Along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, pictured here, runs a smaller-diameter natural gas line used to fuel the oil pipeline’s pumps. That small-diameter line could be a source of fuel for a new Bitcoin mining operation on the North Slope. (Arthur T. LaBar/Flickr under Creative Commons License)
Despite the federal government shutdown, the Trump administration is proceeding with new oil leasing on Alaska’s North Slope.
The U.S. Bureau of Land management said Tuesday it will be accepting nominations for areas to auction in an upcoming oil and gas lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The call for nominations is the first step in the leasing process; comments on suggested leasing areas will be taken for 30 days, the BLM said.
The information is in a Federal Register notice scheduled to be published on Wednesday.
The pending lease sale is in accordance with the sweeping budget bill, signed by President Donald Trump on July 5, that he and his supporters call “The One Big Beautiful Bill.” The bill requires the BLM to hold at least five lease sales, each offering at least 4 million acres, over the next 10 years.
“Congress directed a program of expeditious leasing and development in the NPR-A to support America’s energy independence, and that is more important today than ever,” Kevin Pendergast, Alaska state director for the BLM, said in a statement. “This lease sale gets us back on track toward further exploration and development in the reserve, as Congress envisioned.”
The upcoming lease sale is intended to be under new Trump-era rules that remove protections enacted by the Biden administration, the Obama administration and earlier administrations, dating back to former President Ronald Reagan’s term.
A female caribou runs near Teshekpuk Lake in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska on June 12, 2022. The Teshekpuk caribou herd gives birth to its calves in the land around the vast lake, the largest on the North Slope. Under the Trump administration, long-protected areas and around the lake will be opened to oil development. (Photo by Ashley Sabatino/ U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
Under the Trump rules, more than 18.5 million of the reserve’s 23 million acres are designated as available for leasing. That includes the ecologically sensitive Teshekpuk Lake, the largest lake on the North Slope, which is important habitat for migratory birds and which is adjacent to the calving grounds for the Teshekpuk caribou herd.
Lease sales in the reserve were held about every two years from 1999 to 2010 and annually from 2011 through 2019, but with protections for certain areas, including Teshekpuk Lake.
The Obama administration had a policy of coordinating those federal auctions with the annual areawide North Slope, Beaufort Sea and Brooks Range Foothills sales held by the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas. Coordinated timing on those enhanced industry interest and convenience, agency officials said at the time.
No lease sales have been held since the 2019 auction held under the first Trump administration. After that, that administration shifted its focus to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Two lease sales were held in the refuge, in January 2021 and January 2025. The first of those sales drew few bids, none of them from major oil companies, and the 2025 sale drew no bids.
Environmentalists criticized the move toward a sale during a government shutdown.
“The Trump administration’s outrageous announcement shows a sad truth in our country today: The government is open for resource extraction corporations and closed for the people,” Andy Moderow, senior director of policy at Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement. “At a time when our government is shut down and essential public workers aren’t getting paid, it’s outrageous that federal leaders are prioritizing oil and gas sales over getting the country back on its feet.”
Red-necked phalaropes forage in the wetlands found in the northeastern section of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Teshekpuk Lake and the wetlands around it comprise one of the top habitats for migratory birds anywhere in the Arctic. The Trump administration has opened those wetlands to oil development; they had been off-limits for decades. (Photo by Bob Wick/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity, echoed that sentiment in a different statement.
“The Trump government clearly isn’t shut down for the oil industry, with millions upon millions of Alaska’s western Arctic recklessly open for exploitation and desecration,” he said.“We can’t let this administration destroy key habitat for cherished wildlife like caribou, polar bears and millions of migratory birds for nothing more than stuffing oil barons’ pockets.”
A Department of the Interior spokesperson said certain BLM employees remain on duty to handle energy issues, a subject that Trump has said needs emergency action.
“Activities necessary to address the President’s declaration of a national energy emergency are continuing during the lapse in appropriations. The Bureau of Land Management has staff working in both exempt and excepted status to carry out essential energy-related responsibilities, including review of nominations for the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska lease sale,” said Alice Sharpe, senior public affairs specialist with the department, in an email.
Unlike the Arctic refuge, which is on the eastern side of the North Slope, the National Petroleum Reserve on the western side of the North Slope has drawn industry interest. The reserve is underlain by an oil-rich formation called Nanushuk that has yielded significant discoveries on both federal and state land.
