Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Anchorage to Seattle Day 3: Haines Junction to Boya Lake

We were at the library at Whitehorse so I could post and then went to lunch nearby.




 
 Bridges is a small cafe with healthy food and they also take in youth from a nearby development/training program to give them job skills.  We had a great black bean soup - part was pureed but she left in some of the whole beans to give it more texture. 

 Back to the library to get the van and off down the road. 


 This metal bridge made a racket as we crossed over from Teslin, Yukon.  Below is a shot of Teslin and the bridge.



The trees are quite in full fall colors here yet.  Just starting.  




This is one of three salmon signs at the Teslin lookout point. 



 As we headed southeast toward the Cassiar Highway cutoff (just before Watson Lake) we began to get blue sky and great clouds.   We ended up at Boya Lake campground, about 60 miles from the junction of the Cassiar and Alaska Highways. 



 We've passed about six bicyclists with well loaded panniers.  Three in one group, a single, and a pair.

Doing this quickly in Dease Lake, BC at the learning center.  Sun's out again. 

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Anchorage to Seattle Day 2B: Into Canada, Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

There was road construction between the US Customs station and the Canadian Customs station.  But what an incredible background.



The birch and aspen and other plants were so yellow and golden and even red, that despite clouds it was ‘sunny’ everywhere we looked. 



White River, I think

These are both at Kluane Lake.  Lots of low hanging clouds, some rain, and snow higher up.










The swans are headed south.  We saw maybe a dozen, but this pair was close to the highway at a place where we could stop.  Trumpeters.



As the title says, it was cloudy, but the bright fall colors made it look sunny.  And toward 7:30pm (we lost an hour entering Canada) the sun did come out just past Haines Junction at Paint Rock.  We camped near by at Pine Lake Campground.



Anchorage to Seattle Day 2: Fall Walk To Hidden Lake Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge


[At Yukon Public Library in Whitehorse]

 It's Fall up here!  This is on the road at Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge right near the Canadian Border.





We stopped at Hidden Lake trail - 2 miles round trip - for a bit of morning exercise before what seemed like the inevitable rain came.
















We grazed on blueberries, cranberries, and sweet ripe rose hips. 













click to enlarge
At the lake, Joan spotted in the binoculars a large moose way on the other side.  By the time a got the telephoto lens on, it had hidden in the trees.  You can barely see her in this picture. 




Here are some other shots along the trail.



 






A little down the road is the Refuge Visitor Center which closes after September 15 and we were there September 16.  But the view was still available.
There was a reminder that Washington DC's reach is far.  I don't think cutting back on the hours here is too big a loss.  It's nice and should be available, but it's not essential to be open longer.




And more spectacular view along the road. 






Monday, September 16, 2013

Anchorage to Seattle 1: To Tok in 13,000 words

I meant to only have ten pictures, but I couldn't get below 13. 



















Delicious ripe rose hips



I really need to learn how to use this new camera.  I'm not at all happy with the lighting in most of these.  The last one was so bad I had to play with it a lot in photoshop.  It's where we camped last night - Eagle Trail campground, about 16 miles out of Tok.  The campground before it was closed.  There's still blue sky but more clouds too.  We're off.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Driving Outside, Some Light Reading In The Mean Time

We're driving to Seattle today.  We're almost ready to go, but there's always last minute stuff to take care of.

We did this trip three years ago.  Then we left September 20.  So the stories and photos should be pretty similar.  Here's Anchorage to Tok.  There are a couple more posts from that trip at this link:

Meanwhile there has been a flurry of documents filed with the Superior Court in Fairbanks on the Redistricting Plan.  Below is the Riley Plaintiffs motion for Summary Judgment.  It came during the Yom Kippur holiday and right before we are leaving so I haven't had a chance to look at it.  There are other filings listed at Ernie Weiss' website.  And the Redistricting Board has posted some filings as well (their own from what I can tell.)  So if anyone wants to read all this a write up a guest post about it, that would be great.  I'm not sure how much of this I can read in the car on my laptop battery. 


