WC has been a member of Alaska Conservation Foundation for decades. WC was a board member of ACF for ten years, and is a past treasurer and board chair of ACF. WC has donated thousands of dollars to ACF and its mission. At the risk of stating the obvious, WC is a strong supporter of…
This post is dedicated to the late Dr. Vera Alexander, marine scientist, equestrian, musician, philanthropist and much more. It was WC’s privilege to serve as a marine technician on the R/V Acona in 1967 on a cruise where Dr. Alexander, a newly minted PhD, did some of the original research on the relationship between Harbor…
WC was raised on salmon. Canned salmon, frozen salmon, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, dried salmon; growing up in Alaska, it was the most abundant, least expensive food and WC ate a lot of it. Based on nearly 70 years of eating all five Pacific species of salmon, there’s no question in WC’s mind that king…
WC, as readers likely suspect, is not a fan of missionaries, or at least not Christian missionaries. WC has little experience with other flavors. All too often, in their ignorance, arrogance and zeal, they have destroyed indigenous peoples and cultures. But if there has been a missionary in Alaska that WC nearly admires, it could…
WC subscribes to too many email lists. One of those email lists recently coughed up an article on the early stages of the Moravian church’s missionary experience in the Kuskokwim River delta in southwestern Alaska. “Moravians and Yup’ik on the Kuskokwim River Delta,” by Ryan Barwick has an interesting defensive tone, but is based on…
As a rule of thumb, as you head north on Alaska’s Parks Highway, things get weirder, until you reach the unpopulated Denali State Park. Palmer is different; Wasilla, a few miles further north, is pretty strange, as any reader of this blog knows. If you go a little further north, in the area represented by…
The Biden Administration has approved a somewhat scaled back version of ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Willow oil field, over the 30 years of its production, will add about half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse gases already baking our planet. The Alaska Congressional delegation was…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. This is the second part of a two-parter. Recap: Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the…
The King Cove BUCIP is tangled. It’s not possible to even briefly summarize it in a single post, or at least not in a post that’s short enough that readers would be willing to plow through it. So this is a two-parter. Why should anyone outside of Alaska care about the King Cove Road? The…
It wasn’t called Augustana Creek at the time of these events. So far as WC knows, the creek and the glacier at its head didn’t have an Anglo name. and if the Athabaskan people had a name for it, that seems to have been lost. The Richardson Highway, as it runs through the central Alaska…
WC is being deliberately vague in this post about where and when the events reported here occurred, and has altered the facts slightly to make the players difficult to identify. Their identities aren’t the point of the post. It wasn’t baby seals; it was baby sea otters, not that that’s any better. But, yes, an…
You’ve probably never heard of Thomas Lloyd, Billy Taylor, Charley McConagall or Pete Anderson. They were gold miners, who had followed the gold rush to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1903. Gold miners in Alaska in the 1900s were pretty tough. Certainly tougher than east coast poseurs like Dr. Frederick Cook, a man who didn’t climb Denali…
It was bad enough when Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy (R, Big Oil) would balance Alaska’s budgets using improbably high crude oil prices. Alaska’s state budget is funded, directly or indirectly, by crude oil. Using high crude oil prices makes the effort so much easier, even if doing so has exhausted the remainder of Alaska’s budget…
Sometimes it seems to WC he has been fighting Pebble Mine forever. But it’s only been 21 years. As has been reported here before, it’s the wrong mine, in the wrong kind of ore in the wrong place. It also seems to WC that the mine project has been “killed” at least ten times, but…
Admittedly WC is looking at this from a considerable distance. And WC is from Fairbanks, which marks WC as a rube in the minds of most Anchoragites. But, seriously, the administration of Municipality of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson is a four alarm dumpster fire.1 Bronson was elected Mayor in 2021, defeating Assemblymember (and now state…
WC briefly noted earlier that the California Bar Association had finally taken action against John Eastman. The Bar’s complaint has since been made public. WC has read it. And it is devastating. Eastman will doubtless fight the Bar’s effort a long time, but the undisputed evidence – the facts in the public record already –…
