Equipped with nothing more than standard iPads and basic iMovie software, two Wrangell freshmen spent their summer turning personal curiosities into cinema. Now, their work is headed for bigger screens.

Original, short documentaries by high school freshmen Quinton Davies and Erika Jabusch have been selected for prestigious film festivals this fall and winter, marking the second consecutive year that young storytellers from the community will reach wider audiences.

Davies’ documentary, “Standing Tall in Wrangell,” will screen at the Red Nation International Film Festival in Los Angeles, which runs Nov. 6-14, with streaming into the new year.

Jabusch’s film, “New Beginnings — Zanovo, Diving Deep into the Rich Tapestry of Russian Culture,” will travel north to the Anchorage International Film Festival, running Dec. 4-13.

For middle school digital storytelling teacher Laura Davies, who volunteers her time to mentor the students, the festival selections highlight pure grit and creative determination over high-end gear. 

Quinton Davies turned his camera toward a milestone community tradition, documenting the multi-day totem raising in July 2025.

Jabusch looked inward toward family history and tradition, interviewing her mother, Natalya Jabusch, who immigrated from Russia to Alaska as a child. She also featured Valentina Bardin and Laris Bardin-Siekawitch, both immigrants as well.

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Three of the Wrangell High School students, who were honored at the regional Advancing Indigenous Science and Engineering Society science fair in Juneau in April are now heading to the nationals in Portland.

Seniors Madelyn Davies, Alana Harrison and Sophia Martinsen were scheduled to fly south on Tuesday (October 13) to present their research projects, both of which took home awards at the regional fair in Juneau.

On the evening of Oct. 7, they held a presentation at the Nolan Center to warm up for the trip.

“They did such a great job and I am looking forward to them presenting in Portland!” said their science teacher, Heather Howe, in an email the day after the presentation.  

Harrison and Martinsen collected water samples from the 10-Mile pipe — used by some residents for drinking water — and compared it to microplastic concentrations in samples from Heritage Harbor and Reliance Harbor.

Their project came out of a dual-enrollment class with the University of Alaska Fairbanks for the RASOR program, Rural Alaska Students in One Health Research. The third member of their team, Braden Howard, contributed to the research but chose not to participate in the presentations.

In her science project, Davies researched the antibiotic properties of usnea, a common lichen found throughout the Tongass National Forest. Lichen is an algae hybrid living symbiotically with fungi.

Davies was familiar with the indigenous ties of the plant and its medicinal uses. Her test showed that less bacteria grew when usnea was in the petri dishes. “Which is pretty cool if you ask me,” she said.

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The Nolan Center has a new entryway exhibit showcasing handmade pots made from rare, local clay deposits discovered within the Tongass National Forest. KSTKs Leilani Combs reports that an art teacher used the found material to share with her students the ancient art pottery.

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Wrangell’s efforts to add to its downtown waterfront, develop the former 6-Mile Mill property for a possible shipyard and replace its leaky water diversion flume to the community reservoirs will receive a $43 million boost from the federal government.

The borough applied this past spring for a federal Economic Development Administration Industry Transformation Pathway Grant.

The official announcement is not expected until later this month, but Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is in a tight reelection race, delivered the news last week.

Borough Manager Mason Villarma said the downtown waterfront project will likely start before the end of the year to add rock fill so that the property is ready for American Cruise Lines to install pilings and a floating dock in the spring for its ships to use next summer.

The waterfront work also will include extending the City Dock, but that will be separate from the immediate need to add fill for the new, smaller dock.

Design work on the large-scale redevelopment of the 6-Mile site is expected next year, with actual construction not until 2028, Villarma said.

Building a new flume to direct water into the reservoirs also needs final design and construction drawings before it can go to bid.

The federal grant would be combined with just over $10 million in borough funds to pay for the three projects.

The work at 6-Mile will include shoreline stabilization, utility extensions, roadways and power to the 42-acre site. The estimated cost totals $38.4 million, with $30.7 million from the federal grant and a borough match of $7.7 million, according to Wrangell’s grant application.

The plan is to prep the site while City Hall and JAG Marine Group, which operates shipyards in Ketchikan and Seward, go after state, federal and private funding to build a full-service shipbuilding and repair yard at the property.

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Wrangell’s tribal government, the Wrangell Cooperative Association, is taking the final steps to create a climate adaptation plan to inform Wrangell’s future. On Sept. 29, the WCA held its third and final public meeting for the plan.

The WCA’s Earth Branch has been working in partnership with Anchorage-based Two Bears Environmental Consulting to understand the changing environment and bolster community resilience.

Here is the tribe’s Earth Branch coordinator Kim Wickman.

The reality is things around us are changing, and that’s, I think, what people are starting to finally kind of connect to.

Two Bears, [web: founded by Dr. Ronni Wilcock in 2017, started the process with a listening session last October.

Jaimlyn Sypniewski is the spatial analyst and modeling lead for the company. She says that they always try to get the community’s input first, before diving into the data.

The way it starts is that we come in assuming that we have no idea what’s going on in the community. So one of the things I try very hard to do is not to Google or get any bias. They’re like, “Oh, I’m sure they’re having problems with this, that, and the other.

