Category: Alaska News

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was a gardener’s house.Full sun. Full composter. Native perennials. While the raised beds had seen better days, the soil within them was soft and lovingly tended. It was exactly the kind…

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From left to right: Greg Haas, instructor, Alaska Vocational Technical Center; Sydney Singer, founder, Exit Glacier Greenhouse; Preston Carnahan, vice president, Destination Development, Alaska, West Coast, and Pacific; Dr. Cory Ortiz, division director, Alaska Vocational Technical Center.

Anglers crowded Ship Creek for the Slam’n Salmon Derby, with one participant landing a 13-pound king salmon as the popular Anchorage fishing event continues.

Anglers crowded Ship Creek for the Slam’n Salmon Derby, with one participant landing a 13-pound king salmon as the popular Anchorage fishing event continues.

Anglers crowded Ship Creek for the Slam’n Salmon Derby, with one participant landing a 13-pound king salmon as the popular Anchorage fishing event continues.

When ex-Typhoon Halong flooded the Western Alaska village of Kipnuk last fall, a mass evacuation followed.

Homes were displaced, with some 90% of the village’s structures destroyed, according to Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Most people made the difficult decision to leave the village.

In the end, 19 people stayed behind, determined to see Kipnuk rebuilt — a tiny fraction of the nearly 1,000 people that tribal leaders say lived in the village before the flooding.

Kipnuk was the hardest hit during the storm, but Halong also caused widespread damage in other communities across Western Alaska, including the village of Kwigillingok.

Burt Paul and Benjamin Kugtsun are two of those who remained in Kipnuk.

Cousins and best friends, the two believe that despite the damage, the village can still serve as an interim home for community members while they wait to relocate to higher ground — a long-term goal that tribal leaders announced in March after a formal vote.

Before Halong hit, Burt was a Yup’ik culture and language teacher at the Chief Paul Memorial School. I visited his classroom May 8 and spoke with him and Benjamin.

Posters highlighting traditional Yup’ik values and books by regional authors like Elsie Mather and Paul John filled the space, along with a coffee maker, pillows, mattresses and blankets. For the past seven months, the classroom was a dorm room for both men while they worked with contractors to repair homes and village infrastructure.

In this conversation — the first in a series of dispatches on Halong’s survivors — Benjamin and Burt reflect on the difficult night that the storm arrived in October, their lifelong friendship and the reasons they stayed behind.

The discussion has been edited for clarity, and condensed.

Katie Baldwin Basile: Did you ever leave Kipnuk after the typhoon?

Benjamin Kugtsun: No. We stayed here after everybody evacuated, we stayed behind.

Katie: What made you decide to stay?

Benjamin: We hoped that it could be a village again. To this day, everything’s going good. Power. Houses are back. There is (some) electricity in houses. It’s livable, it’s getting there.

We worked on foundations. They’re replacing the insulation that got soaked. They’re working at our house that I’m staying in right now. I just need steps, so that’ll be it.

Katie: What made you decide to stay, Burt?

Burt Paul: It’s my hometown, and there’s many reasons that I wanted to stay. One of the reasons: The village was destroyed. I felt that we needed to take care of the village. For example: caskets (that floated away from the cemetery), cleanup. I could name so many things.

With these guys, the 19 men that were staying behind, I had a spark in the hope of rebuilding. And then help (from the state and contractors) started to arrive.

It’s a very hard start. It felt like a new beginning. That very strong hope, and I didn’t want to leave home. Like everyone else, there’s no place like home.

Katie: You guys are cousins and good friends. When it came time to stay or go, did you decide together?

Benjamin: Yeah, we planned. We planned every day: What’s next? What’s got to be worked on? And it worked. And now we can be smiling every day.

People that evacuated are coming back for work, to make money for their family. Pretty soon, Kipnuk people will come back, and the school will be open for the kids — that’s our goal.

Katie: How did you feel when you heard that the village had voted to permanently relocate?

Benjamin: I voted that I’m not going to relocate. Because relocation is — you’ve got to have meeting after meeting to get funding. It’s hard to get there right now. So I said, I’ll stay home, where there’s an airport, school, post office — while they’re standing.