One of the more troubling aspects of the political right’s recent actions is its war against citizens. WC will draw on three specific examples from his former home state of Alaska, but the same case can be shown for other states where the political right has control of the government. The Two Rivers Fire DistrictAs…
WC has two posts today. First, WC will address the decision in Kowalke v. Eastman. Later this morning, we’ll start the end of the year series of posts. Alaska Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna has issued a ruling in the challenge to the qualifications of David Eastman to be a state legislator. Basically, Judge McKenna…
A long while back, 20 or 25 years anyway, WC was at a holiday party at a friend’s house. One of the other guests was Johne Binkley, third son of Captain and Mary Binkley, and at that point a reasonably successful politician as well as the CEO of the company that owned the Riverboat(s) Discovery…
WC has fought the Pebble Mine Project since it was first proposed. It the wrong location, the wrong kind of ore and the wrong size of mine. It’s also a gold mine, and the world really, really doesn’t need any more gold mines. If you are looking for objectivity in this post, you are reading…
The Alaska Republican Party Central Committee met earlier this month, the first meeting since the November 2022 election. We don’t know what they had for dessert, but we know what the main entrée was: crow. Great big servings of crow. Mmm. Tastes just like chicken.1 You see, the Alaska Republican Party Central Committee had censured…
When WC was younger, you could drink from a stream in Alaska without worrying about giardia, “beaver fever.” In another lamentable change for the worse in WC’s lifetime, you really, really don’t want to do that any more. It seems to be a European disease. It was first reported in the United States in Colorado…
It was the second strongest earthquake WC has experienced. Only the Good Friday Earthquake in 1964 was stronger. But the November 3, 2002 Denali Fault Quake was M 7.9, and the epicenter, under Susitna Glacier, was only 82 miles from Fairbanks. It’s worth marking the anniversary, and noting what geologists have puzzled out about the…
Gail Fenumiai, Alaska’s Director of Elections, is retiring. Actually, retiring again. Former Alaska Lt. Governor Kevin Meyer – nominally in charge of statewide elections under the Alaska Constitution – somehow persuaded her to return in 2019, four years after she had left the post. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging statewide position than Director…
Anyone who has lived in Alaska for very long knows that those poor folks in Arkansas get confused about the official abbreviation for their state and the official abbreviation for Alaska. All those “As,” Ks” and “Ss,” WC supposes. Of course, Arkansas is “AR,” and Alaska is “AK.” That kind of confusion is the only…
WC was in Denali National Park in early spring, 2012, en route via shuttle bus to Camp Denali for a meeting. On the flood plain of the Toklat River, just before the bridge, we encountered a grizzly bear sow with a second year cub foraging for Eskimo Potato quite close to the road.1 We pulled…
One of WC’s readers noted that while WC has heavily and frequently criticized Alaska’s fossil fuel-driven economy, there has been no suggestion of an alternative. WC, the reader suggests, should offer some constructive criticism for once. Okay. Here’s a 20 year plan to rebuild Alaska’s economy. It’s not going to please everybody – it likely…
Alaska has brought off its first, full general election using the ranked voting system adopted by citizen initiative back in 2020. WC has some thoughts. For good and sufficient reasons, WC doesn’t write much about The Quitter, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But WC will make a small exception here and note that Palin has…
You can make the case that some Wasillians shouldn’t be entrusted with private property. The Alaska Supreme Court’s decision last week in Evertson v. Sibley et al. would be a pretty compelling bit of evidence. Karin Eriksson,1 a mother allegedly suffering from declining mental faculties, had two children, a son named Krister and a daughter…
This post is dedicated to the late Hal Horton, because it is his fault. When WC was a shiny new attorney, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being built, and the outrageous amounts of money involved had attracted all sorts of folks to WC’s quiet little hometown, Fairbanks, Alaska. Some of those folks were determined to provide…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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