The Pretty Rocks Bridge in Denali National Park is nearing completion and is expected to reopen access along Denali Park Road by July after a 2021 landslide disrupted travel.
Celebration 2026 is underway in Juneau, featuring performances, cultural gatherings, and a parade Saturday as communities across Southeast Alaska come together for the event.
Celebration 2026 is underway in Juneau, featuring performances, cultural gatherings, and a parade Saturday as communities across Southeast Alaska come together for the event.
At the pump in the Western Alaska village of Hooper Bay, unleaded gas costs $8.44 a gallon and heating fuel is $9.24. (Nathaniel Herz/Northern Journal)
This story is co-published by Northern Journal and Bethel-based public media outlet KYUK.
HOOPER BAY, ALASKA — Every few weeks this winter, 75-year-old Harvey Joe, an Yup’ik elder in this Western Alaska village, climbed onto his snowmachine.
Dragging a sled with a fuel drum on top, he’d bump 20 miles across the tundra to the neighboring village of Chevak.
In Hooper Bay, on the shore of the Bering Sea far from Alaska’s road system, fuel for Joe’s home heating stove costs $9.24 a gallon, and unleaded gas costs $8.44.
In Chevak, heating fuel was a few bucks cheaper — meaning that each 30-gallon load could save Joe $75.
After dragging his sled home, Joe said he’d have to lie down and rest, especially if the trail was rough.
“Sometimes, I ask somebody to do it for me,” he said. “But if I don’t have a choice, I just go and get it myself.”
Across the country, consumers are contending with sharply higher fuel prices amid a supply crunch brought on by the closure of a key strait in the Middle East — the result of President Donald Trump’s military action against Iran.
But even residents of California, where $6-a-gallon gas prices are making headlines, would face sticker shock if they traveled to Hooper Bay, or any of the dozens of other villages and hub towns across Western Alaska. Even before the conflict, dozens of rural communities across the state faced gas and heating fuel prices above $7 a gallon.
“They should come out here,” said George Nanuk, another elder in Hooper Bay, who took a 100-mile snowmachine trip a few months ago to gather logs to keep his house warm. “You’d be crying at the gas station.”
Western Alaska’s rural, coastal communities typically get an entire year’s worth of fuel delivered by barge during the summer.
The last summer delivery locks in prices for the fall, winter and spring — until ice and weather allow for the next year’s first summer shipment, when the price changes again.
Hooper Bay still hasn’t received its first barge of the year. That means prices there are set to rise sharply when the first delivery arrives — with residents waiting to find out exactly how much.
Much of Western Alaska’s supply comes in tankers from Asia, where markets have been most acutely disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Earlier this year, the region’s fuel distributors issued dire warnings that they might not be able to secure adequate fuel for the summer shipping season. While those fears have since diminished, significant price increases still loom.
In recent days, barges have begun making their initial deliveries, and more rural buyers have placed their orders. The resulting prices are giving the first glimpse of the scale of what leaders from Bristol Bay to the Bering Strait describe as an unfolding crisis that threatens the viability of their communities — which remain deeply dependent on fossil fuels.
While the region’s Native residents have preserved many elements of their traditional lifestyles, communities need refined fuels for heating, electricity, transportation and to run the snowmachines and boats used for subsistence harvesting.
Last week, in the Bristol Bay hub town of Dillingham, gas prices rose to more than $9 a gallon from less than $7 this winter. In some remote areas, they’re set to rise to more than $10 a gallon.
“This is something that could completely wipe out rural Alaska,” said Nathan Hill, tribal president of the village of Kokhanok.
The village, on the shore of Iliamna Lake in the Bristol Bay region, expects to charge $15 for a gallon of heating fuel once its summer shipment arrives, up from the current price of $10, according to its utility manager.
The expense reflects the logistics of getting the fuel to Kokhanok: starting on the road system on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, where it’s loaded onto tanker trucks, which are boated across Cook Inlet, driven along a 15-mile portage road and finally loaded back onto another vessel for the trip along Iliamna Lake to Kokhanok.
Even at last winter’s $10 heating fuel price, Hill said he got phone calls from families who couldn’t make ends meet.
“They were asking me for wood,” he said. “They couldn’t do it at $10. So, there’s going to be more of them at $15.”
Harvesting firewood can help, Hill added, but then “we’re talking about running chainsaws and vehicles to go harvest,” which requires more gas.