Meanwhile, in an attempt to not have anything left to do before we leave in the morning, I'm up until 2am and I still have some things to finish up. So we probably won't be leaving at the crack of dawn.

Friday, September 13, 2013

Joe Miller With Polish - Meet Dan Sullivan

Image from AG Confirmation Hearing
Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan's resignation was announced yesterday and pundits already are weighing his chances in the 2014 US Senate race. 


In February 2010 after listening to the confirmation hearings for Dan Sullivan to be Attorney General (he'd already served in that position for 8 months) I wrote, in my normal understated way, at the end of my post:
"I wouldnʻt be surprised to see Mr. Sullivan running for Governor or Senator sometime."
I knew at the time that this was a man who would definitely be a player in Alaska politics.

Here was a marine, Harvard and Georgetown graduate, attorney, Presidential Fellow working with Condoleezza Rice, married into a solid Alaskan political family from Fairbanks with strong anti-government ideology.

His strategy, he told the Judiciary Committee, was to work with other Attorneys General to collectively sue the federal government on a list of topics from endangered species to tribal sovereignty.  My impression was that this is a guy who plans for everything and readjusts quickly to stay the course when the unexpected happens. 

This guy is Joe Miller with polish.  Joe Miller for the man in a suit and tie and the women around them in their dresses and heels.  Joe's ideology packaged for the moderate and polite.  At the time I thought he'd be a shoe-in for whatever he ran for in Alaska.  It's not that his views are more moderate, just his presentation and style. 

Judiciary committee chair Jay Ramras fawned over Sullivan so shamelessly at the hearing in 2010, that I felt obligated to talk about how to even report it:
"Itʻs hard to be purely a reporter (in the literal sense) and not to add shading on the confirmation hearing for Dan Sullivan. In fact, simply presenting the cold facts would hardly convey the very warm reception Sullivan received. Committee Chair Jay Ramras did everything but blow kisses at the nominee and his in-laws (former Fairbanks Rep. Hugh ʻBudʻ Fate and former UA Regent Mary Jane Fate) who were in attendance."

The only attempt to do the serious oversight work of a confirmation hearing came from Rep. Heron of Bethel who questioned Sullivan on his stand on Native Sovereignty.  Sullivan said his concern was for the rights of non-Natives and Natives who were not members.  He went on to tout a cooperative approach with Natives in getting transportation infrastructure. That sounds more like using the power of the Native organizations to get what Sullivan and the Parnell administration wanted than any interest in Native rights.

This questioning was telling given the State of Alaska's recent appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court on behalf of a man that a tribal court declared an unfit parent.  Despite the Governor's much vaunted "Choose Respect" program to stop domestic violence, it appears that tribal courts are more dangerous to the Parnell administration than men who beat their girlfriends "so badly he broke three of her ribs and collapsed one of her lungs."

You'd think perhaps Sullivan's mother-in-law, a Koyukon Athabascan, ought to have some influence on him.  I realize that this case is under a new attorney general, but it has the fingerprints of Sullivan's strategy for court challenges to pursue his strong and active anti-government regulation stance.  

You can hear some of that discussion between Herron and Sullivan  in this four minute video I made at the hearing.



You can also hear him recite his background to the committee in the video below:


Comparing Truncation in 2001 and 2011/13 - Alaska Redistricting Board

 "The data does not indicate whether that seat was a mid-term truncation or not."

So wrote Michael White in a memo to the Alaska Redistricting Board.  Truncations (see explanation of truncation at the bottom of the page) happens at the very end of the process of redistricting.  The house seats have been created and then the Board has to pair the house seats into senate seats.  The house seats are numbered and the senate seats are lettered. 

This post was going to finish my truncation posts,
but it's turning out to be more complicated.  So this
one basically compares the 2001 Board's approach
to truncation to the 2011 Board's approach.

