Browsing Category : Haines Issues

Museum Making All the Right Moves

By | Comments Off on Museum Making All the Right Moves

Credit the Haines Sheldon Museum for coming to its own rescue. Then fill out the flier that went into your post office box last week and buy a museum membership. The reason you never needed a membership previously was that the Haines Borough and museum were flush. Now both are struggling and your help is necessary to keep the doors…

Read More »

Trump Lost Because He Couldn’t Dance

By | Comments Off on Trump Lost Because He Couldn’t Dance

It wasn’t a big surprise to read that in addition to not knowing how to swim or to drive a car, Adolf Hitler couldn’t dance. Donald Trump can’t dance either. He moves like a man who never had to court a woman. Dancing isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s impossible for control freaks, as it requires a person to momentarily let…

Read More »

Go For A Walk

By | Comments Off on Go For A Walk

“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.” Henry David Thoreau “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Friedrich Nietzsche “Destinations are downers.” Author Ken Ilgunas, after walking 1,900 miles across the Great Plains…

Read More »

The Real Code of the North

By | Comments Off on The Real Code of the North

A friend of mine was at Haines Home Building, ordering an oil heater for a home she was building when the late lumberyard owner Bruce Gilbert interrupted her and asked, “An oil heater? What about the Challenge of the North?” Bruce’s implication, as kindly as it surely was intended, was that real Alaskans burn wood. My friend, an office worker…

Read More »

Act Now To Create Chilkat River Trail

By | Comments Off on Act Now To Create Chilkat River Trail

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…

Read More »

As Always, Our Mountains Are Falling Down

By | Comments Off on As Always, Our Mountains Are Falling Down

Tlingit legend tells of a landslide at Chilkoot Lake so large that the resulting shock wave washed parts of the historic village there into Lutak Inlet. In the late 1880s, a chunk of mountainside adjacent to the Chilkoot River “eye” collapsed, destroying an estimated 30 village structures and claiming several lives. A few years after George Shotridge started building of…

Read More »

Open Letter to A New Assembly Member

By | Comments Off on Open Letter to A New Assembly Member

Congratulations. You’re in power. Now you must sit down with your fellow assembly members and come to some agreement about what you’d like to get done. This will be your most single most important achievement and it’s not as difficult as it sounds. But it must be done at least annually, perhaps even quarterly, or your leadership will be blown…

Read More »

We Laid Off Our Contact Tracer

By | Comments Off on We Laid Off Our Contact Tracer

Infectious diseases have ravaged human populations regularly since forever. Bubonic plague. Spanish flu. Yellow fever. Tuberculosis. Polio. Measles. Mumps. Rubella. Ebola. West Nile. Most of us walk around with a permanent tattoo on our shoulders left by vaccinations to ward off childhood diseases that in an earlier age would have maimed or killed us. In Alaska, white man’s diseases like…

Read More »

Freedom to Roll the Dice on COVID

By | Comments Off on Freedom to Roll the Dice on COVID

Juneau, Alaska – At Tuesday’s Haines Borough Assembly, the town’s most outspoken civil libertarian thanked leaders for not mandating face masks, as has been done here and in Anchorage. “Freedom is the most important thing we have,” he said. That was incorrect, of course. It was Thom Jefferson who nailed our inalienable rights right on the kisser and in the…

Read More »

Make the Mayor Do More

By | Comments Off on Make the Mayor Do More

Some people blamed Mayor Jan Hill for the firing of Haines Borough Manager Debra Schnabel. Hill cast the deciding, tie-breaking vote, but I’m sure she hated doing it. Hill has carved a long career in local politics by dodging bullets. The law of survival in politics is to show your cards only when it’s safe or when you must. Otherwise,…

Read More »