“It affects everything,” he said.
Many seasonal rhythms of life in Hooper Bay, population 1,375, still look much like they have for thousands of years.
In the spring, hunters leave the village in small boats to harvest seals, walrus and beluga whale, while others stay closer to home to gather seabird eggs.
In summer, the salmon arrive and the berries ripen, and in the fall, some residents range far from the village to look for moose, with harvests shared with family and friends.
The average Hooper Bay household gathered some 1,485 pounds of food in 2021, or 330 pounds per person, according to the most recent state data available.
“It’s all about chipping in, as a family, to get this and that,” said Marlin Lake, 34, an avid harvester and father of five in Hooper Bay.
These local harvests, referred to across Alaska’s Native communities as subsistence, are essential in rural villages where groceries must otherwise be flown or barged in, often commanding steep prices.
At Hooper Bay’s local grocery store last week, Lake pointed out grapes — a luxury in rural Alaska — selling for $7.99 a pound, and half-gallon cartons of milk selling for $9, twice what they go for in Anchorage.
Subsistence can help avoid those expenses. But today’s rural Alaska harvests depend on modern technology — specifically, on motors powered by fossil fuels.
Last winter, one Hooper Bay man, Mason Nanuk, said he put 6,000 miles on his snowmachine for subsistence and other outings — including regular trips past Chevak, a village 20 miles away, to check his ice fishing net. Lake said he’ll buy 130 gallons of gas — worth $1,100 at current prices — before a long boat trip up to the Yukon River to hunt moose.
Meanwhile, diesel powers Hooper Bay’s electrical grid and fuels residents’ Toyostoves, which are used widely for home heating across rural Alaska.
The four-wheelers that people drive around town run on unleaded gas, as do the pickup trucks that ferry people the mile to the community’s dirt airstrip. Bush planes that serve as Hooper Bay’s only link to the regional hub, Bethel, run on fossil fuels too — with one-way tickets priced at $320 for the 150-mile trip.
Add a few dollars per gallon to the current fuel price, Nanuk said, and “that’s going to be a lot harder to do more subsistence, or even continue to do what I like to do.”
“I’m trying not to think about it,” said Nanuk, 36.
What doesn’t make sense, he added, is why fuel prices are so high in Hooper Bay when so much oil is produced inside Alaska.
The entirety of the Western Alaska mainland sits less than 1,000 miles from Valdez, the terminus of the trans-Alaska pipeline system. That pipeline moves as much petroleum in 30 minutes as Hooper Bay’s industrial tanks store for an entire fall, winter and spring.
But that 450,000-barrel-a-day supply is unrefined — not in a form that can be used by Western Alaska communities.
Alaska has just three oil refineries, and their limited capacity is geared toward producing unleaded gas, jet fuel and diesel for road system customers — meaning that most of the state’s crude moves by tanker to refineries on the U.S. West Coast.
Hooper Bay’s link to the global petroleum market is the thin yellow pipeline that runs from the shore to the village fuel tanks operated by Crowley, an international shipping and energy company based in Florida that serves some 90 communities in Western Alaska.
In recent years, Crowley and Vitus, the region’s other main supplier, have acquired gas and heating fuel from refineries in Asia; the products are then loaded onto foreign-flagged tankers, which are less expensive to charter than U.S.-flagged vessels.
The tankers then steam across the Pacific toward Alaska, where they’ll idle in federal waters several miles offshore so they don’t have to develop state-level oil spill contingency plans, according to Bernie Nowicki, who monitors the ships in his job as a regulator at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
Crowley and Vitus offload gas and diesel from the tankers at sea into their own barges, which are paired with tugboats. The fuel is then ferried to individual communities, sometimes far up rivers, as the tankers move along the coast — a logistically complex choreography that plays out over the course of the summer.
“They’ll finish up their list, and then by the end of October the tankers are gone; the tugs and barges, they’re back in their wintering locations,” Nowicki said.
The resulting prices are typically far higher than those paid by drivers in Alaska’s road system communities. Last winter, gas was $7.11 in Teller, near the Bering Strait; $8.71 in Mountain Village, on the Yukon River; and $7.56 in Togiak, in the Bristol Bay region, according to a state survey.
