In the early 1990s, Janet Collins was hiking in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge when she saw “Camp 163” labeled on her map. Intrigued, she later looked up Camp 163 in Donald Orth’s Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. Her curiosity led her to Ernest Leffingwell, the subject of a biography she has written and Washington […]
The Coast Guard Unified Command reports that they have established a response to the diesel spill that occurred in Kaktovik and was discovered on Monday. According to the report, an above-ground 5,000 gallon storage tank in the community, owned by the North Slope Borough, was found to have leaked an estimated 4,200 gallons of ultra-low […]
When botanist Janet Jorgenson first visited a patch of tundra east of Kaktovik in 1988, it was flat, dry and thick with 29 species of lichens and mosses. Now, Tapkaurak is wet, gullied and fragrant with sedges and grasses. And, like other parts of Alaska’s North Slope, it is a few feet farther from the […]