One day a recreation trail will extend from Carr’s Cove to the Haines Airport.
A person can say that with confidence because the route already exists and people are using it in droves – walkers, joggers, bicyclists, skiers, snowshoers and anglers.
All that’s left are the formalities, which are considerable but not insurmountable: Getting the Valley of the Eagles Golf Links into community hands and purchasing rights-of-way from a half-dozen or more private landowners.
A rough trail is in place and it’s breathtaking. It skirts the Chilkat River while winding through scrub pines and alder tunnels and around rocky cliffs, crossing streams and tidal pools, opening here and there to staggering, unobstructed views down Lynn Canal, across to the Chilkat Mountains, up at Mount Ripinsky, even around to Santa Claus Mountain.
What made it all possible was Takshanuk Watershed Council’s purchase of 50 acres of the Jones Point sawmill site in 2015, perhaps the most fortuitous land buy in the town’s recent history. It effectively connects scenic River Road to the golf course.
With its recent construction of new trails and a riverside, timber-frame picnic shelter, the watershed council is on its way to transforming Jones Point into what could become the valley’s most impressive park, made so by its peek-a-boo topography, its hidden location and its proximity to town.
Take a walk, bike ride, or ski through here and see if you don’t agree. It’s full of surprises, including a long-daylight orientation, rock grottos, and in late summer and fall, dozens of eagles and brown bears fishing in the river shallows.
It may be time to stop pouring so much energy into a Portage Cove trail that will never amount to much more than sidewalks connecting oversized parking lots, with views of our industrialized waterfront. Tour businesses, boatworks and commercial fishermen have claimed our town-front harbor. That’s history.
Some improvements can be made there, but let’s stop trying to make that area something it can no longer be and refocus our efforts to a section of waterfront not yet developed, a place that looks like the photos we publish to lure visitors to our town.
To do that, we must learn from the history of the Portage Cove trail, including mistakes. A walkway along the harbor was proposed in the mid-1990s, around the same time fishermen revived efforts for expanding the harbor.
Local fishermen – through their borough-created arm, the Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee – met regularly to formulate their plans. Supporters of a Portage Cove trail, myself included, paid lip service to a sea walk but did little more than that.
Like a sea walk, doubling the harbor was mostly a pipedream until voters statewide approved a ballot measure for ports and harbor construction in 2012, delivering to Haines a $15 million gift. Combined with $4 million from the Alaska Legislature, the mega-project was off and running.
Similarly, an effort to build a swimming pool in Haines had raised only about $15,000 in a decade when Alaska became oil-rich in the early 1980s, quickly providing the $1 million or so needed for construction.
The lesson is this: Successful projects start with a group that has a plan and maintains political pressure in support of its project until funding comes along. Then things happen very quickly.
The Takshanuk Watershed Council helped convene a group of residents interested in community ownership of the golf course two years ago. That effort needs to be revived and expanded in the interest of a Chilkat River Trail.
The east-side Chilkat River already is a gem, one that we cannot afford to let slip out of our hands. It will pay dividends far into the future if we take steps to make it an official and protected community asset.