A Crowley spokesperson, Torey Vogel, said fuel prices in Western Alaska are driven by global fuel prices and availability, long-distance marine transportation, shallow-draft barging, seasonal storage, regulatory compliance and a short, ice-free window for deliveries.
“Many Western Alaska locations cannot be resupplied year-round, requiring fuel to be purchased, transported, stored and positioned well ahead of winter demand,” Vogel wrote in an email. “That creates a very different cost structure than locations connected to highway, pipeline, rail or larger-volume supply chains.”
Industry officials earlier this year warned that global oil market turmoil was threatening not just substantial price hikes in Western Alaska, but also whether distributors could even get access to enough supply to meet customer orders.
The supply risk now appears to have diminished.
Vitus’ sales director, Mike Poston, said Monday that “we have the supply.” Another Crowley spokesperson, David DeCamp, said in an email last week that fuel availability is “manageable.”
Crowley is actively working to secure fuel from South Korea and Canada, DeCamp added, with 37 million gallons in “confirmed and pending volumes” representing some two-thirds of customer needs, including winter inventory.
But both Crowley and Vitus acknowledged that the global market volatility is putting pressure on prices. In Vitus’ case, it has also scrambled the company’s delivery schedule.
In a typical year, Vitus would have its fuel tanker in position off the Western Alaska coast by mid-May, said Poston, the sales director. This year, though, its tanker hasn’t arrived yet, and while Poston said it’s coming, he declined to disclose exactly when it’s set to arrive.
“Using the tanker to supply Western Alaska is the most efficient way, but because of product availability, we weren’t able to do that,” Poston said in a phone interview. “So, we’re starting our system with fuel supply via barge.”
Recent gas price increases to more than $9 from less than $7 at gas stations in two Western Alaska hub towns, Dillingham and Bethel, are representative of the cost structure that the company sees for 2026, Poston added. Given “warning signs” of price bumps as high as $5 a gallon, those increases of less than $3 are “good news,” he said.
“But summer is not over and the war is still going on,” Poston said. “We don’t know what the future is going to bring.”
The Vitus tanker’s late arrival, Poston added, means the company will be “under pressure” to meet customer orders before the end of the delivery season — when stormy weather and sea ice force companies to pull out of the region.
Crowley, meanwhile, has started making deliveries from the Glen Cove, a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker that was loaded in Vancouver and is currently parked off the village of Egegik in Bristol Bay.
Company officials would not say exactly how much they expect prices to rise this year. But Vogel, the spokesperson, said Crowley recognizes “the importance of price visibility and continue(s) to communicate with customers as market conditions develop.”
Local officials across Western Alaska and in other rural areas of the state are now girding themselves for price increases — with the scale of the hit still uncertain in some communities.
In Nome, the hub town just south of the Bering Strait, the local electric utility has a contract with Crowley for more than 1.5 million gallons of diesel, according to John Handeland, the utility’s manager.
But the exact cost isn’t yet known because it’s set by a 30-day average of a price index during the month the fuel is loaded onto Crowley’s vessel, Handeland added — which will likely be August.
Until then, the utility and its customers have to wait, placing them “at the mercy” of global markets, he said.
“We’ll do some back-of-the-envelope calculations and some worst-case scenarios, just to make sure we have the right number when we pull out our fuel loan,” Handeland said.
High up on the Kuskokwim River in the hamlet of Sleetmute, Henry Hill, who operates the community’s store and fuel station, says gas prices he charges are set to rise to $11.89 a gallon from $9.43 now.
In the Yukon River village of Galena, meanwhile, the price for the city government’s 425,000 gallons of fuel — used to run a municipal electric utility — has risen to $5.61 a gallon from $3.82 last year, said City Manager Shanda Huntington. That supply is barged down from the Tanana River on Alaska’s road system, she said.
“It’s going to really hurt our community, because I have to adjust all the electricity rates on that — and that’s going to really bump it up,” Huntington said.
In response, the Alaska Legislature, before its annual session adjourned last month, passed an array of policy measures aimed at softening the hit from higher fuel prices.
They include doubling the maximum amount, to $1.5 million, that communities and utilities can borrow under a state-sponsored loan program for bulk fuel purchases.
Schools are getting another $29 million in energy relief, while $11 million is going to a low-income heating assistance program.
Including more than $50 million budgeted for an existing program to offset high rural electricity prices, lawmakers are spending a total of some $100 million on relief, said House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, who represents a rural district centered in Dillingham.
