Spring in Alaska brings ATVs, thawing ice, and a string of wild news items: a massive localized tsunami in a narrow fjord, a bizarre attack on a Wasilla police station involving a car and bear spray, and a reminder about how our forests and their chemistry matter to life here. This piece walks through those events, using local reporting and on-the-ground observations to explain what happened, why it mattered, and why we should pay attention to the unusual risks that come with living in a place of dramatic weather, steep terrain, and independent people.
Spring finally arrived and sent folks outside for all the usual reasons: ice-out, birds returning, bears waking, and the satisfying rumble of ATVs. Those sounds are small, normal markers of the season, and they contrast sharply with the extraordinary natural event that hit Tracy Arm last August. The ordinary rhythms of life make the scale of that event feel even more startling.
Bretwood Higman has spent years scouring Alaska’s mountains for signs of potential landslides. One spot he looked: Tracy Arm Fjord – a popular cruise destination between Juneau and Petersburg.
“I didn’t see anything. So I didn’t have anything marked,” Higman said. “I’ve been working on mapping all across Alaska.”
So he was caught completely off-guard when a mountainside collapsed into the fjord early one morning last August, generating one of the largest landslide tsunamis in recorded history. The tsunami, which at its highest point was nearly as tall as One World Trade Center in New York City, scoured vegetation off the fjord’s walls as it barreled down the narrow channel.
The Tracy Arm collapse produced a tsunami that was enormous but very localized, unlike the massive ocean-crossing tsunamis people often think of. Narrow fjords act like funnels: when a landslide dumps a huge volume of rock and soil into a confined body of water, the water has nowhere to go but up and forward. That channeling is what made the wave so dramatic, and also why the event stayed mostly out of the national conversation.
The landslide came down on Aug. 10 at 5:20 in the morning, so no boats were present. But the area regularly sees more than 20 boats a day in the summer, including large cruise ships that can carry up to 6,000 people.
“This could be really catastrophic if it were to happen at 10 a.m., during the day,” said Ezgi Karasozen, a research seismologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center.
Higman agrees.
“I have tried to encourage my colleagues to look at this and explicitly acknowledge it as a failure,” said Higman, who is a geologist and the executive director of Ground Truth Alaska, an educational nonprofit focused on Alaska’s environment. “We clearly did not identify this beforehand.”
It could have been catastrophic if the slide had hit during peak tourist or boating hours, and that reality has prompted scientists and managers to reassess risk in fjords that attract big vessels. The fortunate timing of the collapse—early morning when few boats were present—meant that, despite the scale and reach of the wave, nobody on the water was harmed. That luck does not erase the fact that a known blind spot existed in mapping and assessment.
Switching gears to something a lot less natural and a lot more baffling: someone tried to drive a car into the Wasilla Police Department, then sprayed a responding officer with bear spray. Security footage captured the incident, which shows the vehicle crossing the entrance lot, moving around concrete barriers, crossing grass, and striking the glass doors of the lobby. The driver was identified as a 41-year-old Palmer man and the encounter escalated from property damage to a situation requiring bomb technicians.
A 41-year-old Palmer man crashed a car into the lobby doors of the Wasilla Police Department and deployed bear spray in an attempt to intentionally hurt police officers on Wednesday evening, police said in an update on Thursday.
Security footage released by the department shows the entire incident, which occurred at 4:43 p.m., according to the video’s timestamp.
The video shows the car being driven across the department’s north entrance parking lot, around concrete barriers, then over the grass lawn and into the glass doors at the entry foyer.
Police identified the driver as 41-year-old Thomas Desalvo II.
During the arrest, officers found unusual wiring in the vehicle running to a dashboard switch and throughout the cabin, prompting an evacuation of the department and nearby fields while professionals checked the car. Anchorage FBI bomb technicians and the local bomb squad examined the scene and ultimately declared there was no continuing threat. The episode landed somewhere between a dangerous stunt and a failed attempt at weaponizing a vehicle, with bear spray adding an oddly Alaskan touch.
During the arrest, officers observed multiple unusual wires inside the vehicle running to a dashboard switch and around the cabin.
Police evacuated the department and nearby high school ball fields as a precaution while officers investigated the vehicle.
Anchorage FBI special agent bomb technicians and members of the Anchorage Bomb Squad responded and determined there was no further threat from the vehicle, according to an update from Wasilla police.
Incidents like that remind residents that crime and odd, dangerous behavior can show up anywhere, even in small or remote communities. The mix of creativity, desperation, and poor planning in this episode left local folks shaking their heads, adding a strange but darkly comic chapter to local crime reports.
Finally, there’s the quiet, ongoing importance of Alaska’s biomes and forests, which shape carbon and oxygen cycles that support life here and beyond. The state’s vast tree cover, wetlands, and permafrost interact with climate in complex ways, and each spring brings conversations about how ecosystems respond to warming, disturbance, and human use. Understanding that interplay helps make sense of why sudden slides, unusual weather, and human disruptions all matter in a place as rugged and changeable as Alaska.
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