Alaska is off to the slowest start of a wildfire season in three decades -- an immense relief one year after fires scorched nearly enough land to cover Connecticut and even threatened remote Alaska Native communities on the tundra. “If you were to kind of draw up a recipe for what would be a benign fire season in Alaska, we really have really checked all those boxes just this summer so far,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service. A lightning strike in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwest Alaska, a region primarily made up of tundra, threatened two Alaska Native villages with about 700 total residents before firefighters put it out.