“But it’s not going to be close in terms of making people whole over what could be another cold winter,” Edgmon said in a phone interview last week from Juneau. “It scares me to death.”
At a Zoom meeting with constituents earlier that day, Edgmon said he heard anxiety, fear and “real apprehension tied to the unknown” about pending fuel price increases.
“The toll it’s going to take on families — there’s probably going to be some that aren’t going to be able to keep their homes warm,” he said. Nonetheless, he added, rural residents pride themselves on being resilient, and “we’re going to survive.”
In Hooper Bay, which is still awaiting its first fuel barge of the year, that resilience is already on display.
In interviews last week, residents described their frequent trips to Chevak last winter to pick up cheaper fuel. Others took their snowmachines on long journeys in sub-zero temperatures to harvest wood, which residents burn to offset their heating bills.
Those trips will likely become even more common once Hooper Bay gets its first summer fuel delivery, further boosting prices.
Last week, before the barge’s arrival, Jay Bell Sr. pulled up to Crowley’s pump to put $12 of gas into his four-wheeler. That paid for 1.4 gallons, which Bell said is enough to run errands for a couple of days.
“We’re really struggling, even with stove oil,” he said. “If it goes up, we’ll have to budget more and tie up our stomachs, to keep our house and children warm.”
If you value public interest journalism like this, please consider a voluntary paid membership to Northern Journal: It cost us $640 to reach Hooper Bay to report this story. If you’re already a paid member, many thanks.
A gray whale and her healthy calf swim in the Pacific waters off Washington. Gray whale calf counts have plummeted, and last year were the lowest on record, according to NOAA Fisheries estimates.
(Image courtesy of NOAA Fisheries/ Alaska Fisheries Science Center)
Raymond, Washington — Doug Nussbaum is a retired logger whose morning rituals include a walk down to the bluff behind his house that overlooks a bend in the Willapa River.
He is never quite sure just what he will spot — ducks, bald eagles and sometimes seals and sea lions pursuing salmon. On April 1, he heard a breeching sound, then was stunned to see a gray whale — some 35 feet in length — swimming in circles.
This whale, skinny and malnourished, had gone catastrophically astray on a spring migration that, for most grays, starts in calving lagoons in Mexico and ends in summer feeding grounds off Alaska and northeast Russia.
For some two hours, the whale held in the bend, about 12 river miles inland from a saltwater bay. As the tide shifted, the whale made a brief push downstream, then reversed course to swim even farther upstream, lingering several days before dying in a shallow, narrow stretch of the river strewn with woody debris.
“I don’t know what turned him around. I think he knew he wasn’t going to make it, and was looking for a place to die,” Nussbaum said.
This whale is one of more than 900 eastern North Pacific grays that have been found dead along the shorelines of Mexico, Canada and the United States since 2019. Malnourishment was often a factor. Many more perished at sea as the estimated population plummeted during the past seven years from a high of more than 27,000 whales in 2016 to less than 13,000 last year.
There also has been an implosion in gray whale births. Last year’s estimated count was the lowest since federal surveys began back in 1994.
Some marine scientists first thought the gray whale population was undergoing a cyclical population downturn after a big expansion that had strained their food resources. But the whales have not bounced back, and these researchers now assign an important role in the whales’ decline to 21st century shifts in temperatures, currents and winter ice cover that have reduced their foraging success in the northern seas.
“What has changed. The obvious answer is the climate,” wrote Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, in an October 2025 article published in the Journal of Marine Science with four co-authors. “The Arctic is the most rapidly warming region on the planet…”
For grays, a favored food source is amphipods, a small crustacean that whales once found in huge abundance in the Chirikov Basin, a swath of the northern Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska.
Amphipods thickly carpeted much of the basin’s sea floor. They clustered together in mud tubes that allowed them to filter feed on decaying bits of algae, which grows on the underside of sea ice then falls to the bottom.
In dives, a gray whale could suck up more than 2,000 pounds a day of the amphipods from these tubes with the aid of their baleen that filtered out sand. This protein-packed feed helped the whales build up the fat reserves they needed to power their marathon migrations back and forth to Mexican waters.
“It was this really rich area — the wheat field of the Arctic for them,” said Jacqueline Grebmeier, a University of Maryland environmental scientist who has spent more than three decades researching marine life in the northern Bering Sea.
