Alaska Blog

Alaska Blog


Notes from Alaska: Chalkyitsik, Alaska

by Jeremiah Millen, BLM Field RepresentativeChalkyitsik_From_the_air

In May, I received a personal invitation to Chalkyitsik, Alaska by First Chief Willie Salmon to discuss the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) most recent Resource Management plan (RMP)- The Eastern Interior (RMP.) The community of Chalkyitsik is a traditional Gwich’in Athabascan village located on the Black River about 50 miles east of Ft. Yukon in Alaska’s Eastern Interior. Chalkyitsik, meaning “fish hooking place,” is a community of 60 residents and is the only remaining permanent settlement for the Draan’jik “Black River People” band of Gwich’in. This area is an important seasonal hunting and fishing spot for people throughout the region who have lived a subsistence way of life as they have for thousands of years.

Chalkyitsik_RoadAfter arriving at the airport, I was picked up and taken into town to meet various members of the community. Many members of the community who I met were volunteering for their community wide clean up day. I immediately set my bags down and got right to work cleaning up the sides of the road and throwing trash bags in a front end loader. After the clean up, we gathered in the community hall and got to know each other over hamburgers and cool glasses of water drawn directly from the Black River, the community’s main water source. I was struck by the level of kindness shared by local residents and the strong sense of place they possessed.
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Notes From Alaska - Sharing our Alaskan Stories

by Betsy Beardsley,  Environmental Justice Program Director, Alaska Wilderness League

Betsy GollWhen I was in high school I spent the summer before my senior year as a tour guide on the Alaska Railroad.  The Alaska Railroad begins in Seward, on the shores of Resurrection Bay near the Gulf of Alaska, and stretches 500 miles north through Anchorage to Fairbanks via Denali National Park.  It takes two days to travel from one end of the track to the other. As much of the terrain is rugged, the average speed of the scenic journey is about 35 miles per hour. 

Like any proud Alaskan, I enjoyed telling tourists about my home State.  For most passengers, this was their first time to Alaska.  Often, I’d have elderly couples rounding out their lives together with a dream vacation, or young adventurers heading into the backcountry of Denali.  For most, their trip to Alaska was a once in a lifetime experience that I was happy to be a part of.

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Notes from Alaska: Traveling to Grayling and Alaska’s Longest River

By Jeremiah Millen, Alaska Wilderness League’s BLM Field Representative

Yukon RiverIn February, I was invited to represent Alaska Wilderness League’s BLM Wildlands Program and share information about regional BLM planning activities at the Yukon River Fisheries Drainage Association’s (YRDFA) annual meeting in Grayling, Alaska. The Athabaskan village of Grayling located on a remote stretch of the Yukon River in Southwest Alaska and is home to close to 200 residents. This is an area only accessible by air with the Yukon River serving as a highway connecting remote villages by boat and snow machine in the winter.

YRDFA, a non-profit organization based in Anchorage, is made up of dozens of board members from rural communities who represent fishing interests of many of the communities along the Yukon River. The meeting location alternates every year between Yukon communities and provides a venue to discuss issues related to health of Yukon salmon serves as a forum to address individual community concerns and seeks to develop solutions and recommendations to drive fisheries management decisions for the region.

The 2300 mile Yukon River is Alaska’s longest river stretches from the Bering Sea to Canada and hosts an international fishery shared by the U.S. and Canada. Yukon in Alaska Native Gwich’in language means “great river.” This fishery drives the economy, culture, and the ecology for the entire Yukon ecosystem. It is widely acknowledged that the most critical unifying element for communities along the Yukon is wild salmon. Yukon River Chinook and Chum salmon have some of the longest migratory journeys in the world and are cherished for their size and high oil content. People along the river depend on this resource for food, social, ceremonial, recreational and economic purposes. In addition, the region also provides critical habitat for caribou, bears, migratory birds, moose and other wildlife.

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Notes from Alaska: Among Polar Bears

By Betsy Beardsley, Arctic Environmental Justice Program Director, Alaska Wilderness League

Polar Bear Country - Pt Hope in the SnowI’ve never seen a polar bear in the wild. Being one of the lucky few to travel to remote arctic villages for work, I used to hope that I’d see one in its natural habitat.

On a recent trip to Pt. Hope, polar bears had been spotted around every corner of the village. Seven bears had come into or nearby the village within a week’s time. We were told to take serious precautions – not to walk very far without a gun through town, to stay indoors at night. One elder said the blizzard whiteout conditions we were experiencing were a polar bears’ playground.

The blizzard had seized Pt. Hope in a flash. The snow came down hard and the gusts of 45 MPH winds made it virtually impossible to see. The wind moved the snow on the ground like a plow, covering up doorways and cars in minutes. In three hours time the entrance to our hotel was completely shut in by snow.

I kept thinking of the polar bears playing out there. While the force of the wind could barely allow me to trudge 10 yards out in the storm, a polar bear could walk across the whole town impenetrably.

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Notes From Alaska

We Cannot Wait Until Tomorrow - What’s At Stake With Bristol Bay
By Norman Anderson

Norman AndersonNorman Anderson is of Aleut decent, born in Naknek, Bristol Bay. He is the youngest son of Edward J Anderson of Akutan, and Alma E Anderson of Ugashik. He is a commercial fisherman and lives a subsistence lifestyle as taught by the elders.

As many of you are aware the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas are under the world ’s microscopes, the Polar Bear the the Arctic’s original inhabitants are at risk of the ever encroaching mega Oil giants. We here in Bristol Bay are soon to become victims as well.

