Alaska Dispatch

Former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens announced today that he now supports an in-state gas line to transport natural gas to Kenai and Valdez, where it would be processed into liquefied natural gas and exported to China, Japan and South Korea.

"Our state should set aside AGIA and build a bullet line as soon as possible," Stevens said.

Stevens' announcement at a Commonwealth North luncheon surprised the crowd. In recent years Stevens has supported a gas line that would carry Alaska's natural gas from the North Slope down to the Midwest.

Stevens said he changed his mind because the Lower 48 no longer has enough demand for natural gas to support a gas pipeline.

After the luncheon, Stevens said his vision is for a gas line to be built from the North Slope to Fairbanks, where it would split into two lines. The two lines would go to Kenai and Valdez, where the gas would be liquefied and exported. The line to Kenai would also provide natural gas for the Southcentral market, he said.

"I've never seen such a magnificent opportunity to develop our resources," Stevens said. "If we don't act soon, that window of opportunity will be closed."

News of this has been scarce in Alaska, but Alaska's 2010 Arctic Winter Games team is doing very well in Grande Prairie, Alberta. CBC News (Canada) has a story up headlined with Team Alaska's dominance, but scarcely mentions it after that. At the beginning of the fourth day of competition (3/10), Alaska's athletes have won a total of 98 ulus (equivalent to medals in the Olympics), 33 of them gold. So far, Team Alaska has won medals in, among other events, cross-country skiing sprints, snowboarding, ski and snowshoe biathlon, figure skating, two-foot high-kick, kneel jump, one-hand reach and wrestling. What's more, Team Alaska's Bantam and Midget men's hockey teams notched simultaneous shut-out wins against Team Alberta on Monday. Read more and see some photos at Team Alaska's news page, here, and go to the 2010 Arctic Winter Games site to see updated ulu (medal) standings and details about Alaska's individual ulu winners. Although the CBC article we mentioned earlier contains little news of Alaskans, it's worth a read, and the video in the upper right corner of the page gives a great, 11-minute-long look at the competition (our favorite was the segment on the Dene hand games), complete with neat interviews of young people from remote parts of Canada. Find that video, here.

[update, 3/12]: Team Alaska is continuing to make a very strong showing in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Now, Alaska's ulu-count has climbed to 203, with 68 of them gold. All of the above Arctic Winter Games links lead to updated pages, so feel free to click on them. Since our last post, Alaska's team has added gold medals in Alaskan high-kick, One-foot high kick and many others. Of particular note is Team Alaska's own Celina Brown's excellent performance in Junior Female Gymnastics. She has won four gold ulus (including the overall individual gold and a share of Alaska's team gold) and one bronze. According to her Arctic Winter Games bio, Brown's goals for the games were to "do as best as I can and represent my gym (Arctic Gymnastics Center) and country with honor." Learn more about her, here. The Arctic Winter Games wraps up with gold ulu matches in team gymnasium sports on Saturday (3/13). Alaska's Junior and Juvenile Female and Junior Male indoor soccer teams are in the final matches, so keep your fingers crossed.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, in a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Attorney General Dan Sullivan, two Anchorage senators criticized his role in the state's repeated intervention in an tribal adoption case involving a child from the village of Kaltag. Despite the criticism, however, the senators voted with the rest of the committee to send Sullivan's nomination to the full Legislature. Read more here.

According to The Associated Press (via the Anchorage Daily News), the division of the United States Department of Justice that investigates cases of public corruption is getting a new leader, Jack Smith, and a new principal deputy, Raymond Hulser. The new leadership comes amid an ongoing probe in the agency's conduct in the trial of former Sen. Ted Stevens, and ends months that the agency has operated without a permanent head. Read the AP brief here, and read a longer item by The Washington Post. The latter contains some good background and was posted before the announcement became official.