But in the 21st century, accelerated Arctic warming reduced winter ice. In some years, it changed the timing of the melt. All of that reduced the amount of algae that reached the seafloor to nourish the amphipods.
The survival of these Chirikov Basin crustaceans also was undermined by increased current flows of warmer waters from the northern Bering Sea into the Arctic. This swept away much of the silt that the amphipods needed to build their tube structures, according to Grebmeier.
By 2010, the amphipod population in the Chirkov Basin had collapsed to only 9% of the 1984 population, according to a master’s thesis by Brian Marx, a research colleague of Grebmeier who analyzed decades of northern Bering Sea survey records.
Many gray whales responded to the radical changes in the basin by pushing farther north into the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Sea, which amid the Arctic warming had a greater inflow of nutrient rich waters that helped to support more sea life. These gray whales could find some amphipods but also had a more varied diet, which likely included krill, a free-swimming crustecean, according to Grebmeier and other marine researchers.
Surprisingly, in the aftermath of the Chirikov Basin amphipod bust documented by Marx, the gray whales initially appear to have thrived, expanding to record high levels in 2016.
But beginning in 2019, amid a severe marine heat wave that reached deep into northern waters, gray whales struggled to find enough food in the Arctic to fuel their long annual migration — even when they journeyed into the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.
Since then, biologists on coastal surveys and in Mexico birthing lagoons have tallied increases in skinny whales with misshapen “peanut” heads that are marked by a severe loss of fat that leaves a concave depression behind their skulls.
“The common denominator is basically just not enough body fat, not enough oil in the fatty tissue that they live off — and they’re just running out of steam,” said Steve Swartz, a marine mammal scientist who has spent decades studying the gray whales in their Mexican calving grounds.
As of the end of May, 25 gray whales had washed ashore along Washington’s waterways during the spring migration period. Most of these whales had poor body condition, including the Willapa River gray, according to Cascadia Research Collective, a Washington-based scientific organization authorized by federal fishery officials to conduct necropsies.
The gray whale carcasses are sometimes left to decompose. Three weeks after its death, the Willapa River gray remains were decaying along a river bank near a boat ramp.
Fifty miles to the northeast, in the resort community of Ocean Shores, Washington, city officials opted for a different approach to disposing of three dead grays that washed up on a prime stretch of beach. They hired an excavator crew to attach cables to the whales, then dragged the carcasses into nearby sand dunes and buried them in pits.
“This is specialized work. They charged us $1,500 per whale,” said Scott Andersen, Ocean Shore’s city administrator.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, commercial whalers targeted grays largely for their oil, which was used in lamps and lubricants, as well as baleen that ended up in corsets, umbrellas and even buggy whips.
The hunts nearly wiped out the eastern North Pacific whale populations. By the 1930s, researchers estimate that just a few thousand, or less, remained, the risk of extinction prompted an international agreement to end commercial whaling.
These gray whales, in the decades that followed, staged a remarkable resurgence. By 1994, with their population estimated at more than 20,000, they were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species Act listing in one of the most notable marine conservation successes of the last century.
Under the regulation of the International Whaling Commission, subsistence hunting of grays by the Russian indigenous people of the Chukotka region has been allowed to continue.
During the past quarter century, the Russians have averaged 125 whales landed each year, according to Russian reports to the commission.
I witnessed one of these hunts during a reporting trip to Chukotka in 2000, when relations between the U.S. and Russia had improved enough to travel there via a brief charter flight from the northwest Alaska town of Nome.
The Novoe Chaplino villagers were in dire straits, lacking many of the foodstuffs that had been delivered during the Soviet era. They were able to reclaim their subsistence roots with some assistance from Alaska Inupiat whalers who provided darting guns and projectiles.
The gray whales remain an important source of food for the coastal villages of Chukotka, according to Russian reports to the International Whaling Commission. But in recent years, as the gray whale population has tumbled, some U.S. scientists have expressed concerns about the impacts of whaling, along with other human activities, such as ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.
They include Swartz and his Mexican colleagues who study the whales in Laguna San Ignacio, a major calving area that provides warm waters shielded from orca predators that roam further north. In these lagoons, gray whales breed — and after a year’ s gestation — give birth to calves that drink a high-fat milk that enables them to triple their weight before joining in the spring, north-bound migration.
