Juneau’s 10 strangest stories of 2025
- Mark Sabbatini
- Dec 28, 2025
- 13 min read
Updated: Jan 2
"Safest city" award despite record flooding (yet again); rainiest football game in memory filmed for the Super Bowl; loose cruise ship during gustnado prompts viral "disaster" videos
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
It’s not news that 2025 was a jaw-droppingly surreal year in many ways. However, it is perhaps a badge of (dis)honor that Juneau had many such moments that had nothing to do with all the national uproar.
A third straight year of record glacial floods occurred shortly before Alaska’s capital city was declared the safest in the U.S. against natural disaster risks. A TV crew filming Juneau’s high school football team as part of the upcoming Super Bowl coverage got a flood of footage, so to speak, with the rainiest game in remembered history. And the year is ending with alternating spells of record cold and record snow.
All of which meant it was pretty easy coming up with lots of contenders for the 10 strangest stories in Juneau during 2025. While lists like this obviously are subjective, there are a couple of eligibility rules.
First and foremost, they cannot be part of our Top 10 Stories of 2025 that will be published on Jan. 1 if all goes as planned. So while losing all but two of the nearly 20 employees at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor’s Center due to the Trump administration’s "Valentine’s Day Massacre" is unquestionably strange, it’s hardly a spoiler to mention it’s part of the year-end top 10.
Also, we are excluding ourselves — meaning the situation at the Juneau Empire/Carpenter Media Group and the launch of the Juneau Independent in June, even though an argument can probably be made it deserves consideration for the strangest or top-10 lists. We are noting that the lists include stories from the Empire during the first half of the year and Independent during the second half, since it was the same news team reporting all of those stories (due to the entire Empire newsroom joining the Independent).
Finally, we started with a longer list of oddities and some didn’t make the final cut. Among them were Border Patrol officials flying over the Taku River in a supposed search for drug smugglers, Will Muldoon's sudden and unexplained resignation from the school board months after winning reelection, two bears fatally electrocuted after climbing a utility pole downtown, and the city abruptly shuttering and evicting guests from the hotel-formerly-known-as-the-Breakwater due to building permit issues.
Here then, in no particular order, are Juneau’s 10 strangest stories of 2025:
Sure, living along the Mendenhall River is pretty safe 364.5 days of the year. But those other 12 hours where record flooding has swamped neighborhoods the past three years are kind of hard to overlook.
A study that put Juneau in national headlines did so anyhow by proclaiming Alaska’s capital the safest city in the U.S. in the category of "natural disaster risk." That top ranking also allowed Juneau to rank as one of the five safest cities in the country of the 182 evaluated in the study released in October by WalletHub, even though the city ranks 86th for home/community safety and 57th for financial safety.
A WalletHub spokesperson acknowledged its study overlooked the proverbial elephant in the room.
"Importantly, glacial flooding is not included in these datasets and therefore was not factored into Juneau's natural-disaster risk score," Diana Polk, a WalletHub spokesperson, stated in an email to the Juneau Independent. "This omission may help explain the apparent discrepancy between the ranking and the community's recent flood experiences, a hazard outside the scope of the available data."
Juneau Mayor Beth Weldon, when asked about the study’s findings before the reply from WalletHub was received, guessed one possible justification for the rating might be "the city protecting the community from harm, so if (that’s) true then I would guess it has to do with the HESCO barriers keeping the valley from flooding."
"Made us all smile anyway," she wrote in a text message.
Call it taking a gamble on gambling as construction of a long-discussed gaming hall near Eaglecrest Ski Area began this summer with no hype, with the first media reports occurring in August when building efforts were well underway. The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska was largely mum about its plans for the 20-acre site it purchased in 2015 with a gaming facility in mind.
But documents showed the gaming facility took a big step forward during the final days of the Biden administration, when the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) on Jan. 17 of this year authorized an amended gaming ordinance adopted by the tribe in October of 2024. Four days later President Donald Trump began his second term and that would ultimately lead to the authorization being revoked in September for the vaguely stated reason that the Biden-era action "does not reflect the best interpretation of applicable law."
Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, in an email to the Juneau Independent, stated the Trump administration’s action was anticipated and next steps were being reviewed.
However, the halting of the local gaming hall project — and a similar dispute involving a tribal casino the Native Village of Eklutna opened in January that was targeted in a lawsuit by the State of Alaska — was part of a bigger move by the Trump administration to restrict "Indian country" sovereignty rights on tribal property. That move may affect millions of acres of land in Alaska, including other Tlingit and Haida land in Juneau and Southeast.
