See my comment "Utterly Hosed". After posting to FlyerTalk, I've learned that the error was largely mine. However, in certain cases, it does appear that American/Alaska have made a baggage fee mistake. As eponymous_coward explains,
Find the baggage rules for your ticket. If they say $0 for bag fees for your bag, complain to the Department of Transportation and ask for a refund from Alaska because you were charged for baggage fees when the ticket said no baggage fees applied.
However, the ticket did include the fee.
Ah, thanks - will check it out. Fortunately, I usually travel just with my backpack so I dont really need to deal with these things. But it is good to know what to do when you experience something like what happened to you.
Yes ultralight no-checked bag is the way to go, but we had a few checked-bag only items from our hike. It would have been cheaper probably to have just mailed them, had we known that we'd have to pay to check.
This would be especially true if we attempted a new Priority Mail strategy I have concocted, where you send a local General Delivery for cheap and then forward to the far-away destination free of charge.