Winter...here we come !!

Tuesday, September 6th

Pink (humpback) Salmon after entering freshwater to spawn

As I told you all in the last post, we have decided to stay in Haines for the winter. We didn't make the decision lightly or without a lot of thought and planning. Haines is not the kind of place where you can just change your mind in December and decide to drive out of here back to the lower 48 (that's what Alaskans call the rest of the country), especially if you are towing your house. After agonizing for weeks over all the options and consequences, the truth is, we really like this place and want to stay here for ??? We like it for what it doesn't have here almost as much as we like what it for what it does have here (if you know what I mean).

Fall colors starting to appear on the Chilkat River

Winter should be quite an experience here and we are really looking forward to it. In the heart of winter, there will be 20 hours of darkness and the 4 hours of daylight will find the sun skirting along the mountaintops in a long sunrise/sunset. The weather here is much less harsh than most of Alaska, or even many states in the lower 48. The temperature rarely gets below zero but they typically get a lot of snow...as much as 200" some years. You can check out the historical weather averages at this link if you are curious:

http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=136307&refer=&cityname=Haines-Alaska-United-States-of-America

Our winter home

We might be crazy for wanting to stay through winter, however, we're not crazy enough to stay in the MLS through winter. One of the keys to staying here throughout winter is having a warm place to live. About a third of the local  population doesn't stay and heads south so they either winterize their houses or they look for someone dumb enough to stay and house sit. That's where we come in, literally. We will be house sitting Ivanca's parents home. If you remember, her dad was one of the town's first doctors (he's retired now) and has lived here for over 40 years. Their house is in the middle of town overlooking the marina with an incredible view of the Lynn Canal through the windows in the living, dining and bedrooms. We feel very lucky to be staying in such a great house.

One of the other keys to living here in winter is having an income to pay your bills with. A lot of the businesses in town close for winter because of the weather or the lack of tourists - like the RV park. Our plan is for Lori to work while I stay warm and cozy watching the storms roll in from the living room and take care of the house chores. Sounds like a great plan to me. Actually, I am already working full time at my new job as a surveyor for one of the largest construction companies in south east Alaska. I will only have 2-6 weeks of work with them before they start shutting down for the winter but they have already asked me to start back up full time in March. The money is very good as they are planning to work 58 hours per week so it will do well for helping us through the winter.

Since we are going to stay, let me use the rest of this post to show you around Haines a little bit.



Pretty much the whole town of Haines

                                              A-----Our House for Winter (103 Dalton St.)
                                              B-----Lori's Work (Chilkat Restaurant and Bakery)
                                              C-----Grocery Store (Howser's IGA)
                                              D-----Haines School (K-12)
                                              E-----Moose Tracks (Fast food, coffee & ice cream)
                                              F-----Library 
                                              G-----Bank

Lori's new place of employment



Let's start with Lori's new place of employment. The "Chilkat Restaraunt and Bakery" is one of only two places in town to sit down for breakfast and the only bakery. It's been owned by Mickey, a cute little Thai woman for the past 5 years. Her mother is the cook so for dinner they serve Thai food. Lori is learning how to bake bread, muffins, donuts and...mmmmm...cinnamon rolls. She starts work at 5am so they can open for breakfast at 7. She says the worst part so far is her morning commute. Not because its so early or there's traffic. It's because she rides her bike and it is dark and there are a LOT of bears, grizzly bears, around town. She has to park by the restaurant's dumpster and the bears have been into it 2 nights this week. On the good side...they close for most of December and January which will assure us of time to fly south for Christmas with family.

There are 2 grocery stores in town. We usually shop at Howsers IGA unless we also need some fishing supplies or outdoor clothing, then we go to the other store because they have all that and groceries. They both get all their stock delivered by the ferry once a week on the same day so you try to shop the day after to get the very expensive fruit and produce while it is fresh (well it's never really fresh). All the bread is shipped frozen so it is usually still thawing if you shop that day after ferry day. The selections are good and you can get most anything you can get in the lower 48, only 30% higher in price. Lori was going to work at the IGA but the 10% discount wasn't worth the chance of not having time off to come visit family for Christmas.

There is one school in town which serves all grades, K-12. There are about 350 kids that attend. They are known as...what else...the "Grizzlies". It is very fitting considering the number of brown bears in this area. A few days ago they had to keep the kids after school until the police arrived because a grizzly had been spotted on the ball field. The police report in last weeks local newspaper was almost all calls regarding bears including one where a homeowner had to shoot a bear that had tried to get into their home. We used to hear gunshots in Vegas all the time and knew it was a crime happening. We hear gunshots here a few times a week and know it is someone having a bear problem. Locals tell us that high school basketball games are very popular entertainment as there is no movie theater or bowling alley. 

