Bethel, Alaska, experienced historically low July temperatures with highs in the 40s, a rare event not seen since 1971, due to an unusual cold air outbreak from the Arctic.

The Kuskokwim River breakup has led to widespread flooding, affecting roads and drinking water in several communities, with Kwethluk experiencing significant impacts.

Bethel Search and Rescue advises against travel on the Kuskokwim River due to dangerous conditions of open water and thin ice identified in their annual aerial survey.

Amid severely restricted fishing on the Kuskokwim River, one bright spot has been abundant sockeye salmon runs at 30,000 fish daily near Bethel.

Biologists do not expect either to reach their goals for fish reaching their spawning grounds.

The booming Bristol Bay salmon run has broken the record set just last year, while on the Yukon River, Chinook are too scarce to harvest.

In an unusual event, a pair of beluga whales swam about 60 miles up the Kuskokwim River to Bethel. After word got out, boaters pursued the belugas and took at least one of them. Now, an official is working to collect samples of the animal to better understand where it came from.

This small owl was sighted perching under a building. LEO Network looking for some help on an identification.

The tomcod harvests in the Kongiganak, Cavuuneq and Ilkivik Rivers have been a failure. Also in other areas, based on observations from Chevak and Chefornak. Both the surface and bottom trawl results show a clear decline in tomcod biomass in the North Bering Sea.

“It got very cold the day we got there, it got down to like single digits and ice came out of the mountains and rivers and sloughs everywhere,” said Allyn Long, general manager of Alaska Logistics.

A decades-long decline in salmon in the Yukon River has reached a crisis this year, forcing harvest closures and prompting emergency shipments of salmon from other regions of Alaska to river residents who are otherwise facing food shortages.

The village is losing ground three times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to studies of Napakiak’s erosion. During high tide, the river is only 64 feet from the high-schoolers’ original classroom and gets closer by the day. On windy days, waves crash against the shore where students used to play, battering it until the land relents and crumbles.

Chum returns are the lowest on record, leaving communities with empty freezers and uncertainty about getting through the winter.

Kwigillingok, a community on the Bering Sea coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is used to some flooding during high tides. But in recent years, that flooding has grown more severe, reaching a new threshold last week.

The Kuskokwim River king salmon run does not look particularly strong this year, but chum numbers look even worse. Historically, around 60% of the salmon in the river at this point in the season would be chum or sockeye, but right now Bethel Test Fishery numbers show that just over 20% of the salmon are.

The size of king salmon returning to Western Alaska rivers to spawn has been decreasing over the past few decades. Researchers at the University of Alaska

Heavy snowfall has made maintaining the lower Kuskokwim Ice Road a challenge this year. The road is shorter than usual, even as its crew is working harder.

Abnormally warm winters in 2018 and 2019, in which the ground did not freeze solid enough to support heavy equipment, delayed completion of this project.

The weather may be cold, but it’s too soon to get out on the river ice. The ice is forming up better than it did two years ago, when the winter was the warmest on record, but it is not freezing as fast or as well as last winter, when conditions were near-perfect.

Dead or dying eggs in a female coho salmon are a possible symptom of environmental stress felt by the fish. In Western Alaska, water levels have been low following a rapid spring snowmelt and low precipitation.