Plenty of Juneau residents added the word "gustnado" to their vocabulary in June when a cruise ship was torn loose from its moorings and nearly collided with another in Gastineau Channel. The webosphere, rather than reacting with "no harm, no foul," went viral with videos featuring "DISASTER" and other scary cyrons.
The sudden storm on June 16 that caused the Celebrity Edge to break loose from the AJ Dock prompted the first-ever thunderstorm warning for Juneau by the National Weather Service. The ship was blown toward the Carnival Luminosa in the middle of the port, but the Edge managed to avoid a collision by dropping its anchor.
In a Facebook post after the storm, the NWS noted the storm was actually a gustnado, explaining: "Tornadoes are defined as a rotating column of air that connects a low cloud with the ground. While a gustnado can look like a tornado, and can even cause damage, it has no upper connection to a cloud."
Adding to the weirdness of it all is a Google search for "viral cruise ship incident in Juneau on June 16" turns up two primary events. The other involves a person deliberately seeking attention (and of course is still getting it with this reminder).
"A woman caused quite the stir in Juneau, Alaska, after leaping off the cruise pier near Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas," the website Come Cruise With Me reported. "The unidentified woman — dressed pretty casually here — sprinted and jumped into the cold harbor water as she was captured on video, and shared widely on TikTok."
Rep. Nick Begich III, R-Alaska, probably won’t feature sitting alone in a mostly empty convention room at Centennial Hall among the highlights of his first year in Congress. But listening to — and delivering — hyperbolic pitches about cryptocurrency to a scattering of true believers and curiosity seekers was probably preferable to wandering outside the convention center where protesters were hoping to confront him about more worldly matters.
The first-ever crypto convention in Juneau, clearly wasn’t a commercial success, with the organizer of Bitcoin Alaska noting the six-day event in early July lost money with its 125 to 150 registered participants, including its roughly 20 featured speakers. It’s not known how many were $150 "mountain" passes compared to the $800 "whale" passes that included extras such as a Tracy Arm Fjord Cruise — and how many simply got in free during the latter part when admission got more lax.
But as one of the featured speakers noted, "We have to start somewhere."
The stage enthusiasm of the presenters couldn’t be denied regardless of how empty the room was at times (knowing the event was being recorded for webcast may have helped provide some voltage). Plus, as the Independent’s story noted after the conference, "regardless of what one thinks of cryptocurrency — future of global finance, overhyped and unstable, a predatory scam — the website CoinGecko asserts the market cap for all cryptocurrency as of Tuesday is $3.43 trillion. Which means it’ll most likely be around for a while whether people buy into it or not."
That said, there’s very little people can buy with cryptocurrency in Juneau these days — although cookies and lemonade were among them outside Centennial Hall during the convention. On the other hand, Begich’s efforts to get the government to invest in crypto are getting a friendly reception from the Trump administration and, yes, a second Bitcoin Alaska conference is planned next year.
If you’re one of the researchers who spent three years coming up with scores rating five proposed routes for a second Juneau-Douglas crossing, hearing "they’re not going to mean anything when they get into the next round" probably isn’t going to make your day.
It also probably wasn’t great news for people favoring or opposing certain routes, and hoping the Planning and Environmental Linkages (PEL) study would narrow down the number of options being seriously considered. Instead, the data and scores collected will be used for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process.
The PEL study gave the highest score to the so-called Salmon Creek option — the one closest to the existing Douglas Bridge — due in part to public concerns expressed about alternatives that cross the Mendenhall Wetlands. But there also wasn’t a huge difference in scores among the five options — all of which were evaluated on a pass/fail basis. As such all got a pass to the next stage, said Greg Lockwood, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities’ project manager for the Juneau-Douglas Second Crossing, when the final PEL report was released in July.
Another heart-stopping moment in the hallowed history of The Alaskan Hotel & Bar arose in October as the 112-year-old establishment finished fifth in USA Today’s Best Haunted Hotel competition decided by online voters.
The downtown Juneau hotel, one of 20 finalists in the 30-day competition that ended Sept. 22, finished ahead of other nationally known contenders such as the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, and The Stanley Hotel in Colorado that was the inspiration for "The Shining."
"It’s no surprise that the oldest operating hotel in Juneau, Alaska, is also known for being haunted," USA Today’s description of the hotel notes. "This historic Alaskan Hotel & Bar has a storied past, having served as a speakeasy and a brothel, and it was once shut down and even condemned. Several legends exist about the hotel, including one about Room 315. The story goes that the room was found to be covered in blood after a Navy soldier jumped out the window (no one ever found out what caused all the blood in the first place)."
Also notable during the year was Hearthside Books and Toys finishing eighth in the newspaper’s "10 Best Independent Bookstores" poll when the results were announced in June.