According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, when the McCartys of Fairbanks came home from vacation, they found a big hassle in their backyard: a yearling moose that had apparently died of natural causes. With fat reserves sinking low, late Winter and early Spring are tough times of year for moose. Since there appeared to be no reason for Fish and Game or Alaska Wildlife Troopers to investigate the death, the carcass became the McCartys' responsibility. They had a couple of options. One was to move the carcass to state land, where it could fulfill its destiny as a carcass in peace. The other was to call up people who might want to salvage the meat, such as trappers or mushers. The McCartys preferred option two and put the word out. They got quite a few responses, but the trapper who came to salvage the meat discovered it was spoiled but agreed to dispose of it anyway. Read much more here. Alaska Beat's favorite part was the wildlife trooper's reason why mushers usually have a hard time getting permits to salvage unwanted moose meat.

According to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, the state Board of Agriculture and Conservation has given Valley Creamery, Inc. (the company created in 2008 to provide a market for local dairy farmers when Matanuska Maid went under) a new $200,000 loan to keep it meeting financial obligations. Recently, a new legislative report indicates that the company may not have put up sufficient collateral to secure previous loans. A portion of the new loan will go to pay off the balance of a previous loan, and some of it will go to pay debts owed to farmers. Read more here. And, listen to APRN's report here.

According to many sources, authorities believe that a traveling Special Education teacher for the Lake and Peninsula Borough School District who was found dead recently near the community of Chignik Lake may have been the victim of an animal attack while jogging, likely a wolf. The matter is still being investigated, so there's no official word on how the 32-year-old woman originally from Slippery Rock, Penn., died. However, locals had been on watch for aggressive wolves in recent days, and, according to KTUU-TV, the people who found the woman's body while returning from clam digging say that a wolf stalked one of them earlier in the day. The district's chief operating officer told the Anchorage Daily News that she had just arrived to the village on her work-circuit, and was probably ignorant of the local caution. Read more from KTUU's early report, here, and a similar report from KTVA-TV, wherein officials express more certainty about the cause of death, here. And read the longest report about this investigation we've seen yet, by the Anchorage Daily News, here. Be sure to read the comments section beneath that last one. Some rural residents (including, ostensibly, the hunter who was bitten near moose camp last year by a rabid wolf) chimed in with good information and perspectives.

According to several Iditarod mushers who gave APRN a look into their mp3 players, music is a useful companion out on the trail. Zack Steer will be rocking some Guns n' Roses and hits by Van Halen. Kristy Berington said she listens to punk rock when she needs a boost, and plugs in something mellower, like Willie Nelson, if she just wants to take it easy. Hugh Neff said he picks his playlist with his dogs in mind too, to help keep their energy up as well as his own. All of the mushers APRN spoke to are taking eclectic mixes with them, but Alaska Beat's favorite was Martin Buser's; he said his family fills up his iPod for him with a little bit of everything, and he doesn't listen to it for months before he hits the trail so that everything is fresh for him. Buser also said his dogs share his tunes, and sometimes when a live track comes on and a recorded crowd starts cheering, his veteran dogs start to think they've already made it to Nome. Watch (yes, it's a video report) more here.

Apparently, the future looks bright for at least one Alaska city. For its March issue, Sunset magazine named 20 of "the West's most innovative cities," and (don't be shocked), Fairbanks made the list at #13. Alaska's Golden Heart City was named a city of the future mainly because of the University of Alaska Fairbanks being a center for Arctic research and being home to the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. Find the index page for all the cities here.

According to The Associated Press (via the Anchorage Daily News), changes coming to federal law will soon allow people to possess loaded firearms inside the borders of many of America's national parks, including a few in Alaska that previously prohibited them. Although carrying a loaded gun will soon be allowed, discharging a firearm inside their borders will still be prohibited. A spokeswoman for Glacier Bay National Park in Southeast Alaska told the AP that she's not worried about Alaskans: "People in Alaska walk around with firearms so we are a little bit different." But she is worried about visitors from Outside misinterpreting the behavior of bears and shooting at them without cause. Read more here. She's right, though, Alaskans are different. We know that a person should keep at least 100 feet away from a tidewater glacier when trying to make it calve with 12-gauge slugs. And we know that no one appreciates a bullet-riddled sign unless the holes form a Big Dipper.