Some of those discoveries have resulted in producing oil fields, and more are expected. ConocoPhillips’ huge Willow project, which the company has said will produce up to 180,000 barrels a day from reserves totaling about 600 million barrels, is located in the reserve and is set to become the North Slope’s westernmost producing oil field.
Cook Inlet waves roll onto the beach at Kenai on Aug. 14, 2018. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is preparing a supplemental environmental impact statement to address legal deficiencies in a 2022 lease sale. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.
There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.
The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.
BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.
“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.
Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said.
The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid.
Earlier in the year, the Biden administration had planned to cancel the sale because of lack of industry interest. But at the urging of former Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Inflation Reduction Act that narrowly passed Congress that year included a mandate for the sale to take place. Hilcorp Inc., the dominant oil and gas operator in Cook Inlet, submitted the only bid.
In response to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups days before the lease sale was held, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in 2024 that the lease sale had been held without adequate study of impacts to endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales. Her ruling put the lease sale results on hold, and she ordered BOEM to conduct a new review addressing impacts to the belugas.
BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.
“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement.
BOEM’s earlier lapses concerning Cook Inlet belugas were “not minor oversights; they are serious errors that must be corrected with rigor and transparency and a proper review that allows the time for public input,” Barrett added.
Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity, also cited risks to the endangered beluga population, which is estimated to number a little over 300.
“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. “The court found that federal officials failed to look at several important factors that could harm endangered belugas, including vessel noise. If the agency hides its analysis, we won’t know whether these critical issues have been addressed to better protect the belugas.”
Hilcorp currently holds eight federal leases in Cook Inlet, including the sole lease acquired in the disputed 2022 sale. The company relinquished seven other federal leases in Cook Inlet. The BOEM website does not list any Hilcorp plans for exploring its remaining leases in the inlet.
The Kuskokwim River is seen in this image captured by scientists working on NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, or ABoVE, which measured the elevation of rivers and lakes in Alaska and Canada to study how thawing permafrost affects hydrology. (Photo by Peter Griffith/NASA)
On Monday, the Alaska Department of Law asked the Supreme Court to reconsider a ruling from a three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the state’s existing two-tiered subsistence fishing system last month.
State attorneys have argued unsuccessfully since 2021 that federal law, as interpreted by recent rulings from the Supreme Court, means the state, not the federal government, has the power to regulate fishing in navigable waters on federal land.
A federal law, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, requires that rural Alaskans be given preferential treatment when hunting and fishing are regulated in Alaska. Simultaneously, the Alaska Constitution forbids that kind of preference.
For decades, the result has been a two-tiered system under which the federal government regulates hunting and fishing on federal land and water, and the state regulates it everywhere else.
Under the state framework, someone from Anchorage would have the same fishing rights on the Kuskokwim River as someone who lives a mile away. Under the current system, the local resident gets priority in parts of the river within federal land.
In 2021, a regulatory dispute on the Kuskokwim River during a salmon shortage resulted in the federal government filing a lawsuit against the state. The Alaska Federation of Natives, Association of Village Council Presidents and other Native groups from across the state joined the lawsuit on the side of the federal government.
In 2024, a U.S. District Court judge in Alaska ruled in favor of the federal government, but the state appealed that decision. Last month, three judges from the 9th Circuit again ruled in favor of the federal government. Rather than appeal the issue to the full 9th Circuit, the state is going directly to the Supreme Court.
The state’s filing on Monday was formally known as a “cert petition,” which asks the court to take up the case.
The court takes only about 1% of the cases it receives, though the acceptance rate is higher (about 5%) if the large number of cases involving prisoners representing themselves in court are excluded.
In a written statement announcing the filing, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Attorney General designee Stephen Cox said the state believes that federal law gives Alaska control of its navigable waters when it comes to fishing.
“Alaska is asking the Supreme Court to hold fast to the text, because fidelity to the law as written is the foundation of the rule of law,” Cox said in his statement.
Doug Vincent-Lang, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said he believes the 9th Circuit decision “deepens a fractured system that undermines conservation, creates confusion, and threatens equitable access for all Alaskans. Salmon don’t recognize federal and state boundaries — our management shouldn’t either. We remain committed to sustainable management and will continue fighting for a system that works for every Alaskan. The Court should decide this case and reverse the Ninth Circuit.”
Attorneys representing Alaska Native groups said on Monday that they expected an appeal to the Supreme Court, even if they didn’t know the exact timing.
