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Feature Story: 75 Hours at Sea on the Columbia; End to end in Southeast Alaska, Possibly for the last time BY DAVE KIFFER - When the State Ferry workers went on strike this summer, one of my friends - who obviously needs to get out more - was surprised.

"My gosh," she said.  "I didn't even know we still had a ferry system."

A lot of locals have gotten used to not using the ferry system to get around. It is just quicker, and in some cases cheaper, to fly these days.  And in today's world, people don't seem to travel within Southeast as often as they used to. We no longer have the ties we had with people in places like Wrangell, Petersburg and Sitka and, if we do, we seem to think that keeping up with them on Facebook is somehow good enough.

So, when we travel, we hop a jet to Seattle or Anchorage, swearing all the way about the uncomfortable seats, the Transportation Safety Administration hassles and the lack of anything resembling actual food.

Meanwhile, the ferries - at least for now -  continue to sail past us, offering a different option, offering something more like the travel that we grew up with, the travel that once marked our lives in Southeast Alaska and our connections to the Outside world, either through Prince Rupert or Seattle. Of course, now the southern connection is Bellingham, a decision the state made three decades ago that still rankles anyone who wants to get somewhere and not be dumped off hours away from Seattle.

And as for Prince Rupert? 

To use a common social media phrase: It's Complicated.

Late in the summer, the state announced it was ending Prince Rupert service at the beginning of October, cutting the ties between Ketchikan and its closest sister city, a city that probably has more in common with Ketchikan than any other place, but has watched that the connection wither over the last couple of decades as the ferry service has been cut further and further, until the final trip, the first week of October, was a completely depressing anti-climax.

I thought about taking the last trip to Rupert. But, it was too short to seem worth the money, and it would have been too sad, in light of the many times I have made that trip in the past, in rapt anticipation of "getting of the rock" for one good reason or another. And so the last trip was made to Prince Rupert, but without me.

Then just this past week, the state announced there would be at least two more runs to Prince Rupert, one in October and one in November and that it hoped that a long term solution could be reached. I've long since given up getting any good long-term ferry options from the people who decide the fate of the Marine Highway. The purse strings keep getting cut by people demanding the AMHS "make money" and yet they dump millions of dollars into maintaining the highways of the "rail belt" without an inkling of making those roads "pay for themselves"

Anyway, I decided to take - in mid-September - one of the last trips on the largest ferry, the Columbia, which is now laid up for the winter. It may never come back on-line. A few years ago, the Taku went into lay-up and never came back. It sat sadly in Ward Cove for a couple of years before it was finally sold for scrap last year. I had always meant to take a final trip on the Taku, which was the first ferry I remember traveling on in the early 1960s, but I never did. 

So I decided to take an end-of-the-season trip on the Columbia. The rumor mill, which has been the best place to get accurate Alaska Marine Highway System info for some time, says that the state plans to try to sell the Columbia off because it is the most expensive ship to run and if there is any clear direction in the current AMHS it is in any direction that will save money in the short-term, even if the long term costs could be catastrophic to the coastal Alaska, including Southeast.

You can clearly see that in the new winter schedule which basically cuts off places like Cordova, Kodiak and Dutch Harbor for months at a time. It is part of a clear, unspoken policy of choking off the system, making it expensive and its schedule unreliable, and then saying "hey nobody rides the ferries, let's get rid of them."

There are also rumors that - also in order to save money - the state will begin carving up the longer runs into shorter runs because vessel and crew costs are lower on day, or shuttle, ferries. The two newest ferries, the Tazlina and the Hubbard, are such short run ferries, designed to make the Lynn Canal run between Juneau and Haines/Skagway. No staterooms, limited passenger amenities, Basically the Staten Island Ferry with a car deck and better views out the windows.

So, if I wanted to get on one ferry and go from Ketchikan to Skagway and back in three and a half days of isolated ocean bliss, my window of opportunity was closing. I swallowed the fact that fare and state room was half again as much as a plane ticket and hopped on, early on a Sunday morning heading north.

Yes, I could have saved a bundle by not getting a stateroom. But I am not that young, adventurous traveler anymore. I don't want to pretzel myself into an observation lounge chair. I don't want to lay in a sleeping bag on the hard deck. And I especially don't want to huddle in the cold Solarium, especially this time of year as the temperature is dropping. I was never a solarium person anyway. I like my privacy.  I don't like other people talking, a mediocre guitar player strumming, or any number of people blowing pot in my face. - More...
Sunday PM - October 20, 2019

Alaska: Living dead can be found scattered across Alaska landscape By NED ROZELL - Their bodies cooling with the October air, wood frogs are now snug in leafy blankets all over Alaska.