A five-person film crew from NBC Sports endured freezing faucet-like rain to spotlight the Juneau high school football community at Saturday’s game featuring the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé Crimson Bears against Dimond High School.
JDHS Head Coach Rich Sjoroos called it the most intense rainstorm he’s seen in his 32-year career. For the show’s marquee host, a longtime sportswriter and broadcaster Peter King, that just means it’s good television.
“Alaska, the weather is unpredictable. We're not in Miami, and I don't want to be in Miami. I want to be in Juneau,” he said during the downpour. “I just want to see what it's really like, and I have a feeling that that's what we're seeing with the clouds coming down Thunder Mountain and occasionally there being an incredible amount of rain, and then it stops raining for a while.”
As it turns out the crew also captured the Crimson Bears’ highlight moment of the season on the field with a 15-14 victory over defending state champion Dimond High School that was decided in the final minute of play.
The gameplay clips, fan, family, and player interviews, and cutaway footage from around town will be edited into a documentary segment about what football means to communities around the country and aired during the NBC Super Bowl LX pregame coverage.
There was indeed fowl play happening at the airport on the night of Nov. 22, but not what alarmed residents thought when they were calling the Juneau Police Department.
"JPD has received several reports of shots being fired in (the) valley, in the general area of the airport," a notice posted on the department’s official page advised concerned citizens. "I’m told this is due to a large gaggle (actual term I looked it up) of Canadian geese near the runway and airport staff are using firecracker rounds before arrivals and departures to help disperse them."
Juneau International Airport Manager Andres Delgado, in a text message that night to the Juneau Independent, stated the airport "uses various methods (mostly nonlethal) to scare off the huge numbers of birds that migrate through the area this time of year."
"Birds are stubborn, and it’s a constant effort to keep birds and other animals from being too comfortable around the airport," he wrote, noting there was a bird strike earlier during the week that forced a departing flight to return to the airport.
Hunting for a job might be tough if you’re being blamed for causing the worst financial crisis in a school district’s history. But Cassee Olin got hired as Wasilla's finance director within a few months of departing Juneau under that cloud a couple of years ago — only to submit another resignation from that job in June of this year due to an alleged "blatant misuse of funds."
Olin resigned as administrative services director of the Juneau School District on Dec. 1, 2023, following a presentation by an auditor that reported significant faulty accounting practices for a second straight year. Within a few weeks, a temporary budget analyst was brought in to scrutinize a district budget officials already expected to be up to $7 million in debt — and district leaders learned in January the actual figure was about $9.5 million.
“Just to be blunt, we were appallingly poorly informed about our budget projections, both revenues and expenditures last year,” Deedie Sorensen, then-president of the Juneau Board of Education, said during a Jan.18, 2024, board meeting.
While the district dug itself out of that situation, Olin began working on Wasilla’s finances.
"I would say she wasn't amazing," Wasilla Council member Ian Crafton said after Onlin resigned from that job as well. "She was competent. I would say she was able to do her job."
Crafton was among the officials raising concerns in Wasilla, telling city leaders during a city council meeting being livestreamed that "I had our finance director lying to my face."
"I would ask her questions, she would tell me one thing, and then we would look at the policy and it was something different," he said.
Olin, who had resigned a few days before that meeting, could not be reached for comment then or following her departure from Juneau. But Wasilla’s city attorney stated during the council meeting that she did not find the allegations of illegal activity by Olin to be warranted and some Juneau residents in during school board meetings have said the district’s problems were caused by the actions of many people, not just Olin.
This is still a developing story, but it’s hard to end this list without winter weather weirdness. Juneau set snowfall records on Dec. 6 with 9.6 inches, Dec. 15 with 9.2 inches and Dec. 27 with 7.8 inches — and might well set at least one more with nearly three feet of snow forecast as possible during the storm occurring on the final weekend of the year.
As of Sunday, Dec. 28, Juneau is at least within shouting distance of setting an all-time record.
"This snowfall has brought the monthly total for December to 40.8 inches which has moved it into 7th overall snowiest," an update on NWS Juneau’s Facebook page at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday notes. "The snowiest December was 1964 with a total of 54.7 inches."
The capital city also has had five days in December with temperatures below 0°F at Juneau International Airport, including four low-temperature records set in a five-day period ending Dec. 23.
The general forecast this winter is for colder rather than wetter winter, according to the National Weather Service. But things like the arrival of an atmospheric river when temperatures are hovering around freezing right after Christmas obviously are an exception to that trend if it comes true.
The forecast on the night of Dec. 31, by the way, is pretty much anything goes with a possibility rain, snow or neither.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
