Inside Unalaska’s rec center, people gathered late last month to sample more than 20 homemade blueberry dishes. There were blueberry buns, blueberry jams, blueberry tiramisu, and even some savory dishes.
Attendee Carlos Tayag, who had entered his own coffee cake in the competition, tried the chicken meatballs with blueberry BBQ sauce.
“You can taste the blueberry BBQ sauce,” he said. “The meatballs are really tender.”
The Unalaska Blueberry Bash started in the 80s and has become a beloved community tradition. But this year, things were a little different.
Clint Huling and his wife Judy are long-time residents of Unalaska. They went to pick blueberries a few days before the bash.
“It was really, really slim pickings,” Huling said. “Between the two of us I think we got, what, maybe a quart? About a quart in about an hour and a half.”
He said a person normally could pick a couple gallons in that time. In fact, this year’s blueberry season was so poor in Unalaska that the Blueberry Bash changed its rules to allow store-bought blueberries.
‘The birth of a berry is a miracle’
Naturalist Suzi Golodoff has lived in Unalaska for 50 years, and she picks blueberries every season.
Hiking on a rocky path up Pyramid Valley — with red, gold and green tinged mountains all around — Golodoff reflected on the abundance of past seasons.
“You could stand here and actually just see the blue, the whole bushes would be blue and bending,” she said.
This season, though, the highbush plants produced very few berries, and many were completely bare.
“The lack of snow and the bitter cold winds we had last winter just wind-burned them,” Golodoff said. “I don’t think it really harmed the roots or anything or will kill the bushes. I just think it set it back completely for any fruit this year.”
Golodoff said every year is different, but she’s only seen a few that were this bad. And they’ve all been in the past decade or so. She said there are cyclic patterns, but she also named climate change as a driving factor.
“It's not just about putting things in the freezer. This is what we used to do during this time of year,” she said. “It's like a marker, and a transition, and tradition. And when that goes missing, I think it's been hard on people.”
Katie Spellman is an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies Alaska’s wild berries. By and large, she said, this was a good year for berries across Alaska. But Golodoff’s hunch for Unalaska makes sense to her.
Spellman said snowpack insulates the bushes, protecting the buds during the winter and in the spring, when freeze-thaw cycles can damage them.
Wind during flowering time can also impede pollinators.
“The birth of a berry is a miracle,” Spellman said. “Every stage in a plant’s life cycle, something can go really wrong.”
This year’s shortage was so dire that, a week before the Blueberry Bash, organizers decided to suspend its rule restricting competitors to locally harvested blueberries.
“If they wanted a competition, there was no choice but to have store-bought blueberries this year,” said Sandra Athey. She spent $16.50 on two pounds of blueberries to make those chicken meatballs with blueberry BBQ sauce.
On the upside, Golodoff said the lowbush blueberries seemed to produce unusually well this year. She recommends looking for them at higher elevations, where the plants don’t face as much competition.