Burt: I also voted to stay, but that vote is weak. Maybe a quarter of the village wanted to stay. But the relocation time estimate is 10 years. ^[1]

Before that happens, we need this village to operate, to use it for waiting at home, for the new location.

Because not all the people have steady jobs and driver’s licenses. Living in a city is a lot of change for many people. The evacuees are depending on a lot of help — but that help will not always be there. Pretty soon, one is going to be standing alone. Some may be successful with finding a new job, a new home, but not all. ^[2]

That’s one of the reasons I keep the village running, so (eventually) they can come home and settle-in.

Katie: What was that night the typhoon hit like for you? What do you remember?

Burt: We knew the wind was strong. And then it shifted to the direction of southwest; it pushed the water towards the land. I know it’s flat in Kipnuk, but the elevation is (normally) just high enough. The regular flood that occurs during the fall time usually does not reach my area.

When I started seeing that (Halong) flood coming in, and how strong the current was, I knew it was going to be high.

We started hearing that houses were floating and drifting away, and some people were texting their whereabouts. Seeing and watching a house float by in the dark. Watching my neighbors float away.

All the debris that hit my house made me worried. A couple of conexes hit, but somehow my house stood up, survived.

When I saw water, I prayed to God to hold and keep my house safe. It was a great disaster that changed people’s feelings about coming back to Kipnuk. Who knows if they will change their minds and come back? Some say, after this year’s fall flood (season), they’ll see, because we cannot tell the future. But standing strong and praying for strength is helping a lot, and people’s prayers all over the world. I believe in that.

Benjamin: I put three twelve-foot-long boards on my house just in case, so when the water got there, the boards would keep it steady, and not float away. It worked.

When it started floating, those three boards were holding the house in place. But once another house drifted and hit our house from behind, we started floating. If I anchored the house, probably it could have stayed where it was. But I wasn’t ready for that.

We started floating away. Next thing, I looked out the kitchen window with a spotlight, I saw a house coming towards us at about three miles an hour. Man, I yelled at my family, hold on to something.

It hit us and it rocked the house. But good thing, it never broke any windows. It was that close to breaking the window — about two to three inches off. So, we are here.

Katie: I’m looking at this photograph of the two of you from when you were much younger, still best friends. Where was the picture that night? And where did you find it?

Benjamin: Oh, the picture of us when we were teens, 18 years old or so.

I had lots of photos that I took out to our old house, because there was no more room and I had to store my stuff. But that old house floated away behind the school where we used to live, and I lost all of the photos.

After the storm, one of the teachers found that picture of us when we were young, on the ground. And when I walked into the school lobby and saw it, I had to take it. And to this day, that picture of us is — we’re still best friends.

Katie: Wow, so this was the only photo of yours that made it through the storm. That’s symbolic, I think, of your friendship.

Benjamin: Now we’re in our 50s or so, still young. We feel like we’re 21.

Katie: Burt, what did you think when you saw that photo?

Burt: It told me that time flies by.

In those younger days, we used to hear from our elders, to expect the unexpected. Because in history, they went through famine, sickness. They went through so much trauma and disaster. I guess this history is ours too.

And they did proceed in success. They would say, you never know what’s coming, but be ready. Be strong. Don’t get comfortable with life’s comforts. Don’t take things for granted.

I always remember those things. Wake up early, all those things that elders used to speak of. And be humble. Sometimes thinking too far ahead eats your mind. Like already thinking of relocating. Maybe that day will come. Maybe not, with the world changing.

Yeah, relocating, starting a new life in a good spot, high spot. We have to adjust with the new location. It’s not far. It’s in the same area, 15 miles away. But infrastructure, I don’t know, it will take 10 to 15 years. A new school, airport, laundromat, maybe a road. We’ve got to think of those things before we relocate. We cannot just build a home and expect to live happily ever after. We’ve got to build the infrastructure first.

Katie: Thank you both. Do you want to add anything else?