She says at community input sessions they heard concerns about future water availability, increasing storms, climate impacts on foraging plants like berries, and an increase in water lilies in ponds that seem to be blocking creek flows.

Sypniewski says that Two Bears’ process uses traditional ecological knowledge and anecdotal observations to structure the plan and inform the modelling. Then, if there’s a disconnect between the data and the observations, they can highlight those differences.]

Major findings in last month’s presentation included warming temperatures and increased precipitation. But not just any precipitation – it’s likely to include big rainburst events that can worsen potholes and create problems for flat-roofed buildings.

Wickman, with the tribe, says they’ll share the plan with the borough once it’s completed.

So we’re able to give this information to the city, then the city can use the information that we’ve passed on to them to help adapt their plans for how they’re planning to build roads or we can help link them with other information or grant sources.

Two Bears is allowing a month for any additional input from tribal members before providing their published report to the WCA.

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For the second year in a row, the Wrangell-Petersburg area has the lowest rental housing vacancy rate among 11 areas covered in the state’s annual survey.

The combined vacancy rate for single-family rental homes and apartments in the two communities in March 2026 was 1.1%.

That is far below the statewide median of 5.4%.

This year’s Wrangell-Petersburg vacancy rate was much tighter than the 3.4% combined rate for rentals in the two communities in the 2025 survey.

The rates were reported in the September issue of the Alaska Economic Trends magazine, produced by the Alaska Department of Labor research and analysis section.

“Every March, we survey thousands of landlords and property managers in selected areas of Alaska, in cooperation with the Alaska Housing Finance Corp.,” the report explained.

This year’s survey included 184 rental units in Wrangell and Petersburg, of which only two were vacant in March. The 2025 survey found six vacancies out of 178 surveyed units.

As tight as the rental market is in Wrangell and Petersburg, the average adjusted monthly rent in the two communities for a two-bedroom apartment— rent plus estimated utilities — was the lowest among the 11 areas covered in the state survey, at $1,288.

That is a 4.3% increase from last year.

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The Wrangell school district will receive a $608,000 grant for a new virtual-reality-based program for middle and high school students to learn about healthcare sciences and careers in nursing, emergency medicine, behavioral health, dentistry and community health.

The money will pay to buy hardware, software and curriculum, School Board President John DeRuyter said last week.

“We are hopeful to be able to begin offering the program by the end of winter or beginning of spring next year,” he said.

The Wrangell program is primarily designed for students who want to become certified nursing assistants or pursue other medical careers. Through the virtual-reality platform the district would purchase, students would study detailed, interactive 3D anatomical models guided by virtual lessons from medical experts, according to Wrangell’s grant application.

The district’s grant request was one of 32 selected in the latest round of federally funded Rural Health Transformation Program awards, announced earlier this month by the Alaska Department of Health. This round, the fifth so far, awarded $25.8 million in grants, bringing the total to more than $207 million to date.

The latest round of awards in Alaska will go to projects focused on improving health access, nutrition, telehealth services, healthcare infrastructure, workforce development and more.

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Student scientists from the Wrangell High School Shakes Glacier monitoring team and University of Oregon graduate student Victoria Benson, last week, gave a two-part presentation on the nearby Shakes Glacier.

Together, their research showed how the glacier – located just up the Stikine River – has changed over time and the mechanisms impacting its behavior today.

Silje Morse, a high school junior, shares.

In Alaska, there are an estimated 100,000 glaciers, and despite this, there are roughly 27,000 recognized glacier bodies, which are the larger ones. Only about a third of glaciers in Alaska have actual names.

Shakes Glacier drains from the Stikine Icefield and terminates at Shakes Lake. Senior Andrei Bardin-Siekawitch says they’ve seen big changes.

The glacier has receded about 10,000 feet, or 1.9 miles, since 1999 through 2023. It has recessed 7,500 feet since 2011, when the Stikine River glacier survey started.

Graduate student Victoria Benson’s research focuses specifically on glaciers that terminate into a lake. She says the research shows that while marine glaciers are losing mass, lake-terminating glaciers have lost a lot more by comparison.

Her work compared the behavior of two Southeast Alaska glaciers – Shakes and Mendenhall, in Juneau.

They mapped the topography underneath the lakes to better understand what characteristics might be at play. Benson explains.

We can collect water depth by having basically a big fish finder or a sonar that can tell us how deep the water is.

They then measured the water temperature and how much sediment was suspended in the water column at different depths to build a temperature profile of the lake.

Benson says that the water at Mendenhall became cooler throughout the summer. This indicated that increased summer glacier melt was cooling the system.

But Shakes Lake showed the opposite behavior. The lake warmed through the season, as would be expected in a non-glacier lake. Benson says that doesn’t mean the glacier was not melting. She says the lake may be too big for glacier melt to dramatically change its temperature.

To address whether there is melt happening, they were able to map the front of the glacier using drones, which showed caves forming in the base of the glacier face. She says that, along with the mildly cooler temperatures near the face and increased sediment in the water,  showed there was likely glacier melt coming out through cracks at the base of the glacier.

