KCAW

Sitka Counseling has an upcoming Narcan pop-up training at AC Lakeside on Saturday, July 11, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., where Sitkans can learn about the opioid overdose reversal medicine. Maddy Moore, prevention coordinator with Sitka Counseling, joined KCAW on the Morning Interview to talk about the organization’s services, the importance of harm reduction tools, and the effectiveness of Naloxone (Narcan). Listen to the conversation here:

High School students at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp will deliver their final performances 7 p.m. Friday, July 10, and Saturday, July 11, at the Sitka Performing Arts Center. Camp faculty member Medar de la Cruz and Executive Director Roger Schmidt joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to share highlights from this week’s programming. Listen here:

Andrew Thoms, executive director of the Sitka Conservation Society, and local artist Rebecca Danon joined KCAW on the Morning Interview to discuss the upcoming comment period on the roadless rule, management of the Tongass National Forest, and an upcoming pop-up show at Harbor Mountan Brewery showcasing Danon’s public lands advocacy artwork. Danon will be selling her art on Friday, July 10, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the brewery, with 20% of proceeds going to SCS. Listen to their conversation here:

The last of the spring sports at Sitka High School wrapped last month, with the Wolves softball team scoring second place at the state championship. Sentinel reporter Shannon Haugland joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the last several weeks of sports coverage, including updates to the fall coach roster at Sitka High School, and plans to cover upcoming summer races in Sitka. Listen to the conversation here:

On July 1, Sitka launched its Tourism Best Management Practices (TBMP) program for the 2026 season. The TBMP is a set of guidelines designed to improve the tourism industry in Sitka, adapted from programs in other Southeast Alaska communities. Businesses can commit to the program’s shared guidelines, and the public can report violations through a hotline. Judson Rusk, the city’s tourism manager, and Victoria Wright, Visit Sitka’s interim contract manager, joined KCAW on the Morning Interview to discuss how the new program aims to establish clear expectations for responsible tourism practices and create a more consistent standard across the industry. Listen to their conversation here:

More than a hundred Sitkans lined the street in silence on Wednesday, as a procession of police and fire vehicles accompanied a hearse carrying the remains of an unidentified WWII soldier from the police station to the Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport.

The remains of the soldier, known simply as X-3 Fort Randall, were successfully exhumed in late June after nearly eight decades in the Sitka National Cemetery, and are now headed to a Midwest forensics lab for possible identification. Sitka was the third burial site for the unknown soldier, and officials hope to give his remains a final resting place. 

“It was a very successful, respectful, and honorable extraction. We had challenges with X-3, but ultimate success,” said Aaron Cummings, a senior planner with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the U.S. Department of Defense agency in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members from conflicts worldwide.

Cummings has been working as an on-the-ground fixer and coordinator for the Sitka disinterment, along with a team of four others from the DPAA, including an archeologist, an odontologist, a senior recovery expert, and a medic, and representatives from Veterans Affairs and the cemetery.

Cummings used an analogy for how disinterments come about, and the multiple levels of approval they face: He said imagine them like cold cases and the DPAA’s historians and analysts are like detectives who pour over old war records pursuing clues to put a case together, arguing why specific unknown remains should be dug up. 

“In the situation of these disinterments, they were able to put enough pieces together to determine there’s a really good case and a really good likelihood that they’re one of a short list of possible matches,” he said.  

Cummings said hundreds of servicemen from WWII were lost in, or in the waters around, Alaska and were either never found or never identified. In this case, there’s evidence X-3 is an unidentified soldier who was killed in a plane crash near Cold Bay during the Aleutian Campaign in 1942. 

“16 lost, six bodies found, five of those six identified, which leaves us 10 never found,” Cummings said.

A trapper buried six bodies that washed up onshore near his cabin until he could notify authorities, who reburied them in the Fort Randall Post Cemetery in Cold Bay. Five were identified and taken to their respective homes after the war ended. X-3 was transported to Sitka where he remained, unidentified.

Cummings said the DPAA has been looking into this case since 2017, but progress stalled, until a possible family member got involved. 