Benjamin: I’m going to start making Noah’s Ark… (laughter) That’s a joke.

 

1. Community relocations take decades and there is no specific federally funded program to support them. For example, the community of Newtok recognized the need to relocate their village due to erosion in the 1980s. The Newtok Native Corp. proposed a land exchange agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1996. The land exchange was formally signed in 2003. After sixteen years of fundraising and construction, the first families moved to the new village of Mertarvik in 2019. The final families moved there in 2024, nearly 30 years after the initial land exchange proposal.

2. Roughly 680 community members from Western Alaska were living in temporary housing within Anchorage and surrounding areas as of earlier this spring, according to the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.

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In my office hangs an old black-and-white USGS geothermal map of Alaska from the 1980s. Most of the map is nearly blank — white space with just a few major rivers and roads transecting the landscape. The only color delineates Alaska’s known geothermal systems and their relative importance for future development: green for low to moderate importance, orange for high importance.

None of the geothermal sites are labeled, but the patterns are familiar. Small green circles are sprinkled like freckles across a wide swath of the Interior, all of them moderate temperature hot springs located near ancient granite intrusions. These systems are powered by heat slowly released from radioactive elements within the rock over geologic time. One represents Chena Hot Springs, where I helped develop Alaska’s only operating geothermal power plant two decades ago.

More green dots mark known hot springs in Southeast Alaska, each emerging along major fault systems that act like natural plumbing networks, allowing water to circulate deep underground, absorb heat, and rise back toward the surface.

A chain of irregular orange patches follow along the Aleutian Islands from the volcanoes of Cook Inlet, along the Alaska Peninsula, and all the way out to Attu, delineating the tectonic boundary where the Pacific Plate slowly descends beneath the North American Plate. As the slab sinks deeper into the mantle, water released from the subducting crust triggers melting in the overlying rock. Some of that molten rock rises back toward the surface in columns of magma, feeding the iconic stratovolcanoes that delineate the northern boundary of the Pacific Rim of Fire. 

But when my eyes drift across the map, none of those features hold my attention for very long. Instead, I find myself drawn to an enormous orange blob just east of Glennallen, its edge lying only a couple dozen miles from the Richardson Highway.  I once took out a ruler and measured it. It covers an area roughly the size of Massachusetts and easily dwarfs every other geothermal feature in Alaska.

At that scale, it is not a geothermal prospect. It is more like an entire geothermal province hidden in plain sight. Clearly, the authors of the map believed this place mattered. So why does no one ever talk about it?

Geothermal energy is having a moment

Much of my early professional career revolved around geothermal energy, and back then it was not considered very cool. The excitement was around wind and solar, while geothermal was viewed as a mature technology. Most people assumed we already knew where the major resources were located, and many of the best prospects had already been developed. The field felt a little like it was on cruise control.

That has changed dramatically.

Advances in drilling and stimulation technologies pioneered by the oil and gas industry have generated excitement about their potential application to geothermal energy, while improvements in high-temperature materials and subsurface imaging are opening resource frontiers that would have seemed impractical just a decade ago. 

As a result, venture capital is pouring into geothermal startups. Former oilfield service companies are reinventing themselves as geothermal developers. Research in the field is booming, with efforts ranging from Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS, to superhot geothermal and a host of other approaches aimed at expanding where and how geothermal energy can be developed. The old assumption that geothermal only works in a handful of special places is being challenged from multiple directions at once. 

And plenty of people are catching the geothermal bug. It consistently scores well in public opinion surveys, and readers frequently bring it up in the comments on my energy articles — often as the preferred alternative to whatever technology I happen to be discussing. The appeal is easy to understand. It promises reliable, around-the-clock energy with a small physical footprint and very low emissions.

I get that. I really do. I also love geothermal energy. But one thing I have learned over the years is that not all heat is created equal. More often than not, when people point to a spot on a map and ask, “Why don’t we develop geothermal there?” the answer has very little to do with temperature and everything to do with geology.

The fundamental misunderstanding about geothermal

Everyone knows that the deeper you go into the Earth’s crust, the hotter it gets. But heat alone does not make a usable geothermal system. To put that energy to work, you have to bring it to the surface, and that requires fluid flow.