Nathaniel Amdur-Clark, who has represented the Kuskokwim River Intertribal Fish Commission in the lawsuit to date, said by text message on Monday that his clients “are disappointed, but not surprised, to see the state’s cert petition. It is just a continuation of the state’s push to undermine subsistence protections for Alaska Natives and rural Alaskans.”
The Supreme Court does not have a set timeline for considering the state’s petition, which will be taken up in a closed-door judicial conference after both sides of the argument file written briefs on the issue.
The ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. building in Anchorage is seen on June 28, 2023. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
The top oil-producing company in Alaska is planning significant layoffs, it announced last week.
In a series of statements, the oil giant ConocoPhillips said it will be firing between 20% and 25% of its global workforce of about 13,000 people. That would mean between 2,600 and 3,250 layoffs worldwide.
“We are always looking at how we can be more efficient with the resources we have. As part of this process, we have informed employees that a 20% to 25% reduction in our global workforce, which includes employees and contractors, is anticipated. The majority of these reductions will take place in 2025,” said Rebecca Boys, director of external affairs for ConocoPhillips Alaska, on Thursday.
Boys declined to say how many people the company employs in Alaska, but prior documents published by the company say that it has “about 1,000 people in Alaska,” and of those, about 80% live in the state.
Altogether, the oil and gas industry employed 8,800 people in Alaska as of July, according to state statistics. If ConocoPhillips were to lay off a quarter of its Alaska workforce, it likely would reverse an upward trend for the oil and gas industry here.
Since bottoming out at 6,100 people in November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, the number of people employed by the oil and gas industry rose throughout President Joe Biden’s administration.
ConocoPhillips produces the most oil of any company operating on the North Slope and holds the second-most oil and gas lease area in the state.
According to state data, ConocoPhillips leases about 490,000 acres of Alaska land and water for oil and gas drilling. That’s behind only privately owned Hilcorp, whose holdings exceed 500,000 acres.
ConocoPhillips is developing the large Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is expected to begin producing oil in 2029.
According to the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, ConocoPhillips is also planning to drill four exploration wells in other parts of the reserve this winter.
On its production side, ConocoPhillips was planning to drill 12 new production wells this year and next from the Kuparuk oilfield west of Prudhoe Bay.
May 14, 2018 – Wind turbines in Kodiak, Alaska. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder / NREL)
For years, urban Alaska utilities have been studying large-scale wind farms that could help break the state’s dependence on natural gas power — encouraged by the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits from the federal government.
Next summer, however, those tax credits will largely disappear for projects that haven’t started construction, a consequence of the tax bill that President Donald Trump signed in July.
Clean energy advocates, and U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, had said they hoped that Alaska wind projects could still advance in time to qualify.
But in recent weeks, board members and executives at the cooperatively owned utilities have acknowledged that the timeline now appears too short — which means any large-scale projects will now have to be built without the generous federal subsidies, or wait to see if Congress reestablishes a more favorable tax regime.
Critics say the absence of major new renewable projects will leave the state dependent on imported, liquefied natural gas and could make consumers vulnerable to price spikes.
“There’s an argument to be made that these electric cooperatives, whose boards have a fiduciary responsibility to the member-owners, have really frittered away one of the greatest opportunities they’ve ever had to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars of value to their members,” said Phil Wight, an energy historian and professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks. “At the highest level, I think that’s a fair argument.”
Since Congress approved expanded tax credits in 2022, Alaska has seen no large-scale wind or solar projects begin construction, while other states like Wyoming and Texas have received billions of dollars in clean energy investment.
At a recent meeting, board members at Golden Valley Electric Association, the utility that generates power for Fairbanks area residents and mines, rejected a developer’s bid to advance a large-scale wind farm on a schedule driven by the expiring tax credits. Utility officials said there was still too much uncertainty about final pricing and whether the project could capture the credits.
Meanwhile, officials at Anchorage-based Chugach Electric Association, the state’s largest power utility, say that another large wind project they’ve been studying with the same developer also won’t be ready to start construction in time to qualify for the credits.
Jim Nordlund, a Chugach Electric Association board member, said that if the Anchorage-area project had captured the credits, it was still far from clear that it could have provided power more cheaply than his utility’s existing natural gas plants.
That’s even assuming prices will rise when local fuel supplies dry up and utilities begin importing liquefied natural gas in the next few years, added Nordlund, a self-described clean energy advocate.
The price of renewable power generally, he said, “is really high.”
Alaskans who are frustrated about the pace of wind and solar development shouldn’t blame the urban utilities, Nordlund added. Private companies, not the utilities themselves, have been advancing projects that failed to materialize, he said, and politics also played a big role.
