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A bell recovered from a Southeast Alaska shipwreck that claimed 112 lives more than a century ago rang Thursday, May 29, for the first time in 117 years, signaling its future role in a Wrangell maritime tradition. Jeanie Arnold, director of the Nolan Center, struck the bell at the close of a community presentation, marking a significant moment for the artifact. If the bell can be restored in time, it will be used to ring out names at the community's annual blessing of the fleet in 2026. The...
WRANGELL — The Wrangell Borough Assembly has approved a $2.296 million contract to construct gravel streets and install buried utility lines at the Alder Top Village (Keishangita.’aan) subdivision near Shoemaker Bay, almost $400,000 more than the engineers estimate of $1.9 million. The contract with Petersburg-based Rock-N-Road Construction, which was the only bidder on the job, will push total development costs for the 20 residential lots to about $4.1 million, more than double what the borough hopes to recover from the land sale. The bor...
WRANGELL - Alaska Airlines has been flying the "milk run" for decades, serving the string of Southeast communities between Ketchikan and Juneau, but this weekend will be the first flight for the Milk Run Music Festival in Wrangell. Two days of music, food booths, corn hole competition, kids events and more are planned for Friday and Saturday, May 2-3, in front of the City Dock. The Nolan Center is the backup plan if the rain gets to be too much. "We're hoping for great weather," said Reme...
WRANGELL — More than five dozen high school students from around Southeast, along with their art teachers, will be busy painting, inking, printing, beading, knitting and more during Artfest, a four-day series of workshops in Wrangell this week. Artfest will run Thursday through Sunday, April 24-27, at the high school, with an art show open to the public from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Sunday, said Tawney Crowley, the Wrangell School District’s art teacher. The festival for Southeast students started in 1997 when Wrangell art teacher Kirk Garbisch helped or...
WRANGELL - Without a real plan, Olivia Strano found herself in the right place at the right time. When she walked away from her work as a yacht stewardess and onto a Wrangell dock last summer, she felt she had found her home. "I've been searching for my place for 10 years, and Wrangell is everything I've been looking for," she said. While she was working a variety of jobs to make ends meet, she asked locals what was something that Wrangell needed but didn't have. Music, music venues and more...
WRANGELL — Jacob Vibbert, of Cheney, Washington, has been charged with illegally killing a mountain lion on the south end of Wrangell Island. According to the state’s report, Vibbert shot the mountain lion on June 3, 2024. There is no mountain lion hunting season in Alaska. The offense, a misdemeanor, can be punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $25,000. Vibbert was charged in January; his arraignment was scheduled for March 4 at the Wrangell courthouse. The kill was reported by Charles Davis, who was hunting and sport fishin...
WRANGELL — The Alaska district attorney’s office has dropped drug-related charges against Wrangell residents Cooper Seimears, 39, Jacob Marshall, 29, and McKenna Harding, 29. Marshall remained in custody as of Feb. 21 for violating his terms of release on a previous charge, while Seimears was released once the charges were dropped. Harding was the sole defendant to post bail before the charges were dropped on Feb. 13. The initial charges came after police executed dual search warrants on the Seimears residence at 820 Zimovia Ave. and the Hardin...
WRANGELL — Tidal Network is scheduled to break ground for construction of its first permanent wireless internet tower on Feb. 19. Tidal Network is the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida’s broadband internet service company. After receiving a $50 million federal grant to construct 20 towers across Southeast, the company pinpointed Wrangell as the host site for its first tower. The ceremony is scheduled for 2 p.m. at the 3-Mile location where the tower will be constructed. The “groundbreaking” ceremony will be mostly symbolic: Tidal Network...
It’s time to expand the generating capacity at the Tyee Lake hydroelectric station to handle growing demand — particularly from heat pumps — the plant’s operator said of its plans to line up $20 million in funding and a federal permit to add a third turbine to the facility. The Tyee Lake station started supplying Wrangell and Petersburg in 1984. It was built with two turbines rated at 10 megawatts each, with an empty bay at the Bradfield Canal facility to add a third turbine when needed. That time is now, said Robert Siedman, chief executi...
WRANGELL — The Wrangell Police Department successfully executed a dual search warrant on Jan. 28 after a month-long investigation into a local drug ring. Cooper Seimears, 39, Jacob Marshall, 29, and McKenna Harding, 29, were charged and arrested following the 8 a.m. search warrant execution. Seimears and Marshall face eight drug-related felony charges and one misdemeanor. Harding faces drug-related charges of one felony and one misdemeanor, though she and Marshall, her fiancée, each face two additional misdemeanors for keeping drugs near th...
WRANGELL - As voices became hushed and the crowd waited for the ceremony to begin, a toddler mumbled an inaudible question to their mother. Amid a sea of people packed into Wrangell's Nolan Center, the woman's response was clear and without question. "The Army killed our people here," she said, "and now they're going to say sorry." The U.S. Army apologized for the 1869 bombardment of the Tlingit village called Ḵaachx̱aana.áakʼw at a ceremony on Saturday, Jan. 11, in Wrangell. Of the seven Tlin...
WRANGELL — The mayor convened the public workshop, inviting Washington state-based entrepreneur Dale Borgford to lay out for borough officials his plans to build biomass boilers that would burn trash from around Southeast to heat large commercial greenhouses at the site of the former 6-Mile mill. He also wants to build a plant capable of filling large plastic bottles with 40,000 gallons a day of clean water from a creek at the north end of the property, or from rainwater if the creek flow is insufficient. And his list includes a plant to turn f...