Two years ago, in a post on truncation, I quoted a memo from Board attorney Michael White:
"Where there is substantial change to the population of a district, and the previous district is mid-term in 2012, Egan appears to require the incumbent's term be truncated and that an election be held.  What constitutes a substantial change is not defined by law or court decision.  In 2000, the three districts the board found substantially similar, all had less than 10% change in population between the previous plan and the new plan. The next highest percentage of maintained population was 66.2%.  The data does not indicate whether that seat was a mid-term truncation or not. " [See the 2000 Proclamation of redistricting here.]
The 2001 Board's Truncation Process

Actually the data do tell us.  I looked at the 2001 Board's Proclamation Plan. (It's a little complicated because they too had two different plans.  This is from the first one, but for truncation and assigning two and four year terms it appears they did them the same way both times.) It says:
"Second, that the terms of the incumbents of seven senate districts—C, E, G, I, M, O, and Q under the old identification system--be truncated because their districts have been substantially changed by this redistricting plan, and that the terms of the incumbents of three senate districts--A, K, and S under the old identification system--not be truncated because their districts are substantially unchanged, and

Third, that the 17 senate seats for which there will be elections in 2002 be assigned 2-year and 4-year terms according to the following schedule, which uses the new system of identification:
2-year 4-year
A (no election) B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K (no election) L
M N
O P
Q R
T (no election) S
From the record, you can extract the process the 2001 Board used for truncation.

Step 1:  (I began the quote above with step 2.) They identified the seats that might need truncation - all the mid-term seats. (The 2- year column above.)  That is the seats that had run in the most recent election (2000) and whose terms were not up until 2004.  Since the senate seats are staggered - ten run in one election and the other ten run in the next - ten would have two more years to serve and sit out the next election (2002) and ten would, in the normal cycle, be up for election in 2002.  So they just looked at the ten seats that had two more years.

Step 2:  They determined which of those ten districts had substantially changed.  They found that three seats were substantially the same:  District A had 95.9% of its population the same.  K had 87.6% the same, and T had 98.2% the same.   (Since K was 87.6% it really was a bit lower than the 10% or less that White wrote in his memo.)  These three were NOT truncated and so are marked "(no election)" because the incumbents will finish the remaining two years in their terms and next stand for election in 2004. 

Step 3:  The other seven districts with two more years to serve were found to be substantially changed and so they were truncated.  Whoever was serving in those districts would have to run again in 2002, just two years after they were elected to a four year term.

Step 4:  They decided that the seven truncated districts would run for two year terms that would end in 2004 - when their terms would have ended if they hadn't been truncated.   In effect these districts got a double hit - they were truncated and then they would only be elected for two years.  But this would keep them in their regular staggered cycle.  

The other ten districts (old letters B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, S) whose seats were up in 2002 anyway and would have run for seats good until 2006, would all have four year terms ending in 2006.    

So, in effect, the only seats with four year terms, that would have been up for reelection in 2004, would still be up for election in 2004 because the seven that were truncated got two year terms until 2004, and the three that weren't truncated wouldn't have to run again until 2004.  At that point they would all run next in 2008.


2001 Board Had Elegant Solution

As I see this now, the 2001 Board found an elegant way to make this work.  Only seven districts were actually affected by having their term length altered by the Board, yet the Board still took care of all those districts that needed to be truncated AND they kept the Senate staggered as constitutionally required with minimal disruption.  Just seven seats were affected.  The terms of the other 13 were left completely alone and served out the terms they were elected to and stayed in the same staggered rotation.  

