The fall equinox is past, and last week, we had our first snow on September 30. That’s not unusual. This snow didn’t stick, and even the extra bit we got on October 1 just melted away within an hour or so. But this is just the beginning of the winter of 2026-27, and there is almost certainly a few feet of snow in our future, times when it will be great to stay inside and have a nice big bowl of hot stew or some spruce grouse and dumplings.
Speaking of eating, turns out owning a donut shop in Alaska comes with its own unique challenges.
Andreea Koski said the brown bear that’s been roaming their Eagle River neighborhood is the biggest she’s ever seen. Early Wednesday morning it visited her family’s home and left behind damage.
“This is what we woke up to,” Koski said, pointing to a glass panel that had been ripped off the metal canopy of a truck that was parked in their driveway. The bear was clearly trying to get inside, attracted by a distinctively sweet smell.
“We did not have any donuts in the house, but the truck does smell like donuts,” she said.
Koski and her husband own Jason’s Donuts in Eagle River, and while the attempted break-in didn’t happen there, Koski says the truck is used to haul donutty smelling trash from the shop.
“It frequently gets the aroma of donuts within the truck,” she said.
The reporting is somewhat light-hearted, but there’s a very real danger here. This was, as Andreea Koski notes, a very large bear; this is the time of year when bears of all sizes are looking for every calorie they can get to prepare them for a winter’s sleep. When bears start associating humans with food, well, that almost never ends well. And this bear looks to be escalating.
But the bear didn’t stop there, it also attacked the families’ garage door where Koski said there was nothing smelly inside.
“His claw marks are all the way up at the top, off to the side here,” she said pointing. “It looks like there’s a nose mark right there.”
David Huntingdon, a manager at Pioneer Doors, was working on a garage door right next door that had also been attacked by a bear. He said he’d heard of three doors that were damaged in the neighborhood overnight.
That is a bear that is prowling a human neighborhood looking for food. That’s a bad thing. It will probably end badly for the bear, and possibly for a human. The Koskis might want to think about finding a way to minimize the donut smell in their truck, although they are in no way to blame for a hungry bear. That’s just an Alaska thing.
Although… I’m tempted to ask if they sell bear claws.
Alaska Man score: Nothing yet for this one; we’ll see how it ends up.
And then, there’s this: a dumb crook who is nothing if not persistent.
On 10/1/2026 at approximately 00:01, Katherine Ivanoff repeatedly misdialed 911 a total of 29 times without reporting an emergency, became verbally abusive when contacted by AST, and was arrested and remanded to Mat-Su Pretrial for Interfering with Emergency Communications under AS 11.56.785.
This crook’s taking attention-seeking to a whole new level.
Alaska Man score: 1 moose nugget. You have to give her credit for sticking to it.
Now, then, a few of you have asked to see the inside of our favorite place in the Valley, the Sheep Creek Lodge, so here we are – the septic system is going in, and I sat down a while back and had a chat with the owners. Oh, and the fundraiser mentioned in the interview has now closed, but things at the Lodge are looking up. Watch!