Essentially, the challenge is finding — or creating — an underground heat exchanger capable of moving large volumes of fluid through hot rock and back to the surface, where that energy can be used to generate electricity or heat homes and businesses.

Heat deep underground is not very useful if you cannot get it to the surface. It is a bit like having a boiler in your house but no plumbing or ductwork to move the warmth where you want it. Sure, the boiler room might be warm, but without circulation the rest of the house stays cold. Geothermal systems need plumbing too.

In the oil and gas industry, the development of fracking technology has been a game changer, dramatically increasing production by creating artificial fracture networks that allow trapped oil and gas to move more easily through the subsurface. That success has generated a lot of interest in applying similar techniques to geothermal through EGS. If engineers can create permeability in oil and gas reservoirs, why not do the same thing in hot rock and harvest the heat instead? 

There are three major challenges with this concept.

First, geothermal systems need to move far more fluid to produce meaningful amounts of energy. The amount of energy that can be extracted from a gallon of hot water is much smaller than the chemical energy stored in a gallon of oil. To compensate, geothermal systems require extensive fracture networks and very large volumes of fluid circulating through the subsurface. 

Second, those fractures need to stay open. That is where you run into a challenge that oil and gas developers know well: gravity. The deeper you go, the more overlying rock there is pressing down on the formation. That pressure is constantly trying to squeeze those fractures shut. At some point, drilling deeper can begin to produce diminishing returns. 

Third, much of the deep crust consists of dense metamorphic and crystalline rocks with very little natural porosity or fluid storage capacity. That is an important distinction from oil and gas reservoirs. Hydrocarbons accumulate and are trapped in porous rocks, so fracking largely works by enhancing pathways that allow those trapped fluids to migrate more efficiently toward a well. 

In other words, the heat might be there at depth. The plumbing often is not. 

That does not mean EGS will not work. The early results are encouraging, and the potential is huge. But if you were looking for a place to start, you would probably begin where nature has already stacked the deck in your favor — places where high temperatures sit unusually close to the surface.

Superhot geothermal

Iceland is one of those places. The island sits on top of a spreading zone in the Earth’s crust, where North America and Europe are slowly pulling apart. New crust is continually being created, the crust itself is relatively thin, and magma can lurk very close to the surface.

Near the Krafla geothermal power plant in northern Iceland, drillers working on the Iceland Deep Drilling Project unexpectedly struck magma in 2009 at a depth of only about 2 kilometers. While they were looking for high temperatures, they were not expecting to drill directly into molten rock. Despite the challenges, they were able to complete the well and briefly produce steam at temperatures exceeding 450°C.

At very high temperatures and pressures, approaching so-called supercritical conditions, geothermal fluids begin to behave differently and can carry far more energy than ordinary hot water. Under the right conditions, a single well could potentially produce several times the power of a conventional geothermal well. The Krafla experience provided a glimpse of that potential and helped accelerate interest in what is now known as superhot geothermal.

The challenge is that these conditions are brutal on drilling equipment and well materials. Temperatures can exceed the limits of cements, steel alloys, and downhole sensors, while corrosive fluids can attack everything from well casing to valves and surface equipment. Only recently have advances in drilling technology and high-temperature materials made it realistic to pursue geothermal development in such extreme environments.

For geothermal engineers, these ultra-high-temperature systems are something akin to Formula One race cars — technically challenging, expensive, and potentially capable of extraordinary performance.

Iceland has been pioneering this work for decades, but Alaska has one of the field’s most respected experts in John Eichelberger, who has worked alongside Icelandic researchers studying these magma-adjacent systems. When I asked John a few years ago where he would pursue superhot geothermal in Alaska, he answered instantly: Mount Augustine, a volcanic island in lower Cook Inlet.

Recently, at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference, I got a better sense of why.