I would note that based on these documents, Mr. White's advice to the Board that "In 2000, the three districts the board found substantially similar, all had less than 10% change in population between the previous plan and the new plan" appears to be wrong.  
  1. Of the three midterm seats not truncated, seat K (87.7% the same) had  more than 10% change.  
  2. There were other districts that had less than ten percent change.  B was 100% the same and S was 91.6% the same.  It's clear also that the other ten districts (including B and S) weren't considered for truncation because their terms were up in 2002 anyway. 
  3. If you click here, you'll get to the 2001 Board's truncation plan and you'll also see that Mr. White appears to be wrong about the next highest percentage.  It wasn't 66.2%.  In fact none is listed at 66.2%.   If we don't count the other two districts over 90%, B and S (B kept the same letter, S was T),  the next highest percentage is E (previous P) at 68.8% and then G (previous N) at 67.7% and  H (also previous N) at 66.9%.  The next one is  N (previous F) at 66.6%.  Of those four, the one with the highest percentage, E (68.8%), was truncated.  The other three were not because their terms were up in 2002 anyway.
  4. White appears to be wrong about the fact that the report doesn't indicate if the next highest percentage was a two or four year seat.  As I said in 3), E (68.8%) was a seat not due to expire until 2004 and it was truncated to 2002. 
The 2011 Board's Truncation Process

As I mentioned, truncation is one of the last things the Board has to do.  The hard part of creating the house district lines is done and they just have to pair the completed house seats.  In addition to the Alaska constitutional standards of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration, they also are supposed to consider 'proportionality.'  I don't completely get this term (as they used it) but basically they said that if a borough had enough population for four house and two senate seats, then all those seats should be in the borough and not split with other boroughs.  The idea is that their size in population should be reflected with a proportional number of representatives.  (Like the other standards, it might have to be given some slack because it competes with other standards.  In this case, Fairbanks had enough population for 5.5 seats.  The .5 remainder had to be paired with someone outside the borough. 

I intended to explain the process this 2011 Board used.

But, in hindsight, they really hadn't thought out the process too clearly.  White's memo, if anyone remembered it by the time they got there, did not seem to reflect a careful review of the 2001 process as the errors of fact indicate.  Also, the Board did this twice - in 2011 and then when that plan was tossed, again in 2013.  Both times what you saw at the meeting was kind of confused.  I was going to offer the steps the Board used, but I think now it makes more sense to talk first about the standards they had.

Standard 1:  The senate seat letters had to follow in order the numbers of the house seats.  So A had to pair house seats 1 and 2.  B had to pair house seats 3 and 4, etc. (This is not unreasonable.  It's how it was done before.  But I don't remember hearing anything that said it had to be that way.

Standard 2:  Seats that had substantially changed, would be up for election at the next election (2012 the first time and 2014 this time around.)  My point here is that they really didn't pay that much attention to which seats were mid-term and which were up in the next election.  Their focus seemed to be on districts that had changed a lot.   I think Michael White (the Board's attorney) might have mentioned 'mid-term' now and then, but it wasn't as though anyone was listening.  They clearly did not divide all the seats into two groups of ten - the mid-term seats and those due to run again in the next election anyway.

Standard 3:  Determining which seats would be two year and which would be four year was divorced from what a seat's normal cycle was.  Their principle here was basically procedural, not substantive.  They wanted the two and four year terms to alternate alphabetically.  It did not (at least publicly) take into consideration what the original seat's normal election would have been, the way the 2001 Board did.  They didn't distinguish between seats that had been truncated and those that would have run in the next election anyway.  A was to be four year, B two year, C four year, etc.  This was particularly confused this second time around because the seats for the 2012 election had been equally arbitrarily chosen.   No one mentioned whether some districts had been truncated twice plus given a two year both times or not.

Their argument at the time (2011) was this would make it random and would keep them from biasing the decisions.  If I recall right, in 2011, they brought the list of lettered senate seats into the meeting, so that wouldn't have prevented them from massaging the list before hand.  I'm not saying they did, but it wasn't a transparent process.  For instance, no one ever explained why the counting of house seats started in Fairbanks instead of Southeast Alaska as it previously had.

Standard 4:  This one was voiced by Board member Peggyann McConnochie. She declared that the seats within a city or borough had to be staggered too.  At one point she said that contiguous seats should be staggered.  Given that districts often are contiguous to more than one other district, this would be impossible.  McConnochie never said where this city and borough staggering standard came from.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but it's clearly not in the Alaska constitution and attorney White had said there were no guidelines for how to do this part of the job.

