich purple monkshood, are straight-up deadly.

On my new neighborhood trail, in a place where I felt like a foreigner, I knew I needed to be introduced. Like at a dinner party. Or a backyard barbeque get-together. I needed a casual, safe situation where introductions were expected.

SO, NATURALLY, I met devil’s club, or S’áxt’, as it’s known in Tlingit, at the hospital clinic. The same place where I get penicillin shots for strep throat, estradiol patches and progesterone pills for perimenopause, and colonoscopies.

The Alaska Native Medical Center has a Traditional Healing Clinic, where Indigenous healers provide counseling, physical services, a healing garden, talking circles and cultural classes. For two months, I saw a healer every week to relieve pain in my shoulder and hip. She offered a class on making a healing salve out of devil’s club. I immediately signed up and waited, impatiently, for my introduction to a plant I knew was important to local and Southeast Alaska Native peoples.

Seven or eight of us met in what felt like a lab in early summer. White 5-gallon buckets sat on the table filled with stalks of brown, thick, spiny, crooked stems. Our instructor told us to pick the stalks in early summer and to wear leather gloves to protect our skin from the plant’s sharp spines, which contain a sap that can cause blisters and pain. In fact, most people who come across S’áxt’ avoid it at all costs because any spines that become embedded in one’s flesh can cause a severe infection. Devil’s club’s scientific name is Oplopanax horridus, or “horrid, armed ginseng.” A proper introduction to this plant was necessary.

Our instructor, Ruby, is Tlingit and was introduced to S’áxt’ by her grandmother, who made tea from the cambium in her kitchen. Ruby taught us to scrape the spines and outer skin off the stems with a spoon. We then peeled the next layer, the smooth cambium, off the stalk in white tendrils. This was the medicine. Like sargiq, which I knew, S’áxt’ could be made into tea for colds and sore throats or a healing salve for aches and pains and a long list of ailments. The plant teaches me that even the most feared and aggressive-seeming life can be soft and have something to share if you take the time to get to know it.

I left the clinic with cambium ready to soak in a carrier oil like grapeseed or olive. In the fall I mixed the oil with Vitamin E oil and beeswax from some Anchorage friends who keep backyard bees. I gifted a tidy jar of the salve to them and shared others with more of my friends and family. I kept a small tin case of it for any rashes, cuts or achy joints at my house.

Later in the summer, my husband, young son and I went biking along the Anchorage trails. Among the ferns, in the golden sunlight that filtered through the birch and cottonwood branches, I saw some large showy leaves on a plant taller than me. Cone-shaped clusters of small red berries dotted the cacophony of plants, showing off their glory at the tail-end of the season. I smiled. And said, “Hello,” to S’áxt’. Happy to know them. Feeling like I was no longer a total stranger in a new place. I was getting to know my neighbors.

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This article appeared in the June 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Plants make good neighbors.”

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.