“If you want to blame anybody for this, it would be that big bad bill. That’s what Trump wanted to do, and it worked,” Nordlund said. “It shut down, at least for the time being, our projects.”
But renewable energy boosters say that the urban utilities deserve at least some share of the blame for not advancing projects more urgently while the tax credits were in place.
The utilities could have developed large wind developments themselves, those advocates argue — or they could have done more to create a stable and attractive market for private developers.
“The utilities are uniquely bureaucratic and expensive in their own self-development. And they’re uniquely bureaucratic and obstinate and slow if a private company is developing,” said Ethan Schutt, who formerly managed the energy assets of an Indigenous-owned regional corporation.
Advocates say utility leaders have also failed to endorse, and in some cases outright opposed, legislation proposed multiple times in recent years to establish renewable energy quotas — which they say could have encouraged more private developers to work in the state.
Large-scale power projects “need to be thoughtfully implemented,” Natalie Kiley-Bergen, energy lead at an advocacy organization called Alaska Public Interest Research Group, said in an email.
“Had more progress been made in the last five years — even the last 15 years — to create a competitive market environment with regulatory and economic certainty for these projects, we could have seen responsible project commitments regardless of federal changes,” Kiley-Bergen said. “Not capitalizing on these tax credits is a product of years of moving slowly on the tremendous opportunities to diversify our energy generation.”
A risk of price spikes?
After its initial discovery in the 1950s, Cook Inlet, the offshore and onshore petroleum basin southwest of Anchorage, produced huge quantities of natural gas.
There was enough fuel to generate not just the vast majority of the region’s electric power, but also to supply plants that produced fertilizer and exported gas in liquefied form to Asia.
But those plants have now closed amid Cook Inlet production declines. And for more than a decade, the urban electric utilities have been contending with risk that gas supply won’t be adequate to meet demand.
Generous state tax credits temporarily approved by lawmakers in 2010 helped stimulate new drilling, but only temporarily, and they were subsequently repealed. Three years ago, Cook Inlet’s dominant producer, Hilcorp, warned utilities that they should not expect new long-term commitments of gas when their existing contracts expire in the coming years.
Clean energy advocates say that Alaskans’ dependence on gas-fired power — Chugach Electric Association generates 87% of its power from the fuel — makes residents vulnerable to both supply disruptions and fluctuations in price.
The utilities have responded to the looming local gas shortfall with plans for new infrastructure that could offload imported liquefied natural gas, known as LNG, shipped from Canada or the Gulf of Mexico.
But unlike gas from Cook Inlet, which producers have long sold at a fixed cost, utilities would likely have to buy LNG at rates that swing with the market, similar to the price of oil, according to Antony Scott, an analyst at the Renewable Energy Alaska Project advocacy group who once studied petroleum pricing for Alaska’s state government.
Given the risk of price spikes that could translate into higher electricity prices for consumers, diversifying with new wind and solar development should be a “no-brainer,” Scott said.
“It’s just like an investment portfolio. Do you want to invest only in Tesla?” Scott said. “A rational, prudent investor would have a diversified portfolio.”
Scott’s advocacy group, and others in Alaska, have pushed the utilities to diversify, in part through lobbying for the creation of the renewable energy quotas.
They cite analyses like a study released last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which found that new renewables would be cheaper than burning gas in existing plants and, by 2040, could meet up to 80% of demand.
“Ratepayers in Alaska have been saying, for a long time, that we need renewable energy projects here at home, and we need to be capturing energy here at home,” said Alex Petkanas, clean energy and climate program manager at the Alaska Center conservation group. “This is not something that is a surprise — that our local natural gas supply is ending, and we need to replace that with new generation.”
A rejected agreement
Utility staff and board members agree that they need to diversify away from gas, with the chief executive of Matanuska Electric Association saying in 2022 that it was “untenable” to continue generating 85% of power from one type of fuel.
Chugach Electric Association aims to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2040, which would likely require sharp reduction in its use of natural gas. And a Golden Valley Electric Association strategic plan approved last year calls for the utility to finalize agreements with private developers to bring on “large-scale wind resources” at prices that will lower members’ power costs.
None of those utilities have moved to build major wind or solar farms themselves; instead, they’ve looked to private companies to do the construction and sell the power onto the grid.
Just one firm, Longroad Energy, has advanced large-scale wind projects on a timeline that could have qualified for the expiring tax credits. One is outside Anchorage in Chugach Electric Association’s region, and one is outside Fairbanks, in Golden Valley Electric Association’s region.
