Ellie Schmidt and a few of her friends were camping at Fred’s Creek Cabin on Kruzof Island in early June. On a rainy Saturday morning at low tide, they took a walk on the beach…

“And we came across a weird object, which I thought was part of a boat,” Schmidt said. “[My friend] thought maybe it was a very weirdly colored log. It was very white and gleaming.” 

As they got closer, they realized it was a whale. Closer still, a very unusual one.

“It was the weirdest whale I’ve ever seen,” Schmidt said. “It had the shape of a dolphin, but it was so much bigger than a dolphin, and it was really striking.”

The whale was about 20 feet long. But it wasn’t just one. Schmidt said they also saw a fetus protruding from the adult whale’s body. They identified them as goose-beaked whales, a deep-sea species rarely seen in Southeast Alaska.

They tied the mother up on the beach, anchoring her body to drifted logs, and they called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s regional marine mammal stranding network coordinators, who asked them to remove the fetus and take it back to Sitka on their eight-foot dinghy. 

“So we basically found whatever gloves we had around, whatever sharp things we had around, and then carefully cut open the whale, and then put this beautiful whale fetus into a cooler,” Schmidt said. “We estimated it was 150 pounds, around six feet long, and very beautiful. We put the cooler in the boat, and brought it back to town.”

Lauren Wild, a whale biologist and assistant applied fisheries professor at University of Alaska Southeast, met them at the dock, put the whale fetus into a white body bag, and put it in the freezer at the local university campus. 

“And then it sort of became, ‘Should we go out and do a necropsy on the mom? Is there information we can find out?’” Wild said.  

Goose-beaked whales are found in deep offshore waters in most oceans and seas worldwide, but their migration patterns still aren’t known. They’re the deepest and longest-diving mammal in the world, capable of diving at least 3,300 feet for 20 to 40 minutes to feed on cephalopods like squid and octopus. The deepest known dive for a goose-beaked whale was nearly 2 miles and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes, according to NOAA.

“It’s sort of a very unusual thing for a beaked whale to wash up, because they live offshore and they’re deep divers,” Wild said. “So for it to have somehow floated in, the currents must be quite interesting there for it to have gotten into that cove.”

Beaked whales use echolocation for navigation and foraging, and are particularly sensitive to underwater sounds. 

“They’re typically the species of whale that is associated with Navy sonar,” Wild said. “So when you hear about mass strandings, often those have been beaked whales.”

The Kruzof stranding wasn’t the only one this summer. A second beaked whale was found beached in Yakutat in early June. Wild said this is rare. Previously, only two were reported in the area in the past 40 years.

“It would be great to see it alive, but it’s cool to [have] a specimen wash up dead, because you can kind of poke into it a little bit more and learn more about it,” Wild said.  

Wild put a small response team together and returned to the stranding site two days later to perform a partial necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the mother. She said they were able to retrieve the head, get skin and blubber samples for genetics and hormone testing, and fecal samples to test for harmful algal blooms. They also looked in the whale’s stomach, which was full of squid beaks, meaning she likely didn’t starve to death.  

“We weren’t able to definitively say what the cause of death was, unfortunately,” Wild said. “Because the carcass was in kind of a moderate decomposition stage, we weren’t really able to get all the things that we would want to get that might help us understand cause of death.”

Wild said if the whale had been more intact, they would have investigated the whale’s brain to look for signs of barotrauma, widely known as “the bends,” from coming back up to the surface too quickly. They also would have wanted to look at her bones, blubber, and muscle for any signs of blunt force trauma that could have contributed to her death. 

“Every piece of a whale is a puzzle piece to sort of put together what its life looked like,” Wild said. “I can’t say right now that we will never know [the cause of death], but we’ll see.”

They brought the whale’s head back to town with them to freeze and use for education purposes in the future. Wild said while she had hoped they could retrieve more, she’s grateful they got the opportunity to do the necropsy at all. 

“Beaked whales are so poorly understood — exactly what they’re doing and what they’re eating, and all the different life history parameters that are so difficult to study on these really seldom seen offshore deep diving species,” she said. “So I mostly just think it’s a cool experience to be able to have been able to get what we did.”

