Anchorage Daily News

Making millions off fish eggs. Imagine you're a fish-egg buyer from Japan or Korea, and plan to make a deal for your clients back home. Your mission: Spend $5-$10 million, and bring home 200-300 tons.

Inexpensive pollock comes from the Bering Sea off Alaska (3.4 billion tons in 2006) and gets fashioned into fish sticks and filets that make a cheap dinner. But the roe is another matter altogether, according to this account from the Associated Press. At the Seattle auctions, buyers spend $400 million on the lung-shaped sacs of eggs that later get folded into pasta dishes or omelets, or used to garnish "everything from noodles to risotto to hand-rolled sushi."

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Farewell my Subaru. What Alaskan can't identify with that sentiment? If you don't own one now, you probably once did. That's also the title of writer Doug Fine new memoir on living green. In it, he details how he bought a parcel of land in southwestern New Mexico, dubbed it the Funky Butte, bought goats and started raising his own food. The goal was to get off the grid and reduce his carbon footprint.

Alaskans may recall another Fine work, "Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man," in which he documents a year roughing it in the wilds of Alaska. Catch a Los Angeles Times review of the new book here. Erika Schickel says, "the lure of a thinking man in or out of harmony with nature is delicious."

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Bison resurgence. Bison could thrive in regions from Alaska to Mexico if adequate measures are taken to prepare for it, according to an assessment from Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups reported on in a story at Science Daily. The icon of American history could make it in areas where conservationists see potential for "large, unfettered landscapes over the next century."

"The general sites identified in the paper range from grasslands and prairies in the southwestern U.S., to Arctic lowland taiga in Alaska where the sub-species wood bison could once again roam. Large swaths of mountain forests and grasslands are identified as prime locations across Canada and the U.S., while parts of the desert in Mexico could also again support herds that once lived there," according to the story.

Today's Anchorage Daily News personalizes the bison comeback with a Lazy Mountain tale of Todd Pettit's 600-acre Pitchfork Ranch near Palmer, where he's currently raising 65 of them. A community blog, AK Root Cellar, hosts a discussion on why Alaskans can't buy local meat in their stores.

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Governor with babe in arms. Governor Sarah Palin tells the Associated Press over the weekend that working as a leader and raising her new son, Trig, are compatible challenges in the modern era.

"It's a sign of the times to be able to do this," Palin said. "I can think of so many male candidates who watched families grow while they were in office. There is no reason to believe a woman can't do it with a growing family. My baby will not be at all or in any sense neglected."

The governor relayed how she got the news of her son's Down Syndrome - over the phone from her doctor, and how it took her several days to begin reading up on the condition and preparing her family for the news. Readers are commenting on the story on the Alaska Politics blog.

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Predicting a changing of the guard? It's the classic politics-in-the-coffee-shop story, and in this round with Associated Press online political editor Ron Fournier, the yarn is about Rep. Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both pitted against challengers for their seats in Washington. Coffee shop dateline: the Butte. You can almost smell the acrid white smoky curling toward the ceiling:

Shoulder-to-shoulder around a slab-wood table, Frank and his pals form a cigarette-smoke circle of plaid shirts, faded jeans and baseball caps. These men and many of the folks they know build radar equipment. They eat fried foods. Hunt and fish. Drink beer. Vote Republican.

And then it comes:

"I've been voting for Ted and Don all my life," says Scott Frank, 45, a blue-collar Republican sipping coffee at the Butte Cafe, "but they've really screwed up."

We shall see, as the battle engages.

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Crow Creek Road upgrade. Brush and tree clearing has begun in the first steps toward paving and bridge construction of the Crow Creek Road in Girdwood, according to a Turnagain Times story, but the project is not sitting well with everybody. The clearing, in fact, caught some residents by surprise who complained of the loss of old spruce trees and a destruction of the natural setting along the historic road that leads to the Crow Creek Mine, according to the story.

"The thing is nobody wants it," Cathy Frost, owner of Raven Glacier Lodge, said of the paving project. "I can't find anybody here that wants it. I've called Ted Steven's office, but nobody could tell us who actually asked where it (the earmark for the improvements) came from. It's a historic road. This is where everybody walks and runs and hikes. This is a beloved road."

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Sales tax jump. Almost 500 cities across the country boosted their sales taxes last year, and Seldovia, which hiked its rate from 2 percent to 4.5 percent, had the second biggest jump on the list, according to the results of a survey reported on WebCPA. The story also says that Wrangell, with its 7 percent sales tax, joined the Catawba Indian Reservation in South Carolina as having the highest city sales tax rate last year.

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The best outdoors towns. Outdoor Life has compiled a list of what it believes are the top 200 towns in America for hunting and fishing. Alaska landed two in the first 50 - Fairbanks, which came in at 31, and Kenai, which came in at 42.

Compilers of the list gave Fairbanks high marks for trophy potential, public-land access and gun laws, but low ones for fishable species and year-round opportunities. Kenai scored well in gun laws and public-land access, but not so well in year-round opportunities.

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Endangered, or "conveniently charismatic." A lengthy essay posted on the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research comes up with conclusions on the plight of polar bears that run contrary to many of the opinions getting attention recently. The animals "are robust and, according to native people, are considerably larger than in previous decades," the essay says.

Sunday's Anchorage Daily News has a report by Tom Kizzia about a move by the Legislature to spend $2 million "to fund an ‘academic based' conference that highlights contrarian scientific research on global warming. Legislators hope to undermine the public perception of a widespread consensus among polar bear researchers that warming global temperatures and melting Arctic ice threaten the polar bears' survival."

As for whether the bears are threatened by the climate changes and the reduction in the Arctic sea ice, (click here for ADN stories and background on the pending federal decision on whether they should be considered endangered), the essay contends it's impossible to tell. "Polar bear fossils have been dated to over one hundred thousand years, which means that polar bears have already survived an interglacial period when temperatures were considerably warmer than they are at present and when, quite probably, levels of summertime Arctic sea ice were correspondingly low."

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"20,000 intrigues under the sea." Who would have figured a jagged volcanic rock sticking above the surface of the sea could one day become treasured for its rich variety of marine life? But according to a Globe and Mail story, that's what happened to the Bowie Seamount, which sank below the surface off the coast of Queen Charlotte Islands, just south of Southeast Alaska's border, about 15,000 years ago.

The seamount has been called an "oceanic oasis" of sealift and was recently added to Canada's network of marine protected areas. "The place is just full of life," said scuba diver Brian Fuhr, one of the few to have explored the area. "It's very cool. ... It's a dive of a lifetime."

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