The Fairbanks area project, known as Shovel Creek Wind, could produce one-third of the power consumed by Golden Valley’s members — and even generate more than 100% of their demand at certain times, depending on the size of the development, said Golden Valley’s chief executive, Travis Million.
But at a July board meeting, Golden Valley’s board members rejected an agreement that Longroad had proposed to keep the project on a timeline to qualify for the credits.
Golden Valley, said Million, still needed more time to finish a study of how much it would have to spend on infrastructure upgrades and its existing fossil fuel plants in order to accommodate power from the new wind project. Utilities must balance swings in power production that stem from the natural variability of wind.
“Without having that step done, there’s just so much uncertainty about the cost. And not knowing what that end result would be to our members, we just could not commit,” Million said in a recent interview. The details of the proposed agreement — including Longroad’s estimated pricing — are confidential under a non-disclosure agreement.
There was additional uncertainty, Million added, about whether the Trump administration, which has been hostile to wind power, would grant the credits even if Shovel Creek advanced on the required timeline.
But Million also acknowledged that the utility could have done more work earlier to speed up the process.
“We should have done a lot of these studies on the front end, to really understand sizing and needs on Golden Valley’s system, before we really started going down this path with trying to find developers,” Million said.
Longroad, through an Anchorage-based consultant, declined to comment. Million said that Golden Valley plans to finish its study and hasn’t ruled out advancing Shovel Creek on a slower timeline than Longroad’s proposal.
The utility is also studying a substantial, if smaller, wind project that could still qualify for the tax credits.
“We have to take control”
In Anchorage, meanwhile, officials with Chugach Electric Association said that Longroad’s work on the nearby Little Mount Susitna wind project slowed as the company focused on advancing Shovel Creek.
The developer, said Chugach board member Nordlund, isn’t ready to make the initial investment in Little Mount Susitna and couldn’t do the continuous work required in order to take advantage of the tax credits — though the utility, he added, hasn’t given up on the project moving forward in the future.
Nordlund ran for the Chugach board in 2023 as an advocate for wind and solar, saying then that “the time to act on renewables is now.”
But he said in a recent interview that there’s “misinformation” circulating that utilities are dismissing proposed wind and solar developments that would generate power more cheaply than natural gas, when that’s not clearly the case.
Chugach has its own non-disclosure agreement with Longroad that Nordlund said bars him from getting specific about prices.
But speaking generally, he added, Alaska is a tough market for private developers, compared to the Lower 48 and foreign countries where they otherwise might invest.
Construction costs in Alaska are higher given the remote setting, harsh environment and lack of contractors competing for business, Nordlund said; the relatively small consumer base also means that developers can’t capture economies of scale.
“I think we need to create a better climate for independent power producers to do business in Alaska,” Nordlund said. The stalled legislation to establish renewable energy quotas could have helped, he added, by giving those private developers more certainty that the utilities were “serious” about bringing on wind and solar projects.
“More could have been done,” he said.
Nonetheless, Nordlund said he thinks the inherently “conservative” culture of Alaska’s utilities is changing, with executives increasingly open to accommodating wind and solar power.
Chugach officials say the utility is still pursuing renewables and remains open to proposals from developers — though they are now refocusing on more modest projects that they can advance in-house, at least in the early stages. Viable projects could then, potentially, be handed off to private developers.
At meetings in recent weeks, board and staff members have discussed a small-scale solar farm that Chugach is studying at the site of one of its existing gas power plants on the far side of Cook Inlet.
They’ve also heard a presentation from a consultant who is examining potential sites for new hydroelectric development, though those projects would face a lengthy permitting process.
“We now have to take control and get in the lead,” Dustin Highers, Chugach’s vice president for corporate programs, said at a recent board meeting.
But some experts like Wight, the energy historian, remain skeptical that those efforts will end up displacing very much gas, with the exception of the smaller wind project in the Fairbanks area that he said could still “make a real difference.”
Pursuing smaller projects with better coordination between regions could be a better strategy, Wight said. But failing that, he said he expects utilities to largely continue their dependence on natural gas — whether through imported LNG, or through a proposed pipeline project from Alaska’s North Slope that’s struggled to secure commitments from investors.
“They’re going to dabble a little bit in renewables here and there, and then they’re just going to hope for cheap gas,” Wight said. “As a state, we’ve been so oil- and gas-dependent for so long that I do think there’s a cultural barrier there, to bring in the new folks who want to think differently.”
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.