Paul Craig, co-founder of GeoAlaska, and his partner Antony Penino hold the geothermal lease rights to the site. During a break, Paul pulled me aside and showed me an image from a magnetotelluric survey estimating the location and size of the magma body beneath the volcano. The way he carried it around reminded me of a proud first-time parent showing off ultrasound photos.

The image showed the fuzzy but distinct black and white outline of an interpreted magma body beneath the volcano. Based on the survey, it appears to lie less than a mile beneath the surface — potentially even shallower than the magma encountered by the Icelanders at Krafla. It was easy to see why he would be excited. 

But a shallow magma body does not automatically make a geothermal project viable. Like the other volcanoes in Cook Inlet, Augustine sits within a compressional tectonic environment where rocks are being squeezed together rather than pulled apart. That is one reason there are surprisingly few hot springs, fumaroles, or other obvious signs of active hydrothermal circulation associated with these systems. 

There is also the significant detail that Augustine is an active volcano and a very remote one at that. It would take a very expensive extension cord to get power from the island to the Railbelt grid. In other words, developing a geothermal project at Augustine is not a slam dunk. Still, it’s an enticing prospect.

If Augustine represents a place where very high temperatures may lie close to the surface, that big orange blob in the Copper Basin on my map may represent something equally important: natural permeability.

And in geothermal, the plumbing problem is often the harder one to solve.

The forgotten province

That enormous orange shape east of Glennallen corresponds to one of the stranger and lesser-known geologic systems in Alaska: the Klawasi mud volcanoes and deep crustal fluid systems of the Copper Basin and Wrangell region.

I have started thinking of it as the “Copper Basin geothermal province” because this is clearly not a single geothermal site like Mount Augustine. It is an enormous region that appears to contain many of the hallmarks of a large hydrothermal system. In terms of unexplored geothermal potential, it may be one of the most significant underappreciated geothermal regions in all of North America.

What makes the area especially interesting is its tectonic setting.

While much of southern Alaska, including Augustine, exists within a compressional environment, the Copper Basin and Wrangell region sit within a complicated network of major strike-slip faults where sections of crust are sliding sideways past one another. In certain places, bends and offsets along those faults create localized zones where the crust is also being pulled apart slightly — what geologists call transtensional faulting.

That distinction matters because these kinds of fault systems can create exactly the sort of permeability geothermal systems need. They act as giant crustal plumbing networks, allowing water to move downward through fractures, encounter heat at depth, and then circulate back upward toward the surface.

Historically, many of the world’s most productive geothermal systems formed in precisely these kinds of tectonic environments where heat and permeability intersect.

The geology is only part of what makes the Copper Basin intriguing. The other part is the old real-estate adage: location, location, location. The western edge of the province is adjacent to the corridor proposed for the long-discussed “Roadbelt” transmission concept — a line that could someday provide redundancy to the Railbelt grid by linking the Mat-Su region, Glennallen, Tok, Delta Junction and Fairbanks while also connecting the Copper Valley Electric Association system.

This is a big part of why the area attracted serious attention during the energy crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, around the same time my map was produced. The geologists evaluating Alaska’s geothermal potential were not simply looking for heat. They were looking for resources that could realistically be developed and connected to the people who might use them.

And initial studies on the ground were promising — geologists documented large carbon dioxide emissions, warm mud temperatures, unusual gas chemistry and helium signatures suggesting at least some contribution from deep crustal or magmatic sources. In other words, they found good reason to believe there could be a dynamic and actively circulating deep crustal plumbing system.

Yet despite those intriguing findings, no serious exploration program ever followed. Why?

A province without a program

Part of the answer is that geothermal exploration is both expensive and inherently risky. Before a drill bit ever touches the ground, much of what lies beneath the surface remains an inference — geophysics, fluid chemistry, structural interpretation and educated guesswork. Exploration wells are expensive, and many fail to find an economically viable resource.

As a result, even projects with compelling targets — like Mount Augustine — face major challenges attracting the capital needed for a multimillion-dollar exploration or resource-confirmation drilling program.

