AlaskaDispatch.com

Alaska may have missed out on the prime viewing of the annular solar eclipse on May 20 -- though it definitely caught some of it -- but there's no better place to be than the Last Frontier to see the June 5 transit of Venus, an astronomical event that only...

Picture this. A brown bear saunters out of the brush along a highway. A car pulls over, followed by a pickup truck. Passengers jump out to take snapshots. They edge closer, crowding the bear, deriving comfort from numbers and their self-possessed superiority over other animals. Soon a bear jam is...

Thaddeus DuBois is comfortable with his body -- which is fortunate, because he makes his living modeling in the nude. Of course, such a vocation comes with its perks.

"The funnest thing to say at a party is that I'm a nude model," DuBois says.

When asked to describe himself,...

Exactly where or when the life of Loretta Sternbach took a turn toward the dark side no one is sure now.

The daughter of a true Alaska war hero and a one-time "Alaska Native Elder of the Year," she started early and well down the trail from a rural, subsistence-oriented...

A batch of soft-spoken kids from a remote Alaska village on a hard-to-reach river island are in a race to raise money in hopes of visiting the U.S. Capitol, where they can lobby for rural education and bring attention to the plight of their school, which might soon close.

...

Iditarod rookie Matt Failor has a message for the Flying Tomato. He wants the red-headed Olympic snowboarder Shaun White to know there's a young dog driving deep into the Alaska wilderness named for him.

Failor, 29, hoped to let White know about his elite canine, who's racing in...

Contested in remote, inaccessible places, long distance dog mushing is a hard sport to follow.

Often, it's hard to tell who's actually leading a race due to the idiosyncrasies of start-time adjustments, mandatory layovers, trailside camping, and general musher sneakiness. And the unknown is part of the sport's appeal.

Nowadays,...

Arctic ringed seals aren't the only marine mammal suffering an unusual skin-lesion outbreak along Alaska's northern coasts.

Walruses that have hauled out by the thousands at Point Lay in Northwest Alaska during recent summers -- an event driven by climate change -- are also turning up...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced Wednesday in a statement that she's not running for president.

By not running, Palin said she would be "unshackled and able to be even more active" in the conservative quest to unseat President Obama, who is up for reelection next year.

"I look...

A region long battered by some of the nation's highest suicide rates has some welcome good news -- a drop in deaths credited in part to teenage students.

When the Teck John Baker Youth Leaders Program began a few years ago, eight students in the Northwest...

Longtime polar bear researcher Dr. Charles Monnett may be back at work after being sidelined earlier this year, but his life at a federal offshore oil agency isn't the same.

The man who in 2006 gained overnight notoriety for co-authoring a brief article about drowned polar bears in the Arctic...

The popular conservative website The Daily Caller ran with the sensational headline Thursday entitled "Pipe Down," followed with a photo of the Trans-Alaska pipeline snaking its way right toward the reader. The story led with the following paraphrase of U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, the feisty Republican who chairs...

If deep oceans covered an area only the size of the state of Alaska, then humans have so far explored in detail only about 2,400 square feet -- enough space to park seven or eight cars, according to details contained in a new report about the threats facing the Earth's...

Ten things you could learn from the "lamestream media" about this week's Alaska bear attack -- only to be misinformed:

1. Chicago Tribune: The bear that attacked seven teenagers in a National Outdoor Leadership School class was "massive.''

Fact check: The bear could have been "massive." Then...

A group of seven teenagers who'd been learning survival skills in the Alaska wilderness were attacked Saturday night by a brown bear sow with cub.

The teenagers had been in the backcountry for some time, training with the National Outdoor Leadership School, which has a sizable staff focused on outdoors...

A small island fishing community 800 air miles southwest of Anchorage has found itself in a monster of a fight with federal enforcers based more than 4,100 miles away, in Washington, D.C.

Acting on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice is threatening to wring...

The state of Alaska released the last emails in the most recent Sarah Palin message dump Wednesday, concluding one of media history's most anti-climatic moments.

About 30 days of emails, 54 pages in all, had not been included with the rest of the roughly 24,000 pages that spanned Palin's...

The amazing thing -- when you watch Sarah Palin from a distance as an Alaskan -- are the words that come from the mouth of the state's one-time governor, if, of course, the "lamestream media'' can be believed.

Here, according to several sources in the lamestream media, is...

Visualize the summer of 2050, and you might see an Alaskan Arctic bustling with maritime activity.

Commercial ships from Japan and the United States will be steaming through the Bering Strait toward Europe on an 11-day, 3,200-mile Northern Sea Route that remains open to ice-strengthened vessels all season....

Has President Obama raised a "stop sign" on oil drilling in Alaska or off the Arctic coast?

Some people seem to think so, even though there's plenty of evidence out there that shows the federal government is moving ahead, albeit slowly, with permitting proposed projects and selling leases in Alaska.