The borough assembly last week unanimously approved a 40-year property lease for a new marine freight terminal at the former 6-Mile Mill property.

Alaska Marine Lines plans to construct and operate a barge ramp and shipping yard as a permanent replacement for the aging borough-owned downtown barge ramp that previously handled the community’s cargo.

Ryan Dixon, media director for Lynden, the parent company of AML, said in an email on Monday: “We currently expect to have designs ready this fall so we can apply for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ permit.”

He added that the permit will likely take a year for approval.

“Once the design and cost estimates have been determined,” Dixon said, “we will be able to make a final decision on moving ahead with the project and what the timeline would look like.”

Under the terms of the 40-year lease, which will begin July 1, AML will pay a base rent of $1 annually. Borough officials noted that the shipping company assumes all financial responsibility for building, maintaining and operating the facility.

The post AML & Wrangell Borough move forward with property lease appeared first on KSTK.

The borough assembly has unanimously voted down a proposed land lease for a privately run data center. The assembly on June 9 went with the manager’s recommendation to retain the waterfront property for future maritime industry expansion.

Borough Manager Mason Villarma recommended rejecting the lease application from Greensparc, which was looking to build a 10,000-square-foot facility on borough-owned land at the 6-Mile Mill deepwater port site.

The project would have been the company’s second venture in Alaska, following a smaller data center installed in Cordova last year.

Public opposition to the data center in Wrangell focused on concerns over power consumption and environmental issues, with residents airing their complaints on social media and at an assembly meeting.

Villarma told assembly members last week that the 6-Mile site is one of the borough’s most valuable industrial waterfront assets. Because of its deepwater access, upland acreage and proximity to marine operations, the site is uniquely suited for maritime uses that cannot be easily located elsewhere in the community.

The post Wrangell Borough Assembly votes NO on data center proposal appeared first on KSTK.

An employee at the Tyee Lake hydroelectric power station was injured on June 11 and flown to Wrangell for medical care.

The Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department transported the worker to the hospital, arriving at the Wrangell Medical Center less than two hours after the initial call of the injury at the Tyee power station, about 45 air miles from Wrangell.

Neither the fire department nor the Southeast Alaska Power Agency, which operates the Tyee Lake facility, disclosed the nature or extent of the worker’s injury, or the worker’s name.

“The patient was reported to be in stable condition at the time care was transferred to hospital staff,” Wrangell Fire Chief Jordan Buness said in a statement on Monday, June 15.

“Our primary focus is our employee’s well-being, and we are heartened by their positive prognosis,” Robert Siedman, chief executive officer of the regional power agency, said in a statement on Tuesday, June 16.

“We are conducting a thorough review to determine the exact circumstances and identify any additional safety measures we can implement,” Siedman said.

The Ketchikan-based Southeast Alaska Power Agency operates the Tyee Lake hydro power project for Wrangell and Petersburg, and the Swan Lake hydro power station serving Ketchikan.

The Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department received the initial call at 9:39 a.m. on June 11, and used a member-owned aircraft to quickly fly emergency medical personnel to the work site. The aircraft and personnel were airborne 11 minutes after the call, Buness said.

Emergency personnel “conducted assessment and treatment, and prepared the patient for transport,” according to the fire chief’s statement, arriving back in Wrangell about an hour after they landed at the Tyee airstrip.

“No further information regarding the patient’s condition will be released out of respect for privacy,” Buness said.

The post Tyee Worker Injured & Flown to Wrangell appeared first on KSTK.

The Anan Wildlife Observatory bear cameras are online for a third summer, with the hard work of students participating in the Teaching Through Technology program.

Wrangell T3 students returned earlier this month from their third year of field work to set up the cameras to livestream the black and brown bears of Anan Creek. With support from the international nonprofit explore.org, which hosts the livestream, and the U.S. Forest Service Wrangell Ranger District, the T3 students designed and installed the camera systems that provide four different views of the creek.

The cams at Anan are the only student-run cameras of all of the sites hosted on explore.org, which shares a variety of wildlife livestreams. 

Around 390,000 viewers tuned to the Anan cams throughout the first season, but that number more than doubled in its second year with 890,000 total viewers. 

The livestream is available at friendsofanan.org.

Anan is among Wrangell’s top visitor attractions.

The first year, the students designed and installed the system from scratch, with two cameras. They then added two more cameras the second year to add more views of the bears. This year, the students focused on making things look more professional after cleaning up wire debris and other damage caused by winter storms.

There are four cameras streaming at Anan currently, with plans to add a fifth at the top of the waterfall in the future. 

The post Streaming Live From Anan appeared first on KSTK.

Listen to Andre and Anika with this week’s Recreation and Road Report.

Road Conditions/Construction and Logging Activity:

• Middle ridge road is closed until repairs can be completed next year.
• The mainline, McCormick creek road, #6265, is washed out and impassable at mile post 13, just past the highbush lake road.
• The Highbush lake road, #50040, has a slide across it but is passable to high clearance vehicles.
• The Nemo loop road, #6267, has a slide across it but is passable to high clearance vehicles. 
• Contracts are in the works but repairs will not happen until much later in the year.
• Please stay safe out there!