Wild said they scanned the fetus at the local hospital on June 25. And she said they plan to perform a public necropsy on the fetus at Sitka Whalefest this fall, which could shed light on what caused them to wash ashore on a remote Southeast Alaska island. 

Piles of white plastic sacks line both sides of a small gravel lot in Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. There’s around 90 of these bags, each about the size of a washing machine, stuffed with marine debris.

“I’m not sure what these buoys are for,” says Zofia Danielson as she picks up a bundle of oblong buoys resting near one pile’s base. Their red plastic has faded into a translucent orange from salt and the sun. “In the last two years, Sitkans have been finding them all across the sound.”

Danielson is the Sitka Sound Science Center’s managing scientist. She oversees the marine debris program that’s been gathering scraps along the coastline for the past year and a half. This summer, the team made a puzzling discovery at Inner Point on Kruzof Island.

“I imagine somebody scribbled it out and dropped it in the ocean as a reflection of how they were feeling at the time,” she says.

An ambiguous seven-line poem sprawls across a small piece of lined paper. It’s rolled up inside a glass bottle dotted with algae and sealed with a plastic cork.

“We all love to wax poetic about the ocean, about her many currents and storms, and I think truly the perfect storm brought the message in a bottle to Inner Point.”

Danielson says the crew isn’t sure where it came from or how long ago it was written. She says finding a message in a bottle is actually pretty common. But this one is a bit more cryptic than others they’ve stumbled upon in the past.

“Sometimes they have more of a story,” she says, “and sometimes they’re a little more of a mystery.”

And she’s leaving the contents of the poem a mystery too.

“It’s a message for the person and the sea,” Danielson says.

They found the bottle nestled in a stack of driftwood logs.

“It’s always a lucky find when you find something fragile in such a rugged landscape.”

Danielson says the wind, waves, and currents along the outer coast are the perfect recipe for marine debris to accumulate on the shore. They plan to go out on a total of 35 cleanup days this summer. When they do, a crew of four travels an hour or two from Sitka on a small vessel, then rows into shore on a dinghy.

“They crawl through the jungle gym of alder trees up in the high intertidal and wade through the dense beachgrass and cow parsnip to pick up plastic bottles and other smaller pieces of debris that can be hidden by the summer’s vegetation,” she says.

After several hours on shore, the team passes the debris in an assembly line onto the dinghy to take back to the boat. Once in Sitka, the collection is driven out to the lot at the industrial park to be weighed and documented.

The science center has a statewide database for marine debris cleanup efforts dating back to the early 2000s.

“Marine debris is an incredibly powerful tool for communication,” Danielson says.

With their findings, they can learn more about where debris washes up, how much accumulates over time, and the impact it has on intertidal plants and animals. Whether it’s a message in a bottle or a fishing net, Danielson says every piece of debris has a story to tell.

View the full agenda here

The Sitka School Board will meet on June 30 at 5 p.m. in the district office board room to interview the candidates and vote on their appointments. The board will also take up the agenda from its regular meeting earlier this month, which was postponed. 

More than 100 Sitkans decorated in rainbows and holding signs that read “Love is a terrible thing to hate” and “Protect Queer Kids,” gathered in Totem Square on Saturday for the culmination of Pride Month. 

The event was put on by Sitka Pride, which aims to build equity and respect for LGBTQ2+ people in Sitka through accessible programming and inclusive events year round. 

Quinlyn Holder, who is Yup’ik, Athabaskan, and white, is a Sitka Pride organizer. They told the gathered crowd that growing up in Sitka, they felt like they had to move away because they were queer.

“I felt like I could feel how different I was, and I went east,” Holder said. “But I came back because I was Native. There was something that I had to do here. I had to come home. I couldn’t run anymore. And every time I came home, I realized that there were a lot, and lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of queer people here. We have always been here.”

Michael Mausbach helped start the current iteration of Sitka Pride. They began their speech by asking the crowd to look around at the people standing beside them — “at the families, the friends, the neighbors,” “at the kids waving flags,” “at the elders, queer and allied,” — and reminded them of the importance of community. 