During the past decade, Swartz observed huge reductions in the number of gray whales giving birth, along with increases in the numbers of skinny whales as well as those that appear to be a reasonable weight but do not bear calves.
That stark trend is also evident in the broader calf count conducted by NOAA Fisheries biologists at Piedras Blancas Lighthouse Station in central California, where they track calves migrating north each spring. In 2025, NOAA estimated there were just 85 calves — down nearly 95 percent from more than 1,500 estimated in 2015. This year, calf counts also are expected to be low.
“Let’s get real here,” Swartz said. “The whales are having a really rough time.”
Last August, Swartz, along with a Canadian and Mexican colleague, sent an open “letter of concern” to the International Whaling Commission urging a review of gray whale biology and their management.
That letter got a cool response from Dennis Litovka, a Russian scientist who directs the Chukotka Arctic Scientific Center and serves on the whaling commission’s scientific review committee.
“We don’t accept and cannot support such (an) idea,” Litovka wrote in response to questions from this reporter about the letter of concern.
In his comments, Litovka wrote about the importance of gray whales to the Chukotka villagers and whalers with whom he had lived and worked “shoulder to shoulder.” He said that Russian scientists do not see dramatic changes in a Chukotka bay frequented by gray whales. As for quota reductions, they should be made “only very exceptionally,” and as a last resort if gray whale populations continue to decline, Litovka wrote.
Litovka serves on the whaling commission’s science committee that in 2024 concluded that, despite the die off, the gray whale population can sustain the authorized hunt levels, currently a maximum of 840 whales over six years when a small number reserved for Washington’s Makah Indians are included. The scientists met last May for a meeting that included a gray whale review. But the commission is not scheduled to revisit the gray whale subsistence quota until 2030.
For decades, whale researchers have reported that some gray whales may opt out of the long migration to the Arctic to feed in other locations. They include more than 200 whales that spend much of their time foraging off northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Southeast Alaska.
A much smaller group ventures deep into Puget Sound to spend part of the year pursuing ghost shrimp in shallow coastal waters that turn to mudflats during low tide.
“We call it a high-risk feeding strategy because they may be a mile away from safe water, and as the tide goes out, they’ve got to get out before they get stranded,” said John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist at Cascadia Research Collective.
Other gray whales that forage in Pacific Northwest waters have become skilled, versatile foragers. They filter feed on crab larvae and skim feed through kelp beds for mysids, a shrimp-like crustacean.
Amid the overall decline of the gray whale population, the numbers feeding in the Pacific Northwest have been stable.
“They have looked very good,” Jeff Harris, a NOAA Fisheries biologist who surveyed large areas of Northwest coastal waters frequented by the grays.
Some gray whales that have long fed in the Arctic are also trying to feed along the West Coast to gain an energy boost for their migration. Since 2018, there has been an increase in whales venturing into San Francisco Bay, where they are at high risk of getting killed by vessels. In an article published in April in the Frontiers of Marine Science, researchers identified 114 whales that entered between 2018 and 2025 and found that 18 of them later died within the bay.
If conditions don’t improve in the Arctic, more whales may opt to feed in the Pacific Northwest. But the Pacific ocean off Oregon and Washington has a narrow continental shelf that limits the prime foraging for grays, so it’s not likely to provide enough food for a much larger gray whale population.
But another big climate event could soon make life more difficult for gray whales. As early as July, marine forecasters are expecting a powerful El Nino marked by weakening trade winds that would send warm Pacific waters to the West Coast and the Bering Sea.
El Ninos typically weaken, and sometimes curtail, nutrient-rich upwellings of cold water that are vital to the marine food chain that supports gray whales. This one, according to some models, could be one of the strongest on record.
“I think it’s just going to shake up the whole ocean,” said Harris, the NOAA biologist. “A lot of species are going to be struggling.”
Republican U.S. House candidate Nick Begich and his supporters wave campaign signs at the corner of the Seward Highway and Northern Lights Boulevard on Nov. 4, 2024, the day before Election Day. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Two years ago, Republican Nick Begich III defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola and became Alaska’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Now, 14 people are hoping to imitate Begich’s performance.
Monday was the filing deadline for candidates interested in running in this year’s elections, and in addition to the incumbent Begich, there are two other Republicans, six independents, two Libertarians and four Democrats.
That tally could change by June 27, the deadline for candidates to drop out of the race.
