At a meeting on Aug. 17, Haines-area state forester Greg Palmieri tried to bring Mosquito Lake Road residents around to accepting some small timber sales in their neighborhood. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell. Clearcuts would be small – no larger than 10 acres – and restoration of old logging roads there might open some areas to recreation, including…
Chances are, your local librarian is a subversive, and if you’re religious, you should thank God for that. Or perhaps not. God is not a free-thinker, at least he wasn’t in the Old Testament. Old God took an eye for an eye. He smote the Philistines. And he wasn’t tolerant of you thinking there might be other gods every bit…
The recent Haines Borough election was a disappointment to some of my liberal friends, but they ought not fret much. It’s unlikely this assembly will do much because they’re like most assemblies – spoon fed by an administration and a staff that’s not interested in changing much. That’s unfortunate because the world around us changes every day and success goes…
U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski was in town early last month and again she went on about how much she likes Haines and how she’d like to have a cabin here some day. We should take her up on it. Murkowski coos over Haines every time she visits and she visits a whole lot compared to Alaska’s other U.S. senator, Dan…
At the June 14 Haines Borough Assembly meeting, economic development director Lee Hart commented that it takes a spreadsheet to find a restaurant that’s open in Haines. Hart’s remarks came a few weeks after a friend of mine received an email from an Anchorage friend wanting to know where to eat in Haines. “It’s complicated,” my friend responded. Last night…
We learned to make balloon animals at the Kid’s Stage of the Southeast Alaska State Fair this year, the secret being a small plastic pump to inflate those long balloons that defy most everyone’s blowing capacity. So some knowledge was gained amid the chaos that results from combining sugar-addled youngsters with tempera paint, glitter, and hot glue. Also, my apologies…
It’s no big surprise that garbage rates are going up again. Like utility charges and taxes, the cost of getting rid of stuff never goes down. During a proposed doubling of garbage rates in the mid-1990s, one lifetime resident told the Chilkat Valley News, “Whatever I can’t burn, I’m flushing down the toilet.” And so it goes. Local waste handler…
The summer of 1987 was a heady time in Haines journalism, or it seemed that way to me. I was sole reporter for the Chilkat Valley News when Mike Sica and Barnaby Dow of KHNS covered area news like white on snow. Dow, the Haines reporter, was building a journalism resume impressive enough to get him out of town before…
My high school English teacher wrote recently, discouraged by the state of the nation, as are so many of us. Pizza Joe, our town’s street-corner philosopher, says it’s because we believed the lies we were taught as children. George Washington could not tell a lie. It took until midway through the Trump administration and much hand-wringing by the establishment press…
Under police chief Heath Scott, you will never be safe enough and you will never stop paying more for it. Now the police are into the pot of money that pays for the public library, Chilkat Center Haines Museum and swimming pool for $177,000 and more each year. That’s right. If you can’t get into the pool or museum, it’s…