For the first time in five years, helicopters and cowboys are rounding up cattle by the hundreds on Umnak and Unalaska islands. The Bering Pacific Ranches at Fort Glenn on Umnak Island are herding their tundra-roaming cattle to take them to market.
Alaska agriculture officials say the Bering Pacific is the state's biggest cattle operation. It's also the only one with cowboys herding by helicopter.
The only contested race on Unalaska’s ballot on Tuesday is for Seat G on the Unalaska City Council. Former police officer John Waldron is vying for the seat against longtime local politician Frank Kelty.
Both candidates are experienced politicians. Unalaska residents are familiar with Frank Kelty from eight years as a City Council member and his ten years as Mayor. John Waldron was elected to the borough assembly and school board in Yakutat and served as a police officer here in Unalaska.
The news that Shell Oil was abandoning its quest for oil in the Arctic Ocean came as a shock in Unalaska and around the state. Unalaska officials said the move won’t hit the city’s budget too hard. But local companies doing business with Shell are scrambling to figure out what it will mean for them.
Unalaska Mayor Shirley Marquardt said it will hurt the companies providing support to Shell’s Arctic effort in the short run.
After sinking eight years and more than $8 billion into the effort, Shell Oil is pulling out of the Arctic Ocean, the company announced in a press release Sunday night.
Shell officials said the company safely drilled a well 6,800 feet beneath the floor of the Chukchi Sea this summer. They found indications of oil and gas there, but not enough to warrant further exploration.
“We thought it was the potential to be a multibillion-barrel prospect,” Shell Alaska spokesperson Meg Baldino said. “That is not the case. It is not commercial.”
The Equanimity anchored off Unalaska's Town Beach. KUCB/John Ryan photo.
One of the world’s largest yachts cruised into Unalaska from the Bering Sea on Tuesday.
The Equanimity sailed down from the Arctic Ocean after crossing the Northwest Passage from Greenland, a voyage only recently made possible by a shrinking polar ice cap.
The sleek blue and white super-yacht is reportedly owned by a billionaire embroiled in a financial scandal rocking the government of Malaysia.
Biologist Ian Hewson with a striped sun star. Photo courtesy Elliot Jackson.
Starfish from Mexico to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula have been hammered by a wasting disease that causes their arms to melt into goo and fall off.
Researchers believe a virus called a densovirus is behind the widespread outbreak.
Cornell University microbiologist Ian Hewson has come to one of the last starfish strongholds, the Aleutian Islands, to suss out what makes this disease so virulent.
Whitman College geologists studying Mt. Carlisle. Photo courtesy Kristen Nicolaysen.
Scientists flock to the Aleutians every summer to study the islands’ rich wildlife, long history and active volcanoes.
For the past two summers, an interdisciplinary team has visited the Islands of the Four Mountains, in the central Aleutians, to study how resilient the earliest settlers had to be to live there thousands of years ago.
Among many finds this summer, archeologists dug up two slate ulus (crescent-shaped knives) on one of their digs on Chuginadak Island. They think the find means these ancient seafaring people were somehow trading or acquiring goods from as far as Kodiak, 700 miles away. There are no known sources of slate in the Aleutians.
Unalaska's tallest building? KUCB/John Ryan photo.
The biggest cruise ship ever to visit the Aleutian Islands pulled into Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor Tuesday morning. The floating city known as the Celebrity Millennium disgorged about 2,500 passengers and 1,000 crew. In tandem with nearly 300 passengers in town from the much smaller Le Boreal, the two cruise ships nearly doubled the population of Unalaska for the day.
For many towns in southern Alaska, the arrival of a mega cruise ship would make for an ordinary or even a slow day for tourism. Juneau can handle five big cruise ships at once. But those towns along the main cruise corridors have infrastructure for a deluge of wandering pedestrians seeking entertainment. Unalaska does not.
The Resolve Ibis at its new long-term mooring site off Unalaska's Front Beach. KUCB/John Ryan photo.
If you’ve wondered why a 200-foot orange barge has been parked in front of Unalaska’s downtown for the past week, here’s why: It’s the Resolve Ibis, and it’s the centerpiece of an effort to improve the safety of big ships passing throughout the Aleutian Islands. It could be parked there for the next five years.
The orange, boldly lettered barge is the most visible element of a private effort to improve shipping safety along the Great Circle route across the Pacific.