WRANGELL - On Saturday, Jan. 11, the U.S. Army will issue a formal apology to the community for its December 1869 bombardment of Wrangell's Tlingit village, Ḵaachx̱aana.áakʼw. This is the third recent military apology to Southeast communities after the Navy apologized last fall for its attacks on Kake (1869) and Angoon (1882). Given the rarity of these admissions of guilt, there is little precedent for the structure of the event, meaning the planning - at least for the Wrangell apology - was...
WRANGELL - Next time your friend asks for a ride to the airport, say yes. You might be their only hope. After two years in service, Tiny's Taxi turned off the ignition for the last time on Dec. 31. Tiny's has been the island's sole taxi service since Johnny Cab ceased operations last summer. "It's been an incredible journey," Tiny's founder Mike Lewis said. "I've met some amazing people and made some amazing friends. (I've) played catchup with a lot of the old-school locals after 30 years of...
WRANGELL - It was 1869 and smoke filled the winter air. Cannon balls ripped through Tlingit homes while U.S. Army shells shrieked across the sky. The same type of artillery used against the Confederates just four years prior was now turned on the Tlingit people of Wrangell, in their homeland which they called Ḵaachx̱aana.áakʼw. One hundred and fifty-five years later, the U.S. Army is apologizing. The apology is scheduled to take place in Wrangell on Jan. 11, 2025. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Army...
WRANGELL — Tidal Network is operating in its test mode, with about a dozen Wrangell households trying out the new wireless internet service provided by the Central Council Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Wrangell is the first location in Southeast to get the new service, which is funded by a federal grant for construction and later will be expanded across the region. During the testing phase, technicians will be “breaking it to fix it,” looking to maximize the signals’ range and finding the best system for managing the fiber optic a...
WRANGELL - Kids keep asking John Schank if he's Santa. "I can't lie to them," he laughed. "But I say, 'I'm just his helper.'" John Schank is 72. He has a big white beard and has been driving for Lynden Transport for 49 years. He and Fred Austin, another longtime Lynden driver, are transporting the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree and its 82-foot sled - trailer - from Seattle to Washington, D.C. This is Schank's second time driving The People's Tree from Alaska to Washington, D.C. He was selected to d...
It seemed everyone in Wrangell piled into to the Nolan Center to witness the blessing of the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree. Led by the Wrangell Cooperative Association, the event was moved indoors after a persistent storm turned a cloudy afternoon into a rainy one. The event was attended by folks from Wrangell, from throughout Alaska and from Washington, D.C. Even Smokey the Bear made a surprise appearance. Kate Thomas, the borough's economic development director, played emcee for the afternoon,...
Two thousand and ninety to one. Those were the odds of winning the only elk-hunting permit on Zarembo Island this year — the first time in nearly 20 years the state Board of Game has permitted elk hunting on Zarembo after they were urged to do so by the Wrangell Fish and Game Advisory Committee. Quite literally against all odds, Wrangell resident Curtis Kautz won the lottery. His prize? A 31-day window to try and bag a creature Kautz described as smart, skittish and fast. "They're hard to s...
WRANGELL – The borough wants a data center to plug into Wrangell. Better yet, it could even move into the unused formal hospital property. Data centers are large hosting sites for multiple servers that provide computing power and storage for cloud-based service providers. While at Southeast Conference, held in Ketchikan last month, borough representatives spoke with Sam Enoka, founder and CEO of Greensparc — a San Francisco-based technology company that specializes in setting up modular, small-scale data centers for cloud computing. Enoka gre...
WRANGELL — Though it was important to pinpoint the exact location and extent of damage to the community’s wastewater outfall pipeline into Zimovia Strait, officials also discovered that the 12-inch plastic pipe and the seabed around it have become home to hundreds of sea cucumbers. “Over the years and years, wildlife has figured it out,” Tom Wetor, the borough’s Public Works director, said Sept. 26. Sea cucumbers, a bottom-dwelling invertebrate, proliferate around the nutrient-rich waters near the diffuser end of the outfall line, he said. “I...
Wrangell is trading in the stormy skies of Seattle and heading east, hoping for favorable tourism trade winds in Chicago. For the first time in two decades the borough will not send any representatives to the Seattle Boat Show. Instead, the Economic Development Department has elected to attend the Travel and Adventure Show in Chicago. The two-day event kicks off on Feb. 1 of next year. Economic Development Director Kate Thomas said she expects an audience as large as 19,000 travel enthusiasts and an additional 2,000 to 3,000 attendees who work...
WRANGELL — The borough hopes to learn this week the exact location and condition of the kinked blockage in the treatment plant outfall pipeline that has forced a temporary solution — discharging the wastewater on the beach near City Park. “It’s essentially been bent in half,” Public Works Director Tom Wetor said of the 12-inch-diameter plastic pipe, which was hooked Aug. 30 by a boat anchor and damaged as the anchor line was being pulled up. Repairs could take a couple of months, he said Sept. 6. It just depends on how much work is needed. T...
WRANGELL - The Oakland Museum of California has housed the Kadashan cane for the past 65 years. Now, with help from the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, the five-foot cedar cane is due to arrive in Wrangell in the coming days. Lu Knapp, a direct descendant of Chief John Kadashan, was thrilled when she learned of the cane's imminent return. "It just gives me a really good feeling hearing that it's coming back," Knapp said. "It was my great-grandfather's!" While any...
So, you want to see bears at the Anan Wildlife Observatory. But maybe you couldn't get one of the limited number of permits, or you live out of town and can't make the trip, or maybe you are a little more afraid of them than you care to admit. But now, thanks to the U.S. Forest Service, explore.org and 14 Wrangell high school students in the T3 Program, anyone worldwide can view Anan's fish-crazed black and brown bears. Last week, after months of preparation, planning and prototyping, the two...