Step 1:  If there was a step one, it was a fairly chaotic process where they tried to fit the senate letters to the house numbers and debated back and forth.  At the time I wrote that it sounded like they were exhausted from the setting up of the house districts and that they really hadn't thought this next step out.  The transcript reflects this.

Step 2:  A member of the audience says something about the need to change some of the house district numbers so the senate seats letters will fall right.  I'd note, as I did at the time, that having an audience member speak to the board was pretty extraordinary.  Audience members can talk to board members during breaks and before and after meetings, but when the Board is in session, only Board members, their staff, and invited guests (pretty rare - like the Voting Rights Expert they hired) can speak.  Everyone else must listen only.  The exception is when they had public testimony and people were given a set amount of time to address the Board.  At Board meetings others didn't address the Board.

But this time, an audience member spoke up and suggested a way out of the knot they were tying themselves up in.  Also, of note, is that the audience member they allowed to address them was Randy Ruedrich, former chair of the Alaska Republican Party.

Step 3:  Adjourn for about half an hour.

Step 4:  Come back with a new list and then alphabetically divide them into two year and four year seats.

There's another decision of importance here too.  Somewhere in all this, before the break, the Board determined that their previous standard of 10% of less change in a district's population would be lowered to 75%.  (Actually, in the end, I seem to have missed where it happened, the standard was lowered to 70%.  In 2001 a district that was 68.8% changed was truncated.    The current Board did this explicitly because John Coghill's seat was 77%.  And White had told the Board (incorrectly as I pointed out above) that all the 2001 districts that were not truncated had less than 10% change.


The Consequences

I'm going to save most of this for a later post.  Going through the truncation list and the new terms assigned to each district is tricky.  Their lists have seat letters only - no incumbent names.  And this time, since they made two different plans, it has added complications.  And this post is already very detailed.  So I'll get some charts ready that I think will make it easier to see the changes in districts from the 2010 election to the 2012 election and what is planned for 2014 and beyond.  In brief, though, for now:

The 2001 board had fairly simple and elegant plan.  Split the seats into those that had to run in the next election and those who had two more years to go.  Only the second group was considered for truncation.  Of the ten, seven had to be truncated.  When it came to two and four year terms, they kept all the districts in their original rotation.  Only seven seats were affected.

The 2011 board didn't seem to take the regular staggered rotation into consideration and put every seat up for a lottery for two or four year terms.  Trying to figure out the consequences is pretty difficult because of the changes in the district letters and because they did this twice. I'm still working on these. 

[Whoops, I accidentally posted this.  I'm going to leave it up, but reserve the right to fix any typos I missed in the morning.]





Truncation:   Senate terms are for four years, while house terms are for only two.  Senate seats are also staggered.  Half (10) are voted on in one election and the other half (10) in the next election two years later.  If redistricting significantly changes the constituency of a senate seat, then a large number of the voters of the new district are represented by someone they didn't vote for.  Thus, senate seats with significant changes are subject to truncation.  This means that regardless of when the term is up for the sitting senator, the population should be able to participate in choosing their senator in the next election.

So, all the new districts whose terms expire in 2016 that have a significant change will be up for election in the next election (2014).  Those up for election in 2014 will be up again anyway so they don't need to be truncated.  But this messes up the staggered terms, so some have to be designated as two year terms and others as four year terms to get ten up for election one year and the other ten the next election. The 2012 election used a new redistricting plan in which all but one of the seats were truncated and then the Board assigned two or four year terms to them. And now they have to do that again. 

