On Monday afternoon, Pat Philpott sat in his home near Mile 7 of the Haines Highway, looking out over the glass-calm water of the Chilkat River. 

Then he noticed something strange. 

“I saw ripples,” he said. Short waves, three sets of them, coming toward him from the direction of Kicking Horse River across the inlet – traveling perpendicular/sideways to the normal river flow.  

“I said, ‘what the hell?’ I thought there were animals, but there…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...