The Minerals Management service has divided Alaska’s offshore into 14 planning areas, 7 of these are in the fish rich Bering Sea. And home to the already endangered Pacific Right Whale. For generations we subsistence lifestyle people have safely lived off of the healthy diet of Wild Salmon, this pristine sea food now is in danger of becoming fouled with chemicals involved with the daily process of exploration directly in the path of migrating Salmon.

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Notes From Alaska

Returning to Lake Iliamna To Understand Pebble Mine Controversy
By Betsy Beardsley, Arctic Environmental Justice Program Director

Betsy Beardsley and President CarterMy father spent his career as a hunting and fishing guide in Alaska. His guiding business started from a small log cabin outpost on the Kenai River that he and my mom built in the 1970’s. Over time, he accrued enough seed money and client interest to build a fly-in fishing lodge near Lake Iliamna in Southwest Alaska.

Lake Iliamna of the Bristol Bay Watershed is one of the largest lakes in Alaska. It’s a stone’s throw from Lake Clark National Park and about a 20 minute float plane ride to Katmai National Park. Century-old game trails zig zag across the land where bear and caribou have roamed through the seasons. Nearby streams are the spawning grounds of the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. John Denver once called the area God’s country.

As a child, I would spend many summers exploring the woods and hills around the lodge. My dad and I would fly in his small airplane to fish a quiet stream for grayling or rainbow trout. Sometimes we’d take a skiff from the lodge to a secret fishing hole for the largest rainbow trout on Earth. The wise old fish mostly watched us from the deep waters below the boat. They were too smart to test our line, but their quick movements sometimes tricked us into thinking we had them.
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Notes From Alaska

Lessons from the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group
By Betsy Beardsley, Arctic Environmental Justice Program Director

Kokolik River in the South NPR-A (photo: Betsy Beardsley)The Western Arctic Caribou Herd is the largest caribou herd in Alaska, with a population of over 500,000. Its range is the entire northwest quarter of Alaska, spanning an area about the size of Montana. Over 40 Alaska Native villages depend on the herd to feed their families each year, as they have for generations.

I had the the privilege of attending the annual meeting of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group in early December. The working group includes a broad range of stakeholders—subsistence hunters, sport hunters, hunting guides, outfitters, reindeer herders, and environmental leaders—committed to the conservation of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. Its mission is to “Develop an integrated grass roots process for sharing representation, responsibility and decision-making among stakeholders in management of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd.” Agencies from the State of Alaska and Department of the Interior meet with working group each year to update and share information.

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Seeing Southeast Alaska for the First Time

by Liz VanDenzen, Director of Field Operations, Alaska Wilderness League
Published online on October 25, 2007

The Juneau WharfRecently, I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Southeast Alaska for the first time, specifically to the state’s capital, Juneau. I was worried that I wouldn’t actually get to see Southeast because it is the rainy season in the nation’s largest intact temperate rainforest, the Tongass National Forest. I arrived late at night to overcast skies and rain, but I awakened the next day to a beautiful sunny day. I walked down to the wharf and got my first glimpse at this community squished between the water and the snowcapped peaks behind it. It is now the off-season in Juneau, the time after all the cruise ship passengers go home, so I shared the wharf only with hundreds of seagulls and a playful seal.

Liz Walking the Perserverance TrailTaking advantage of the beautiful weather and the advice of the folks at the Silverbow Inn, I headed up Gold St. until it ended and just kept walking into the Tongass National Forest and the Perserverance Trail. It seemed like around every corner there was a beautiful vista or a lush dense forest canopy and all along the way the flowing waters of Perserverance Creek into the Silverbow Basin. Along the way, I met many happy Juneau residents thankful that the sun was out, enjoying their habitat. A couple of the stores in town even put signs on their doors that read, “Closed due to the discovery of sunlight.”

 

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A long, loud howl

By Dave Shreffler, published August 14, 2007

Happy campers on the Utukok River (l to r): Kristen Miller, Jim Campbell, Carol Kasza, Tom Campion, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Chris O'Neill, Don O'Neill, and Dave Shreffler

June 2007 - Utukok River, Western Arctic, Alaska
The softness and saturation of arctic light is a photographer’s dreamscape. Photography here is like painting with light. The endless tundra is the canvas; the ever changing light the palette that conveys the mood of the landscape, bracketed by the serendipitous swishes of wildlife.

The tundra is a sprawling carpet of blooming wildflowers; the sky a 24-hour stage for dancing clouds. We’re immersed in a vast, undulating landscape, springing to life after nine months of smothering snow and ice. Lapland longspurs welcome the change with melodious rifts, as nesting plovers skitter about scolding us for coming too close.

Caribou sauntering south toward summer feeding groundsFor days on end I’ve reveled with new friends in the emerging splendor of the Utukok Uplands, a wildlife haven containing the core calving area of the 450,000 head western arctic caribou herd, the largest concentration of grizzly bears north of the Brooks Range, and healthy populations of wolves and wolverines.

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The League’s Kate Greiner: “Report from the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge”

DAY 1 (June 7, 2007):

Kate in the Arctic RefugeThis was my first time in Alaska and I was excited to see one of its most celebrated, yet most controversial wilderness areas—the 1002. It took two bush planes to get us there from Fairbanks. One from Fairbanks to Coldfoot and another from Coldfoot to our camping spot on the 1002—by the Katakturuk River (empties into Camden Bay and the Beaufort Sea), north of the Sadlerochit Mountains (northern-most range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), and about 12 miles from the coast. Read More »

Featured Blog: Ground Truth Trekking Across Alaska

Bretwood HigmanErin McKittrickKeep coming back to read the about the adventures of our friends Erin McKittrick and Bretwood Higman as they journey through Alaskan lands at the heart of controversy and share on-the-ground information, photos, and stories with the public.


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