“We are an agency with finite resources, and there are approximately 81,000 missing [soldiers] from Vietnam, Korea, and World War II,” he said. “With those kind of numbers, it’s hard to prioritize, it’s hard to rack and stack your missions, and family interest is one of the elements that we utilize to determine how we prioritize and which missions move up the ladder.”

While Cummings said all 11 unidentified or missing soldiers are possible matches, Chris Pfeiffer believes X-3 could be his great uncle, 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen, the co-pilot of the C-53 that went down near Cold Bay. Pfeiffer has collected hundreds of pages about the crash and his uncle over the years, has pressured his congressmen and the DPAA to disinter the remains, and even started a blog to document the process. He flew in from Texas for the disinterment and watched the process unfold from about 50 feet away. 

“Unless I got involved, it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” and so they, ” Pfeiffer said. “They mentioned that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that’s why we’re here today.”

Pfeiffer said the whole process has been emotional. 

“This is a story that’s been handed down and talked about,” he said. “Lt. Christensen was my mother’s uncle, but he was a surprise baby, and he was just a little older, like nine years from my mother, and she considered him her big brother.”

Pfeiffer said he has a letter from the Army to his great grandfather that says there’s no chance of ever finding his son. He said the Army “closed the door.” 

“But that wasn’t true,” he said. “My great grandparents passed away. My grandparents passed away. My parents passed away, and all of their brothers and sisters all passed away, not knowing what I know. And they could have known it. It could have been shared. Now we know this is the one opportunity. It may not be a good opportunity, but the best one we have to see what happened.”

Cummings said the dig to exhume X-3’s remains was “unique” and “surprising” in many ways. It was the agency’s first disinterment in Sitka. The remains, which were located on a narrow step of the main hill at the national cemetery, had to be hand dug. He said the team also had to make a contraption out of wood to allow the archeologist to hover over the casket on her stomach to access it. Despite the challenges, he said everything was intact. The remains were in a metal casket that was placed inside another one made of wood and metal. 

“Our extremely seasoned archeologist had never seen anything like it,” Cummings said.

There are about 20 gravesites for unknown soldiers in Sitka’s cemetery. Cummings said they also tried to disinter another soldier, known as X-1 Amchitka, during their trip. X-1 is thought to be a crew member from a ship that ran ashore in early 1943. But the team was unable to locate the remains, likely because of soil movement or a previous disinterment decades ago that wasn’t properly recorded. 

Cummings said even when they aren’t successful, these disinterments are important to the nation’s promise, and agency’s mission, to never leave anyone behind. 

“Some of these missions are difficult: The analysis, the historian work is difficult. Sometimes it’s really difficult in the field,” he said. “But it’s important for the closure of the families, and for just anybody to know that we will not lose faith, we will always pursue, we will always try to bring our folks home, provide closure to the families, and just honor our nation’s fallen.”

As for Pfeiffer, he said even if X-3 turns out to not be his great uncle, he’s so grateful to have been involved in this process and will stick with it until the end. 

“I am really thankful, as a veteran myself, to just help whoever this is,” he said. “I’m gonna see it through. If it goes to Oklahoma, goes to California, goes to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, I’m gonna go with it.”

The remains of X-3 left Sitka on July 1 for Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, where, through DNA analysis, the DPAA hopes to get a positive ID.  

The Sitka Public Library’s calendar is jam-packed this month, with the summer reading program in full swing, the Armchair Travel speaker series, and events like Books and Brews. Jessica Ieremia and Margot O’Connell joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to share more about the events happening at the library this month. Listen here:

Sarah Lewis is a professor of extension with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. She will be in Sitka later this month offering classes on food entrepreneurship, produce safety, preservation, and a menopause mocktail hour. Lewis joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the upcoming course opportunities. Listen here:

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. 

After Saturday’s parade, Sitkans can continue the party on the water with the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society’s annual Fourth of July Cruise. Organizers joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the cruise, which will feature naturalist Matt Goff and historian Rebecca Poulson. Listen to the conversation here.