“Today, I hope we honor the people who came before us: those who struggled, organized, celebrated, resisted, and imagined a future they might never get to see, because we owe them so much,” Mausbach said. “But I also hope that we honor something that’s easier to overlook. It’s the people walking beside us. Because these are the people we’ll call tomorrow. These are the people we’ll laugh with next week, we’ll dance with tonight at the Mean Queen. These are the people that we’ll grieve with, celebrate with, cook with, create with, and keep building this place together.”

Following the speeches, the marchers headed up Lincoln St. led by people carrying the American, Alaska, and Pride flags, before walking back to Totem Square accompanied by a police vehicle escort. 

Sealaska Heritage Institute is hosting Indigenous artists in public spaces across Southeast Alaska this year. The residents aim to create, showcase their artistic processes to visitors, and connect with their heritage. 

Nena Howell Walton is the current artist-in-residence at Sitka National Historical Park. She’s an oil painter and certified Tlingit and Haida tribal artist with family ties to the area. Howell Walton’s grandfather, Rudolph Walton, was a famous artist and master carver from Sitka.

“It’s pretty incredible, because just being here in the Sitka area, just the air, and knowing that I’m walking on ancestral grounds where he was inspired by the bird flying over his head or feeling the mist on his face,” Howell Walton says.

Howell Walton says she’s seeking to reimagine her grandfather’s work in her own paintings. She looks to include elements of formline, a traditional art style incorporating curved lines and shapes, used by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

Howell Walton says she’s starting a series of paintings while in Sitka. The series will eventually include 30 pieces, each with an owl. 

“I really feel like they have that kind of wisdom and knowledge and leadership and sight forward,” she says, “and it’s my hope that we could all just get along, and this owl would lead us forward.”

Howell Walton says she hopes to study the colors traditional to Lingít art in the museum’s archive to incorporate into her own work. 

“I’m going to sit down with those pieces for a number of sessions and try to create [the colors] with my own hand,” Howell Walton says.

She’ll paint the pigments onto color swatches she can later reference as she continues to work on her series back home in Washington. 

You can observe Howell Walton working on her paintings at Sitka National Historical Park through July 3rd.

Sitka Tribe of Alaska has joined several other Southeast Alaska tribes — including Ketchikan Indian Community and Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska — in condemning a recent social media trend where users dance around Alaska Native totem poles, replicating a scene from a popular early-2000s rom-com.  

“The Proposal” stars Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, and Betty White, and is set in Sitka. In a scene from the 2009 blockbuster hit, Bullock and White dance around a totem pole to the hip-hop song “Get Low” by Lil Jon.

Rob Allen, interim general manager at Sitka Tribe of Alaska, said while there have been instances of tourists doing this in the past, it seems more prominent this summer. He said the Tribe doesn’t approve of the “inappropriate behavior.” 

“Totem poles are not objects. They have meaning,” Allen said. “They’re telling a story about who we are in this place. They’re not just something to mock or make fun of, and people are just not showing proper respect to that.”

In a Thursday press release, the Tribe said they support tourism as both an economic driver and as an opportunity to educate visitors about Sitka’s “vibrant, living culture,” but they expect visitors to “treat our people, our homelands, and our culture with respect.”

They also ask the visitor industry to strongly discourage the “misguided behavior.”

“Disrespect for totem poles, sacred sites, and other elements of our culture is unacceptable and undermines our trust in the industry that we have worked hard to establish,” Allen said. “We will continue to work with our partners to address acts of disrespect and protect our cultural heritage.”

The Sitka Tribe has its own tourism program. Allen said they’ve developed programs to help educate visitors about Lingít land, culture, and values. 

“We’re not just showing you something that was in the past. This is who we are. We’re living it,” he said. “We’re here and we’re not preserving our culture. You preserve something that’s dead, and we’re not dead. This is a thriving culture and we want to share that with people and educate them that we are not preserving, we’re living. And that’s a very important part of the entire community of Sitka. This is our home, and this culture is very important to us and to this place and to who we are.”

