For a town that bills itself as a recreation mecca, we have a parks and recreation problem: Our parks and outdoor facilities need help and our recreation events occur on a spotty, irregular schedule. Because we compete with the rest of the world for visitors and residents, these are important issues. Magnificent scenery won’t solve them. Nonprofits and volunteer efforts…
The addition of the Alcan 200 snowmachine race to this year’s Winterfest celebration promises to add critical mass to the fledgling event, making it a bigger draw that can bring more visitors and money to our town. Winterfest happens Feb. 16-18. That’s enough lead time to start promoting this year’s event as a blockbuster. Former tourism director Leslie Ross created…
Starting around 2013, Chris Thorgesen arrived from Colorado and did a remarkable thing. He bought five prominent and empty commercial buildings on Main Street, refurbished them and filled them with tenants. Then he bought others. When retired golf pro Dave Canipe, who owned the King’s Store building, complained to Thor that he’d bought every crappy building on Main Street but…
In 37 years in Haines, including as a newspaper reporter, editor, publisher and Haines Borough Assembly member, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know our town, its people, history, culture and politics. I have celebrated our successes and mourned our losses, endured our battles and led or joined various efforts to improve our town. Now I’d like to work…
It’s hard to remember Fourth of Julys in Haines without thinking of Dick Flegel and Erwin Hertz. Hertz organized arm-wrestling competitions, nail-pounding, and the Mad Raft Race while Dick put on the games for youngsters at Tlingit Park. Between the two of them, they held down quite a bit of our fun on the Fourth. Of course, Flegel’s connections and…
Andrew Letchworth is leaving town, and that’s too bad. Andrew is a respectful, thoughtful and kind man who headed up the Haines Chamber of Commerce the past few years. He’s young and energetic but had the unenviable job of standing up at public meetings and speaking for industrial development of this place that most closely resembles a national park. It’s…
Let’s start with the basics: In our political system, where individuals are asked to serve as representatives of many other people, choosing those individuals by appointment is a lousy way to go. People should be able to elect the people who lord over them. That was the point of the American Revolution and every other democratic revolution in history. But…
A friend remarked that the $57,000 the Haines Borough on cutting brush to eliminate “bear hiding places” is as much money as he spent building his house. When a government action becomes a joke, it’s a mistake, and jokes about the government undermine support for government. Until we come up with a better way to make decisions, we need a…
“Small-town hatreds…verging on civil war, have happened everywhere in this country: over a man shooting a neighbor’s dog; over one kid’s slapping another; over a dead relative’s will; over which farmer was first in line at the grain elevator; over hiring a new preacher. It’s small and disgusting, but it’s America. And I reckon we might as well get used…
It’s not an early spring. Few are. So few are that a person can almost name the years they happened. There were a few in the early 1990s so warm and dry that our forester put up signs warning of wildfire danger. You can mark these years by what you were doing at the time, things like Easter egg-hunting in…