(Rashah McChesney/Chilkat Valley News) Julie Korsmeyer shows off Jim Stanford’s new sign for Emerson Field on July 6, 2025, in Mosquito Lake, Alaska.

It’s mid-morning on a Sunday in early July and Julie Korsmeyer has given up on a posthole digger. Instead, she kneels down and sticks her arm deep into the ground of the Mosquito Lake baseball field, to clear the last of the dirt out of the way for a wooden fencepost. 

Nearby,…

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...