Visit Sitka, the island’s visitor services program, also condemned the behavior in a social media post on Thursday. The organization is launching a Tourism Best Management Practices program on July 1 that sets a shared standard for Sitka’s tourism industry.

“Totem poles are not EVER props for social media content, viral trends, or entertainment. They are not relics of the past. They are part of living cultures that continue today,” the post said. “Taking photos can be a meaningful way to remember your time here, but please do so with respect. Do not climb on, touch, imitate, or interact with totem poles in ways that diminish their cultural significance or the people and communities they represent.”

Updated on 6-26-26 at 1:30 p.m.

Harbor Mountain Road is now open to pedestrian traffic, according to the U.S. Forest Service. But it remains closed to vehicles while the U.S. Coast Guard continues its investigation of the area where a helicopter from Air Station Sitka went down on Monday (6-22-26). Coast Guard and local emergency personnel told KCAW on Thursday (6-25-26) there’s no timeline for the investigation or salvage operation of the aircraft.

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Original post from 6-25-26

The scene of a Coast Guard helicopter crash in Sitka on Monday (6-22-26) remains closed until further notice. The U.S. Forest Service issued an updated closure order Thursday (6-25-26) for the area on Harbor Mountain, where a MH-60 Jayhawk carrying four crew from Air Station Sitka went down during a training exercise. The crew was transported to the local hospital with “non-serious injuries” and released the same day.

Sitka Fire Chief Brian McLaughlin said the crash occurred in a heavily wooded area that’s challenging for investigators to reach. The Fire Department is helping the Coast Guard safely access the site. 

“We provided some of our ropes team experts to head down with part of the Coast Guard investigation team to find a safe route down to the site, because they’re going to have several more days of getting down there and doing their investigation,” McLaughlin said. “Not to mention at some point there will likely be a salvage effort.”

McLaughlin said the investigation and subsequent salvage operation of the aircraft could take weeks. He said a majority of the area has reopened, but reminds the community to keep its distance as the Coast Guard continues its recovery and investigation efforts.

“I know everyone’s going to work as quickly and efficiently as they can to open everything up,” McLaughlin said. “But until that time, we just continue to ask for everyone’s patience and support, and kind of keep away from that area for their safety.”

In an email to KCAW, U.S. Coast Guard Public Affairs Officer Pam Manns said there’s currently no timeline for wrapping up the investigation.

“We extend our deepest gratitude to all the local responders who assisted us during this critical time,” Manns said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed about $123,000 from the state budget Wednesday that was earmarked for a maintenance position at Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka. 

The school, which is operated by the state, currently has three budgeted maintenance positions, but two remain unfilled. 

Dunleavy spokesperson Grant Robinson said in a statement that the governor generally doesn’t support adding funding for new positions when existing positions have vacancies. 

Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican, said the state-run boarding school needs maintenance staff given its state of disrepair. News of deteriorating facilities and an exodus of roughly a quarter of its students over the past year prompted state legislators to visit the campus in February and hold hearings to question school leadership. But he said cutting the position seems like a “logical” move on Dunleavy’s part, given that there are still unfilled positions. 

“When we looked at it, the age of the buildings and footprint of the school, [we saw] they could use some assistance in maintenance manpower,” Stedman said. “So we had a dialog with the Department of Education, and we added that in the budget, and the governor had a difference of opinion, and that’s fine.”

Mt. Edgecumbe serves students from across the state, the majority of whom are Alaska Native from rural communities. Stedman said the state can do better when it comes to creating a better environment for the hundreds of students living there. 

He said the $123,000 funding cut isn’t “significant” given the millions in approved funding for facilities upgrades at the school. But, he said, they will continue conversations with the state Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) next school year to check on staffing levels and maintenance progress.

“It is a big, big year for Edgecumbe as far as appropriations to fix Mt. Edgecumbe High School. Phenomenal,” Stedman said. “It took a lot of work to accomplish it, so now it’s going to be up to the contractors to make the school look proud again.”

Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, an independent from Sitka, said Mt. Edgecumbe is in a crisis, but she doesn’t believe the governor’s veto was “malicious.” The problem, she said, is that even a small amount of money can make a major difference to any school, and certainly to a school like Mt. Edgecumbe.

“They need to fill the positions they have, and if we find that’s not sufficient, we’ll go back at it next year and add another position,” Himschoot said. “But having one maintenance person when you have 400 kids at a residential school is completely inadequate, so they need to fill the positions that are budgeted right now, and then we can look at it again. I feel like it’s not a completely unreasonable move to make that veto.”

Himschoot said the entire school needs a lot of support from the Department of Education right now, and the most important thing is to fill vacant positions and bring the school “back up to the standard that we want to have for kids across the state.”

“A loveable idiot, an obnoxious nuisance, and dramatic.”

That’s how Ben Hedrick describes their clown persona, aptly named Drama.

“Clowning is an art form where you essentially make yourself the butt of the joke,” they say.

You might spot Drama performing for tourists waiting in line for shuttles outside Harrigan Centennial Hall. 

“It’s like having a captive audience,” Hedrick says. “It’s a lot of fun, and I’ll just walk up and down the length, telling the same five bad jokes, because it’s a different audience every time, and I’ve only got so many.”

When lines are long and slow, Drama serves as a distraction. 

“I like to go out downtown, mostly when two criteria are met: when it’s a nice day out — because I don’t want to be out when it’s raining and windy and miserable — and if I have a day off from work, because it takes a while to put on the makeup and get all ready,” they say.

Before performing, Hedrick coats their face in white, adds black triangles above and below both eyes, and draws a red smile across their lips. They paint a bright red star over their right eye, in homage to one of their favorite artists. 

“The star is a nod to Paul Stanley from Kiss, just because I’m a fan of classic rock,” Hedrick says.

Drama’s full get-up includes a thrifted red button-up and vertically striped tights. Red and black scrunchies on their wrists act like cuffs. They wear suspenders clipped onto a pair of bloomers Hedrick sewed themself. 

They say they are aiming for a Shakespearean look because their clown name is Drama.

“I’m very into theater. I wanted to kind of embrace that with this clown character.”

20-year-old Hedrick remembers their first foray into theater. Despite the stage fright, they knew they found their calling after performing in a second grade play. And they’ve been stage acting ever since.

In middle school, Hedrick attended a two-week circus workshop at Sitka Fine Arts Camp, a yearly arts summer camp for kids from around the world. They say the first week was dedicated to showing the students things like clowning, juggling, and basic acrobatics. By the end of the second week, the campers had to choose one skill to showcase as a final performance.

“I noticed that nobody said that they were doing the Rolla Bolla,” Hedrick says.

That’s a wooden plank that rests on top of a rolling cylinder. It’s a prop used to boast one’s balancing skills. Hedrick says they initially went with the Rolla Bolla to be different, and the whole class — including the teacher — was shocked they didn’t choose clowning and was “practically yelling at me to change my answer.” 

So they did, and they ended up performing a pretty memorable clowning routine. 

“I didn’t think what I was doing was particularly special, but apparently my basic information on clowning that I already had struck a chord with people,” they say. “They enjoyed what I did, so that’s really where it started, and it laid dormant for a very long time.”

It wasn’t until last December that Hedrick, now in college, gave it another go. 

“I was bored, wanted to pick it up, and I just really committed this time,” they say.

Hedrick began documenting their progress and performances on social media. Since starting their page at the end of last year, they surpassed 33,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. One video got over 1.3 million views. They taught themself how to juggle and make a clown horn sound with just their voice. 

“People have asked me several times if I’ve attended a clown college. I have not. It is harder to get into most clown colleges than Harvard.”

Instead, Hedrick studies theater and communications at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with the dream of becoming a professional actor one day. For now, though, they’re satisfied with the spotlight Drama has garnered. 

“Clowning is a very cutthroat industry if you’re trying to get into it seriously. Luckily, I have been fortunate enough to be in places where clowns aren’t a widely discussed topic,” they say. “I’m the only clown in Sitka, as far as I’m aware.”

And Hedrick intends to be the town’s only clown for the foreseeable future.