Thursday, September 12, 2013

The Beer Up Here - Alaskan Beer App - And Ben Kerosky's Last Anchorage Stand - iPhone 5c


The Beer Up Here is an iPhone app that allows folks to track down all the Alaska breweries, their beers, and the places that serve them.  Two guys from Eagle River put it together  - one a beer fanatic and the other a software guy.  If you're looking for a place to get a good local beer, this app will tell you where they are available, how they are made,  
and what's on tap that day.  I was impressed.  


Joe Tranquilla
At Wednesday night's Alaska Apple Users Group (AAUG) Joe Tranquilla sounded pretty obsessive in all the details that he has in the app, plus serious photos.  Anyone looking for places to drink Alaskan beers or just to know what all is available, should check out this app.  As he explained, they keep things constantly updated.



Here's The Beer Up Here blog's latest post (Sept. 7, 2013):
"We just added the 300th beer to the app! The Broken Tooth Beg, Yarrow or Steal – a saison with hand-picked Alaskan yarrow and juniper berries. Our initial release included 255 beers. So we’ve added 45 beers in the 35 days the app has been live. That’s an average of more than one beer a day. If you buy the app, you get all those beers and a growing database for the price of a beer. Thanks for the support!"

Someone asked about the cost of the app.  It's $4.99.  He said he gets about $3.50 for each one bought and Apple keeps the rest.  Also says he gets his check about every six weeks, though Apple says they pay monthly.  If they hold the money on 1 million apps for an average of three weeks, they could pick up a nice amount of interest every month.  I bet they get more than my credit union is offering. 

The second half of the meeting was a presentation by UAA grad and long time Apple representative in Anchorage - Ben Kerosky.  Ben's leaving tomorrow by car for Seattle where he takes on a new job which will include visiting Apple outlets around the Seattle area.  (J and I will follow him a few days later down the highway.) 

Ben's last hurrah at AAUG was a presentation on the new iPhones 5c and 5s.  He had a 5c that he demonstrated with.  I still have a dumb phone, but I attend
Ben Kerosky and Apple 5c Demo
these meetings  so I at least know what others are spending their money on and figuring out if anything does things I need bad enough to spend the money on. 

One nice feature I didn't know about is a Do Not Disturb button that lets you shut off the phone when you don't want to hear from others - like during the night. 

It does allow, he said, someone who calls twice in a row to break through the barrier, so he suggested you only let friends do this.  And I'd be careful which friends. 

He also answered one of the questions I had about the 5s' new fingerprint id.  You can have up to five different people and you can also use a pass code as a back up. 

Ben has been one of the youngest folks to attend on a regular basis and he does it as part of his job.  I suspect with the younger crowd, all they friends give them the info that the older crowd gets at these meetings.  We're going to miss Ben, he's been a great resource at the AAUG and at Best Buy. 

The Alaska Apple User Group meets on the (as of this month) second Wednesday of the month at the BP Energy Center.  You can check the AAUG website too.  They have some spectacular iPhone Photography winners for 2013.  These are really fantastic images.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

UPDATES: Green Screen Mystery, Campbell Creek Under Seward Highway, and Sugar Shack Reopened


Chong Kim is the project engineer in charge of the Seward Highway reconstruction from Tudor to Dowling, which includes the Campbell Creek bike trail.  I'd gone for a bike ride today to keep some hold of my sanity and looked for the DOT office behind the donut shop at Lake Otis and Tudor.


He apologized for not answering my phone call.  I'd left a message asking when the bike path would be done.  He said he was still trying to pin down the contractor before calling me back, but since weather is such a big factor, it's hard to say.  He figures about 2 or 2.5 weeks until it's all done.  By September 30th.  [I'd posted anyway a few days ago with then and now pictures.]

[UPDATE Oct 11:  I've updated with pictures from Oct. 9.  Mr. Kim told me maybe next week.]