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Crab fishing is practically synonymous with Southeast Alaska, but in recent years the Dungeness crab fishery has become less reliable. Many say that recovered sea otter populations are responsible for the decline.

Now, after the summer Dungeness season closed 20 days early, Wrangell is seeking a local disaster declaration. Here’s Wrangell Borough Manager Mason Villarma.

There’s been little to zero action at a regional level to address the sea otter issue, and there’s not very many avenues to work within and get some sort of relief. The salmon fishermen get relief all the time, so why not the shell fishermen?

He was speaking at an August 25 borough assembly meeting.  The borough assembly voted unanimously in support of  a local disaster declaration after the Dungeness closure.

The declaration is intended to bring federal relief to crab fishermen and catalyze the formation of a Southeast shellfish fishing association.

Sea otters are voracious eaters that must consume up to 30% of their body weight – that’s around 25 pounds of food daily for a large male. Their diet consists primarily of shellfish, including clams, oysters, and crabs.

As otters have rebounded from near extinction, they’ve needed more and more food to support their population. In recent years, this has put them directly at odds with Alaska crab fishermen.

The Wrangell assembly vote approves the Borough to ask Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy to support and request a federal fishery resource disaster determination.  If the U.S. government approves a disaster declaration, it could bring financial compensation for the 60 Dungeness crab permit holders residing in Wrangell.

But Villarma says that he understands federal support could be difficult to secure.

What we’ve seen under this administration is a low chance or probability for fishery disasters to be subsidized.

Even without federal support, Villarma says the declaration brings more awareness to the issues fishermen face. It also may push the formation of a shellfish-specific fishing association in Southeast Alaska, which doesn’t exist.

There is currently no such association in the region like there are for seiners, gillnetters, long-liners, and fish processors. Associations like this can give fishermen more agency in addressing issues concerning their livelihood. It can also allow them to pressure government organizations like the National Marine Fisheries Service to fulfill mandated stock assessments and population surveys.

Villarma says the borough will be bringing in an expert to work with fishermen over the next few months to discuss such an organization. He says it will be up to participating groups to decide what the makeup of that association will be.

Whatever the form. I would imagine that it’s going to be a broad array of different user types, but the fishermen being probably the strongest sub user in the association.

The disaster declaration isn’t the first resolution to address the sea otter issue. Last year, Wrangell, Haines and Petersburg passed resolutions seeking a sea otter management plan and for the federal government to relax sea otter protections under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

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Southeast Alaska has seen several geohazards recently – glacial flooding last month in Juneau, a landslide-driven tsunami last year in Tracy Arm, and a deadly landslide in Wrangell in 2023. That followed deadly landslides in Sitka, Haines and Ketchikan in the last decade.

To learn how to prepare for such events, Wrangell residents gathered at City Hall last week for presentations from experts on earthquake, tsunami and landslide risks and preparedness.

The first presentation, given by the Alaska team for the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program, showed attendees how earthquakes can drive tsunamis and why the waves are so destructive.

I think it’s important to stress that it is a misconception that communities in the Southeast are completely protected from tsunamigenic earthquakes.

Barrett Salisbury is the hazard program manager at the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

Salisbury says several earthquake scenarios could directly affect Wrangell Island, including quakes from the Aleutian subduction zone, the Haida Gwaii section of the Queen Charlotte Fault offshore British Columbia and activity in the Cascadian Subduction Zone in the Pacific Northwest.

These scenarios will be included in a report that Salisbury and his colleagues are preparing, along with draft maps to provide the borough with the information needed for hazard planning.

Once approved, those maps will also be published for the public at DGGS.Alaska.gov.

The report will also show potential tsunami inundation lines, where the top of the flood waters may reach on the island, which will allow the borough to establish tsunami evacuation routes.

The landslide presentation was given by Jill Nicolazzo, a geological engineer with the Alaska Landslide Hazards Program. Nicolazzo shared models created after Wrangell’s landslide three years ago that killed six people.

The maps showed that – like most other islands in Southeast – the risk for landslides is higher on the western-facing slopes, which are more exposed to ocean winds and storms. This is also where most of the island’s population resides.

The modeling also found that the steeper the landscape, the higher the landslide risk – and that there is a high correlation of landslides and proximity to creeks and waterways.

Landslide Program Manager Molly McCreary says that someone asked after the presentation why they mapped the whole island.

Doing the whole island is good because also people recreate and they drive anywhere there’s a road. So just to keep people aware of the hazards in these areas, I think is the main purpose. But also maybe they can use the map in a productive way to one, be informed and also two, maybe I was thinking of building here and maybe I want to alter my plan.

She says that while the maps’ intended purpose is to inform development, they can also be used to inform people recreating in the backcountry where there may be increased danger during periods of high rainfall.

Mike Lucio is the geohazards mitigation coordinator for the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

We want everyone to be aware of what’s going on, but we also want people to be well educated, understand what’s going on, so we’re not talking from a place of fear or a place of misconceptions or bad information.

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