In the state’s primary election on Aug. 18, Alaska voters will each pick one of the 15 candidates. The top four vote-getters advance to the November general election. At that election, voters will rank the final four in order of preference, using ranked choice voting to pick the winner.
Begich’s two leading challengers are expected to be Democratic candidate Matt Schultz and independent candidate Bill Hill.
Schultz is a pastor in Anchorage who was one of the first people to officially challenge Begich, and he has the endorsement of many of the state’s Democratic officials. Among his endorsements is Tom Begich, a Democratic candidate for governor and Begich III’s uncle.
Hill, a commercial fisherman and former public-school superintendent, has raised significantly more money than Schultz, campaign finance records show, but much of that money has come from outside the state. Hill has also hired Ship Creek Group, an experienced campaign consulting firm in Anchorage.
Of the 15 candidates, five do not live in Alaska: nonpartisan Melanie Salazar, Democratic candidate Yaquelin Reynoso, Democratic candidate Eric Hafner, Republican candidate Eddie Goldfarb and Libertarian John Foddrill.
Under the U.S. Constitution and current interpretations of that document, someone can run for U.S. House in any state as long as they live within that state at the time they take office.
In Alaska, it is common for out-of-state Americans to run for federal office; most receive less than 1% of the vote.
Hafner is a convicted felon and serving time at a federal prison in New York. Two years ago, he finished in the final four of the 2024 U.S. House race after several higher-finishing candidates withdrew.
The Alaska Democratic Party sued, arguing that he was ineligible to serve if elected. The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the party, and Hafner remained on the ballot, finishing fourth in the general election.
An early voting station is set up in the atrium of the State Office Building in Juneau, Alaska, on Aug. 5, 2024, the first day of early voting for the 2024 Alaska primary election. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
As national Democrats seek to win control of the U.S. Senate, they’ve named Alaska one of their top targets. They’ve already donated millions of dollars to boost the candidacy of Democratic candidate, and former U.S. House Representative, Mary Peltola.
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing the same with incumbent U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan. Both will be competing against 14 other candidates in the upcoming Aug. 18 primary election.
In that election, each voter picks one candidate and the top four-vote getters advance to the Nov. 3 general election. In that election, voters will sort the candidates in order of preference using ranked choice voting to select the eventual winner.
Monday was the deadline to file as a candidate for the U.S. Senate race, and the field includes seven Republicans, three Democrats, three independents, a Green Party member and a Libertarian candidate.
In addition to the incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of the challengers is also named Dan Sullivan, and he’s also running as a Republican, albeit from Petersburg instead of Anchorage.
Among the other candidates are frequent participants in past Alaska elections — Republican Gerald Heikes, Republican Dustin Darden, and Libertarian Scott Kohlhaas.
Carol Hafner, running as a Democrat, is the mother of Eric Hafner — currently serving a felony sentence in a New York prison — who finished in the final four for Alaska’s 2024 U.S. House race and is running in this year’s contest, too.
The deadline for any candidate to withdraw from the primary election is June 27.
By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
Seventeen people have registered as candidates for Alaska governor in this fall’s election, though the final slate won’t be set until June 27, the withdrawal deadline. Only four will advance in the Aug. 18 primary.
The deadline to register as a candidate was 5 p.m. Monday. Former state Sen. Lesil McGuire and former Gov. Bill Walker, both running as independents, were among those who registered on the last day.
The field of candidates, which includes 11 Republicans, three Democrats and three independents, is especially large this year. Incumbent Gov. Mike Dunleavy is term-limited and unable to run for another term.
Unless they withdraw, all of the 17 candidates will compete in the Aug. 18 statewide open primary election. Voters will each pick one candidate, and the top four vote-getters, regardless of party, will advance to the November 3 general election.
In November, voters will rank those final four candidates in order of preference using ranked-choice voting. The winner will take office at noon Dec. 7 for a four-year term.
Current Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, a Republican, dropped out of the race on Monday, 13 months after she said she would run for the office.
Dahlstrom had raised a relatively small amount of money since her announcement, according to preliminary campaign finance disclosures.
Two other independents, Jessica Faircloth and Gregg Brelsford, and one Republican, Bruce Walden, also declined to register as candidates despite filing preliminary paperwork.
Because a gubernatorial candidate must have a lieutenant governor candidate as a running mate, the days before the filing deadline brought a flurry of announcements.