In our chat I had a minor revelation.  He looked at the pictures I took last week of the path and he pointed to some hardware connected to the ground and then pointed to some green, transparent fabric on the wall in his office.  They will attach some fencing to that hardware.  Suddenly I had a flash - those strange green screens we'd seen where the Campbell Creek trail goes under Martin Luther King Blvd.  The ones with the images of the skier, biker, and walker.  The screens that we'd shaken our heads over in wonder at who would have put such boring art up.  I made some disparaging comments in a post this summer about a similar (unfinished) screen (below) where the Campbell Creek trail goes under the new bridge at Dowling.  (You used to have to cross the street at this point.)

It turns out these are to keep trail users from being covered with snow by a snow plow clearing the road above them.  Another reminder to myself to not jump to conclusions, but if it's strange, to assume there is something I'm not getting. Am I going to wait next winter to video tape a snow plow at this spot?  Don't hold your breath. 

It all makes sense now.  As it turns out, he said the Feds (EPA and another agency) say they may not plow into the creek anyway from the Seward Highway, but Chong said debris falls from passing vehicles so it's still good to have there. 

A Hopeful Note

I also talked to the office engineer who said, when I wanted to know the date for the bike trail completion, "You and everybody else.  That's the only thing people call to ask about."

I just want to document that piece of feedback about public interest in the bike trails, because I doubt that they are keeping track of that sort of feedback for the DOT administrators or for the legislators in Juneau, some of whom think people who ride bikes are anti-capitalists. 

And finally, the Sugar Shack reopened today.  It's not giant news, but this is a small local business that got trashed by vandals last May.  The thoughtless vandals cost this business almost four months of business and inconvenienced all the people who pass by here and regularly stop for a beverage.
















Anchorage Gets 5pm Jolt (4.2)

A very short but sharp earthquake jolted me a few minutes ago while I was on the phone with my mom.  This was not one of those quakes where you say, "Was that an earthquake?"  But I don't think I felt it for more than a couple of seconds.

The Alaska Earthquake Information Center (AEIC) doesn't have the magnitude yet but it was 2 miles from Eagle River.  Here's from their site:

[UPDATE 5:18:  Earthquake Track is calling it a 4.2.  Not that big as earthquakes go, but as I said, it was a sharp jolt.]

Preferred Hypocentral Solution:

Local Date: Tuesday September 10th, 2013
Local Time: 05:02 PM AKDT
Universal Time: 09/11/2013 01:02:58.648 UTC
Magnitude: Unknown
Latitude: 61.3217
Longitude: -149.5222
Depth: 17 miles (28 km)
Author: oa_opDbg

This earthquake was:

2 miles (2 km) E of Eagle River
5 miles (8 km) SSW of Chugiak
7 miles (12 km) NE of Fort Richardson
10 miles (16 km) ENE of Elmendorf AFB
15 miles (23 km) ENE of Anchorage
18 miles (29 km) S of Wasilla
23 miles (37 km) SW of Palmer
28 miles (45 km) N of Hope
29 miles (47 km) NNW of Girdwood
32 miles (51 km) SSW of Hatcher Pass
34 miles (54 km) SSE of Willow
34 miles (54 km) SW of Sutton
48 miles (76 km) NW of Whittier
57 miles (91 km) ENE of Tyonek
58 miles (93 km) N of Moose Pass
59 miles (94 km) N of Cooper Landing
69 miles (110 km) NE of Sterling
70 miles (112 km) SE of Skwentna
72 miles (115 km) SSE of Talkeetna
74 miles (118 km) NE of Nikiski
78 miles (125 km) NE of Soldotna
79 miles (127 km) NE of Kenai
85 miles (136 km) N of Seward
91 miles (145 km) NE of Kasilof
91 miles (146 km) E of Mt. Spurr
99 miles (159 km) NE of Clam Gulch
99 miles (159 km) E of Hayes Volcano
101 miles (161 km) NNW of Chenega Bay
101 miles (162 km) WNW of Tatitlek
107 miles (172 km) W of Valdez
115 miles (183 km) NE of Ninilchik
123 miles (197 km) ENE of Redoubt Volcano
251 miles (401 km) SSW of Fairbanks
566 miles (906 km) WNW of Juneau