Down there inside those thumb-size frogs, even smaller creatures are hitching a ride. These tiny parasites have the power to make frogs develop up to a dozen extra legs, or no legs at all.

Don Larson just defended his University of Alaska Ph.D. thesis on the fate of wood frogs that are at this moment becoming camouflage ice cubes. While taking a course in physiology of northern creatures, he became fascinated with the parasites attached to some wood frogs. How could a creature that leeches off another organism endure that animal freezing solid?

Wood frogs, which exist from the Brooks Range all the way south to Georgia, are the only amphibians in northern Alaska. Larson’s advisor Brian Barnes years ago found that the Alaska version of the wood frog is special, able to tolerate frigid temperatures under the snow that would kill Lower 48 wood frogs.

They do it by becoming sweet.

Right now, frogs are freezing and thawing with the daily swings of air temperature. Larson found that with each nip of frost, frogs’ livers produce more glucose. That glucose floods their bodies, helping them avoid the cell dehydration that happens when we get frostbite.

Alaska wood frogs are fine out there, even though their brains and eyes and legs will soon be frozen solid.

“This animal has no heartbeat,” Larson said. “In a lot of ways, it’s not a living organism.”

After a half year in the living-dead stage, wood frogs thaw in springtime and hop away to a nearby breeding pond as if nothing happened.

During his research, Larson collected 18 wood frogs in Fairbanks and fit them with tiny glue-on transmitters. He then let them go and tracked them to crevices on the forest floor where they stopped moving in fall. For two years, he checked the temperatures where they hibernated, finding that even when Fairbanks air dropped to minus 40 F, the frog-level temperature under a cushion of snow was still above zero. - More...
Sunday PM - October 20, 2019

JEFF LUND: Reading and re-reading - Four nights into reading Roderick Haig-Brown’s classic Fisherman’s Fall, I realized I had already read it. It took me hours over four nights to realize this. Later I found an empty package of 6X leader near the end of the book – the bookmark that charted my progress. In my defense, I figured I read it a few years ago when I bought Fisherman’s Winter, Fisherman’s Spring and Fisherman’s Summer. 

I know at this point my next statement is going to sound absurd, but I really do enjoy the book. How do you enjoy a book you don’t remember you read and that apparently you didn’t finish? Well, it’s not because I like to fly fish or because I teach high school English. It’s because it fits in the genre of books that just sooth the mind before bed. It’s not a plot driven, deeply symbolic masterpiece that warns society of a totalitarian government, drug cartels, censorship or anything like that. It’s simply the opposite of a screen’s blue light that is the antagonist of sleep. Honest words about fishing are the perfect ramp into unconsciousness.

As an English teacher, I realize that an English class may temper the love of reading for a student. So, I wonder how often it does. For the students who do well on the in-class essays I attempt to make unGoogle-able, I wonder if it was just a chore, or if they did enjoy it. - More...
Sunday PM - October 20, 2019

DANNY TYREE: Are You Throwing Away Too Much Clothing? - Remember when big news meant scientific breakthroughs, assassinations and economic meltdowns?

Now the international headlines are reserved for the scandal (or heroism, take your pick) of Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex) wearing the SAME GOWN she wore on a tour two years ago!

(“Glycemic index, celebrity fashion statements. Which shall I watch today?”)

This fashion development dovetails nicely with a Wall Street Journal report about consumers (especially wasteful Americans) buying ever-increasing amounts of clothing, wearing each item an ever-diminishing number of times and consigning the castoffs to the overburdened landfill.

(Yes, the landfill – or incinerator. For various reasons, less than one percent of the fiber used to produce clothes is recycled into new garments.)

Perhaps it’s because of frugality ingrained by parents who grew up during the Great Depression, but I feel ashamed that the duchess’s commonsense actions must raise so many eyebrows. - More...
Sunday PM - October 20, 2019

Political Cartoon: Defying Gravity, Making History
By Jeff Koterba ©2019, Omaha World Herald, NE
Distributed to paid subscribers for publication by Cagle Cartoons, Inc.