ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska is off to the slowest start of a wildfire season in three decades — an immense relief one year after fires scorched nearly enough land to cover Connecticut and even threatened remote Alaska Native communities on the tundra.
Thanks to a cool, wet summer, wildfires so far this year have burned just 1½ times the size of New York’s Central Park.
“If you were to kind of draw up a recipe for what would be a benign fire season in Alaska, we really have really checked all those boxes just this summer so far,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service.
A U.S. appeals court has halted a lower court ruling that would have shut down southeast Alaska’s chinook salmon troll fishery for the summer to protect endangered orca whales that eat the fish.
Climate change is opening up the Arctic, and a $600 million-plus expansion will make Nome on Alaska’s western coast the nation’s first deep-water Arctic port.
![Boats jockey for position minutes before the opening of the Sitka Sound sac roe herring fishery on March 23, 2014, in Sitka, Alaska. Sitka is the home port for a charter fishing boat that sank in nearby waters killing three and leaving two lost at sea in late May 2023. The tragedy has put a spotlight on the safety of southeast Alaska's vibrant charter fishing industry and on the port town of Sitka, where charter operators charge thousands of dollars per person for guided fishing trips. (James Poulson/The Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP, File)](https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/9459028/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x1686+0+81/resize/500x281!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fafs-prod%2Fmedia%2F0f10ecda89874c669661fb79f355aed6%2F3000.jpeg)
Charter fishing industry experts in southeast Alaska say they’re eager to learn the cause of a tragedy that left five people dead or lost at sea.
It’s a far cry from last year, when the state burned in ways rarely or never seen.
A lightning strike in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwest Alaska, a region primarily made up of tundra, threatened two Alaska Native villages with about 700 total residents before firefighters put it out. Smoke from a fire that prompted a three-week evacuation for a subdivision in the community of Anderson blanketed Denali National Park and Preserve, one of the state’s premiere tourist destinations.
One home was destroyed in that fire and several seasonal cabins were lost. The only fatality in last year’s fires came when a helicopter pilot moving equipment to support firefighters died in a crash.
In all, last year’s fires consumed 4,844 square miles (12,545 square kilometers) — just slightly less than the size of Connecticut. Of course, Alaska is huge; Connecticut could fit within it 118 times, according to the tourism website alaska.org.
This season’s favorable weather is thanks to an upper level trough of low pressure over the Bering Sea and western Alaska. It’s bringing cooler air, promoting cloud cover and encouraging the arrival of moisture from the Gulf of Alaska, which helps keep plants from drying out, Brettschneider said.
Firefighters hired by state and federal agencies are not sitting around lamenting they have no fires to fight, said Sam Harrel, a spokesperson for the Alaska Division of Forestry. The state is using money from the infrastructure bill to remove fuels to prevent future fires, he said.
Alaska has also sent about 100 firefighters to help battle wildfires engulfing neighboring Canada.
The one drawback to the cooler, wetter summer is that some Alaskans are missing out on what is traditionally a short summer season. Eberhard Brunner, an 85-year-old photographer from Anchorage, wore a raincoat as he captured images of geese at the city’s Westchester Lagoon on Thursday.
“It should be nice and should be sunny, in the 70s,” Brunner said. “If the weather keeps me home, I’ll never be able to get out.”
Naomi Reupena-Tuaiao, a Honolulu native working in downtown Anchorage on her summer break from college in Nebraska, wishes it was just a little warmer.
“It’s just cold,” she said from under a large red umbrella. She had been standing outside in the rain for about seven hours, directing tourists to a trolley. Her shoes were wet and she was wearing two jackets.
Anchorage has only gone above 70 degrees F (21.1 degrees C) once this year.
Even though conditions favor the low fire season now, Brettschneider said that could quickly change.
The state is still about 10 days away from the historical peak for lightning season — last year, an astounding 61,000 lightning strikes were recorded from July 5-11 — and it only takes a few days of sunny, breezy, dry weather to provide fuel for wildfires.
“Things can change on a dime, but so far, so good,” he said.
The fire season generally concludes in Alaska at the end of August.
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