Reba Lean

It's not just the building of model ships that interests Dennis Carroll. It's also the history behind each ship. And the models are more than just trinkets -- they are art.

The last thing returning soldiers want to do when they arrive home after a deployment, sometimes late at night, is make their beds, not to mention purchase towels or midnight snacks.

The commercials are everywhere on Fairbanks TV, on YouTube and at the theater. The "Alaska Grandmas" encourage people to head to the shooting range for the Alaska Grandma Safe Shootin' Challenge.

It would have been easy for the 16 Japanese tourists to stop in Fairbanks and call their Alaska trip complete. They wanted more, though. They wanted to see the Alaska that lies far beyond the cities.

Larry Hodges smiles easily, cracking jokes with his fellow Fort Wainwright firefighters. Though he and his friends have been sharing laughs for years, his position at the department changed after a hit-and-run snowmachine incident at the springtime Arctic Man event.

They arrived at 10 p.m. Saturday from the cargo hold of an Alaska Airlines flight after a couple of days of flying. Their names are Apollo and Thor, and when Sgt. Conan Doyle's unit first found them, they were hungry and neglected in an Afghanistan police outpost.

Earl, Gus, Ghost and Yoda were the highlights of the Alaska Bird Observatory's Owlpalooza on Oct. 1, even though they did none of the talking.

Whether they had been scolded, encouraged, loved or touched in another way by her, hundreds of people mourned the loss of 102-year-old Athabascan matriarch Hannah Solomon on Thursday.