Anan Wildlife Observatory:  

• The Anan Rangers are busy getting the deck and trail ready for the permit season. Rangers have seen a few black bears eating sedge and skunk cabbage as well as two brown bears so far.  One of the black bears has triplets! Very exciting! 
• The T3 students have been working with Explore.org to get the camera reconnected and ready for the season. Yesterday, cameras officially went live. Find the livestream feed on Explore.org!
• Anan Wildlife Observatory permit season starts July 5th.  There are still permits available for most days on recreation.gov if you have your own boat/floatplane to get there.  If there are no more permits available on recreation.gov for the day you are interested in, 4 permits each day are available through weekly lotteries.
• All lottery requests must be made in person at the Wrangell Ranger District office. Weekly requests will be collected by Mondays at 4:30 and awarded on Tuesdays by noon.  

The request schedule for this week is as follows:

• For those who will need to purchase transportation to Anan, please contact an authorized guide directly for both passage and permits.

Recreational Reminders:

• The rec crew repaired the Yunshookuh loop campground road last week.
• Áax’w Sáani (Little Lake) cabin construction has begun. Expect short traffic delays on FS road# 6277. 
• WCA crew is working on rec site and trails out the road on wrangell island. Getting site ready for the summer season. 
• Thank you to everyone who showed up to Pats lake family Fishing day! Special thank you to the Department of Fish and Game and the WCA for helping make the event so great!
• Forest Explorers and Reading with a Ranger starts this week! The Rangers hope to see you there for some summer outdoor fun! 

This announcement is courtesy of KSTK and your Wrangell Ranger District.

The post Rec & Road Report – June 15th through 19th appeared first on KSTK.

Trucks and service vehicles of all sizes will be in the parking lot next to Volunteer Park for the annual Touch-a-Truck event 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.

Kids, and adults, are welcome to walk around, climb inside and take a seat in bulldozers, dump trucks, police cruisers and fire engines.

Organizers note there is a strong chance a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter will make an appearance, unless the crew is called to an emergency.

There is no admission fee for the community event.

And while trucks and sirens can be loud, Touch-a-Truck organizers have set aside a quiet hour for the second half of the event — no horns allowed from noon to 1 p.m.

This weekend’s event has expanded from past years to feature community vendors for the first time.

The post Annual Touch-a-Truck event June 20th!! appeared first on KSTK.

It’s almost time to watch the bears enjoy their time feasting on salmon at Anan Creek.

The Anan Wildlife Observatory’s bear cameras will go live on Monday, June 15.

Over the past two weeks, Wrangell students worked with the statewide high school tech program T3 Alaska and the U.S. Forest Service to get the Anan bear livestream cameras up and running. 

According to the student team, the work included seasonal maintenance of broken equipment after a harsh winter; installation of a new junction box and wiring conduit; installation of a new microphone at the lower photo blind; and beginning the installation of an underwater salmon camera.

The livestream feeds and more information about Anan are available at the Friends of Anan website: friendsofanan.org

This is the third year of the livestream bear cams at Anan, which debuted in 2024 in a cooperative effort between the students, the Forest Service and international wildlife nonprofit explore.org.

The post Friends of Anan excited for upcoming season! appeared first on KSTK.

Though school is out for the summer, the student gardens at Evergreen Elementary are just getting started and need tending.

Fifth-grade teacher Holly Padilla acknowledged that the growing season doesn’t necessarily fit the school calendar.

She says, “We can get started in the spring with our classes, and they do the harvest in the fall, but there’s a long summer stretch without much student participation. I’d love to find a couple of community champions.”

The gardens have a long history at the school, starting in the late 1990s as the Evergreen Agricultural Testing Site, or EATS, relying on community support and business donations. Over the years, primary oversight has passed to the greenest thumbs among teachers and staff.

Each class will get a particular part of the harvest to use in making a dish for an open house in the fall. Current plantings include strawberries, squash, tomatoes, zucchini, melons, green beans, peppers, basil, beets, potatoes, romaine lettuce, chives, garlic, rhubarb, radishes, carrots and celery.

There is also a range of flowers.

The post Elementary School Garden Needs Summer Volunteers appeared first on KSTK.

Sue Bahleda interviews Larry Persily on his 50th anniversary of owning the Wrangell Sentinel. Get the behind-the-scenes scoop on what it has been like to own, publish and write for the Sentinel. Plus, hear about a couple of amazing reports that truly stand out.

The post Talk on the Rock – Larry Persily’s 50th Anniversary of Purchasing the Wrangell Sentinel appeared first on KSTK.

The assembly has scheduled a public hearing for Tuesday, June 9, on two separate requests to lease borough property at the 6-Mile Mill site for a small-scale data center and for a new barge landing and freight yard.

The public hearing will start at 6 p.m.

Greensparc, the California-based company that proposed last summer to build a small data center in Wrangell, ran into significant local opposition. Residents spoke of their concerns about possible noise and whether the draw on the power grid would create shortages during times of peak demand in the community.

“This town is not super-stoked on the data center,” Borough Manager Mason Villarma said at an assembly meeting in April.

The other request on the June 9 assembly agenda to lease borough-owned property is from Alaska Marine Lines, which proposes to build and operate a barge ramp and freight yard at the 6-Mile waterfront.

AML’s privately owned operation would replace the borough-owned barge ramp next to the City Dock downtown. The borough shut down that ramp more than a year ago after an engineer’s inspection discovered corrosion and deformed steel and determined that the almost half-century-old steel ramp was unsafe to use.

AML applied last fall to lease a few acres of borough tidelands at the former mill site for a 120-foot-long ramp and four mooring dolphins at the northern end of the property.

The post Public Hearings on Two, 6-Mile Land Use Proposals appeared first on KSTK.