But the challenge in the Copper Basin also extends to land ownership, jurisdiction and leadership. Unlike Augustine, where a defined geothermal prospect on state lands has been leased to a private developer, the Copper Basin geothermal area spans a complicated patchwork of federal, state and Native-owned lands. Portions lie within or adjacent to federally protected lands, while others fall within state lands or lands owned by Ahtna, a Glenallen-based Alaska Native Regional Corporation. Any serious effort to evaluate the resource would almost certainly require cooperation among multiple landowners, agencies, researchers, utilities and local stakeholders.

That complexity may help explain why the prospect has never developed a project champion. Large energy projects rarely move forward simply because a resource exists. More often, they move forward because someone believes in the opportunity and is willing to do the hard work of assembling partnerships, pursuing funding, navigating permitting and keeping the idea alive long enough to determine whether it is worth developing.

In other words, the Copper Basin may have the right geology. What it is lacking is an organization or coalition willing to take ownership of the next step. 

And yet, the timing may never have been better. Alaska is actively searching for long-term energy options as uncertainty grows around the future of Railbelt gas supply. At the same time, the Department of Energy is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in geothermal exploration and demonstration projects. If there was ever a time to bring together Ahtna, state agencies, utilities, researchers and federal partners to take a fresh look at the Copper Basin using modern tools and techniques, this may be it.

Whether the Copper Basin ultimately proves to be a major geothermal resource or not, the potential upside is significant enough that we owe it to ourselves to find out.

Forty years ago, the geologists who assembled the map hanging in my office looked at the available evidence and colored an enormous swath of the Copper Basin bright orange.

That was a provocative choice. In the years since, relatively little has been done to either confirm or refute that interpretation.

Perhaps it is finally time to find out whether they were right. 

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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit by former Alaska state Sen. Lora Reinbold, R-Eagle River, against Alaska Airlines.

Alaska Airlines banned Reinbold in 2021 for refusing to follow its masking policies during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. She sued the airline in 2023, after leaving office.

By email, Reinbold said she was dissatisfied with the court’s decision.

“Alaska Airlines is the sole carrier to Juneau, which puts it in a position to control access to government, courts, medical care, and family for every Alaskan — and the same dynamic plays out in Hawaii and other places where a single carrier holds the keys,” she wrote. “A monopoly carrier with that kind of power needs accountability — including to the federal disability law it tried to ignore. The Ninth Circuit did not appear to grasp how serious that question is. This case deserved a thorough review and an assessment of the broad future impacts.”

Reinbold delivered oral arguments in April, the panel issued its order May 20, and Reinbold on June 3 filed a motion on June 3 asking the full court to hear the case. That motion is pending.

Reinbold, who represented herself in the suit, noted that Alaska Airlines was the sole commercial air carrier between Anchorage and Juneau during the 2021 legislative session, and her ban effectively denied her the ability to travel to Anchorage by commercial air flight. 

She ultimately drove across Canada and took a state ferry to reach Juneau.

Alaska Airlines’ monopoly, combined with its implementation of federal rules, made it a state actor and thus subject to constitutional claims, Reinbold argued.

Furthermore, the airline gave her no opportunity to appeal the ban, she said.

An Alaska District Court judge dismissed the case in 2024, and the judge rejected Reinbold’s attempt to amend her complaint and keep the case a live issue. 

“When corporations enforce government policy, hand-in-hand with the state, constitutional protections such as fair notice and due process must still apply,” she said by email.

During court arguments, Alaska Airlines raised a variety of procedural issues with Reinbold’s complaint and argued that it was not a government agency and thus not liable for alleged violations of the U.S. Constitution.

“Plaintiff was entitled to her personal views about COVID-19,” the airline’s attorneys wrote in 2023. “She was not, however, empowered to invoke her personal notions to evade or disregard federally mandated requirements for air travel that applied to all other Alaska Airlines guests during a worldwide pandemic.”

The airline was represented in court by attorney Richard Grotch, who said Reinbold did have a doctor’s note indicating that she did not need to wear a mask, but she never indicated that during booking, as the airline required.

“There’s no constitutionally guaranteed right to fly. There’s certainly no constitutionally guaranteed right to fly Alaska,” he said. 

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