Month: May 2011

The Sitka Summer Music Festival is a lot less hairy than it used to be. One of the state’s premiere art events, the festival was founded in 1972 by Paul Rosenthal and fellow students from the University of Southern California – all of whom had taken master classes from violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

The legislature’s failure to reauthorize the Alaska Coastal Management Program means big changes for local governments once the program ends on June 30. But exactly what those changes will be is still unclear.

Hundreds of Sitkans gathered along the beach at Sitka National Historical Park on Sunday to help raise a totem pole commemorating the park’s 100th anniversary.

An orphaned brown bear cub was being nursed back to health in Sitka on Friday after being discovered in Angoon earlier in the week.

The 2012 budget calls for about $835,000 to be spent on technology such as computers and phones, as well as the networks and people that connect them throughout city government.

The Sitka Historical Society and Museum will likely be able to keep its full-time curator after the Sitka Assembly approved funding at a budget meeting Thursday night. But the $25,000 boost comes at a price for some community nonprofits, which also seek funding from the city.

A totem pole raising delayed because of the federal government’s potential shutdown last month is set to go forward this weekend.

The U.S. Coast Guard visited the cruise ship Westerdam during its stop in Sitka on Wednesday to investigate a reported collision between the 936-foot vessel and some ice on Tuesday evening near Hubbard Glacier.

Today's story on the Wood Frog may have left some listeners with the impression that this was the only amphibian in Alaska ("In Alaska, the Wood Frog is the only amphibian found throughout most of the state"). There are actually four kinds of amphibian in Alaska: Frogs, Newts, Salamanders and Toads. There are two kinds of frog; the aforementioned Wood Frog and the Columbia Spotted Frog. There are two types of salamander too; the Long Toed and the Northwestern salamander. The Roughskin Newt and the Western Toad round out the list. The Wood Frog, as the story accurately states, is the only amphibian north of the Arctic Circle.