Former Alaska attorney general Treg Taylor, running as a Republican, announced businesswoman Candice English as his lieutenant governor choice. Self-funded Republican candidate Matt Heilala picked former Wasilla Rep. Jesse Sumner, a fellow Republican.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Matt Claman of Anchorage picked healthcare executive Sarah Skeel, and former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins chose current Anchorage Assembly member Zac Johnson.
If a lieutenant governor candidate drops out before June 27, the candidate for governor can pick someone new to replace them. If a candidate for governor drops out, the lieutenant governor candidate may replace them and pick a new lieutenant governor.
Volunteers and supporters celebrate the public opening of the Eldred Rock Lighthouse in Lynn Canal on May 30, 2026. (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
The telltale sight of the white octagonal structure and red roof of Eldred Rock Lighthouse is a marker for mariners and many upper Lynn Canal residents sailing north, signaling they are close to home.
Alaska’s oldest original lighthouse is located 55 miles north of Juneau and 17 miles south of Haines, and will be open to members of the public for the first time. Visitors can learn about its storied history and service to Southeast Alaska.
Boats of supporters from Haines and Juneau joined a grand opening event on the island May 30 to celebrate a roughly six year volunteer-run effort to preserve and restore the now 120-year-old lighthouse.
Sue York is executive director of the Eldred Rock Lighthouse Preservation Association, a Haines-based non-profit organization that took over the lighthouse from the U.S Coast Guard in 2020 and spearheaded the restoration effort. She said it was easy to recruit support for the project because of the lighthouse’s regional significance.
“This building to us is our heritage, Coast Guard heritage, maritime heritage. It’s Southeast Alaska special,” York said. “(On) the ferry, everyone that lives in Haines, Skagway and Juneau has a feeling about the lighthouse as they go by, right? It’s home, it’s ‘Oh, we’re almost home.’”
Eldred Rock Lighthouse was constructed after a shipwreck tragedy during the Klondike Gold Rush and completed in 1906. It has served as a beacon and navigation aid for mariners ever since. Several generations of lighthouse keepers kept the kerosene light alive year-round. Technology improvements replaced lighthouse keepers and Eldred Rock was automated and left empty in 1973. It was listed under the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
After storm damage in 2016, the preservation effort drew volunteers from around Haines, Skagway, Gustavus, Juneau and beyond to restore the iconic lighthouse. It took extensive repairs, repainting and abatement work to remove hazardous building materials and renovate the lighthouse, living quarters and out buildings and dock. Charter tours will be available for groups of 25 from Haines beginning this summer, and visitors can rent one of five bedrooms or volunteer as a lighthouse keeper, according to the group’s website.
The mission of the group is to restore, preserve and share, said John Woods, a board member with the Eldred Rock Lighthouse Preservation Association.
“It’s kind of this quintessential Alaskan thing, where you’re like, ‘I’m in this lighthouse on this tiny little island in the middle of Lynn Canal, with these huge mountains and glaciers around, there’s whales, eagles, puffins,’ you know,” he said. “So we’re excited that… we’re going to be able to fulfill that part of our mission, the ‘share’ part.”
“People will get to have that experience and get to go out there and be like, this is a special place,” he added.
The public opening celebration on May 30 represented a particularly special day for siblings Tainya and Doug Adamson, who traveled from Washington state to Southeast Alaska for the occasion. They are the great-grandchildren of the first lighthouse keeper on Eldred Rock, Nils P. Adamson, who manned the lighthouse from 1906 to 1911.
“I’m just grateful,” said Tainya Adamson, growing emotional as she first spotted the lighthouse from the boat. “To be here is incredibly overwhelming, but incredible. We’re very honored to be able to pay respect to our great-grandfather, as well as everyone else who was here.”
“This is incredibly important for our family, something that’s been part of our family story for a very long time,” said Doug Adamson, “And something we’ve heard about our whole family as a history of mariners — my great-grandfather is a light keeper, my grandfather was in the lighthouse service, and my father was in the Coast Guard, worked at a lighthouse, so for our family personally, this is very important.”
The preservation group is continuing repairs and renovations into the summer, as they begin welcoming tour groups and visitors, and working to set up a maritime museum onsite.
Tuesday night, partly cloudy skies. Low 48F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday, partly cloudy skies during the morning hours will become overcast in the afternoon. High 71F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph.