 

There are no chain franchises in Haines of any sort and only 2 "fast food places". Both places are made from some kind of 8'x20' trailers and both have drive-up windows where you actually order, pay and pickup your food from the same window. I'm not sure which one I like better. "Hog Heaven" has some decent sliders (sometimes) and "Moose Tracks" has good soft serve ice cream. Spaz likes Moose Tracks better because they give her a dog biscuit when she drives through...with us of course.

Haines Library

Haines has a great public library with real paper books. They also have DVD's you can check out and watch and free classes you can join like wood carving. They also allow well behaved dogs (like Spaz) inside. We can also bring Spaz into the bank while we do our business, in fact, they encourage it and give her dog biscuits also. We also have the "Hammer Museum" (that's right, a hammer museum) with over 1,500 hammers in it one of which is said to have been used to build the pryamids of Egypt. I should have included a picture of the giant hammer in front of the old museum building...stay tuned...maybe next time.

The police and the fire department share the same building. There are 3 police officers-2 male and 1 female. The fire department is made up of all volunteers. They are called to duty by three blasts of the super loud horn, the same one that sounds the noon whistle everyday. Every summer, they host a $10 salmon dinner to help fund the station with salmon donated by the local commercial fishermen. This year they served 1,200 dinners which means almost everyone in town came. 

That should pretty much give you an idea what Haines has and what it looks like. You may have also noticed what it doesn't have - freeways, traffic, stoplights, grafetti or smog. You may now also think we are really crazy or you may understand why we want to stay for a while.

Either way, hope you enjoyed your tour of Haines and winter...here we come !!

Summer Bummer

Wednesday, August 31st

BUMMER…the end of summer has come! I know it happens every year but this year was different…is different. This end of summer brings with it the end of our job at the Haines Hitch Up RV Park which is what brought us to this part of Alaska and this beautiful little city.

We have loved every minute we have spent here – day and night, rain and sunshine, fishing and hiking, working and…ok, well work is work and can you really love it? We did enjoy the job and doing something so different - no worries, no responsibility, no liability – just mowing and cleaning.

As much as we have enjoyed all the wild beauty of nature this summer, we have enjoyed all the people we have met almost as much. People here seem to be so different from Vegas – they dress differently, they think differently, they do different things and they have such different lives.

Some of them have become our new good friends, like Patrick and Ivanca. Patrick was a state fish and game trooper until an on the job accident involving an ATV crushed his pelvis and forced him into an early retirement. Patrick is all Alaskan. He grew up in the Alaskan wilderness near Dawson City on the Yukon river. Their house had no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. His father was a trapper and and his mother sewed the family parkas from the hides of bears, wolves and caribou. Patrick ran his own trap line by the time he was 9 years old along with his other daily chores such as hauling water from the creek to the house and taking care of the family’s dog sled team. His parents still live there and Patrick goes back every year at this time to hunt moose. He says you are welcome to fly into their cabin anytime using these coordinates in Google Earth:          64°55'22.03"N          141°17'55.75"W

Ivanca is his wife. She is a tiny ball of fire from Bulgaria. Her parents are long time  Haines residents (over 40 years) and her father was one of the towns first doctors. They adopted Ivanca from an orphanage in Bulgaria when she was 9 years old which started a trend that lead to 9 different orphans being adopted by others families in this tiny little town of 1,300 people. She has a dog grooming business and when she is not walking dogs for miles, she is running miles and miles all over town. She has also become quite a hunter and last year shot a grizzly that weighed 5 times what she weighs.

Marteen is another one of the orphans adopted from Bulgaria. His parents are very successful artist hippies that live in a home 8 miles from town with no indoor toilet, just an outhouse. His dad seems to be a true old school hippie from the 60’s. He studied physics at Berkley before he left for a voluntary apprenticeship crafting guitars by hand. He now makes a living painting and creating these beautiful custom guitars using no power tools. Please check out his work and read about these guitars at these links:

http://robgoldberghandmadeguitars.com/

http://www.artstudioalaska.com/

Some of them are just very unique characters we have gotten to know like Sally. We first saw Sally as we waited to catch the ferry in Skagway before we ever even got to Haines. We were waiting to board when this old 1970’s POS (piece of s#$t) Ford pick up parked next to us with this ancient looking, weathered old lady driving. We thought “now that is an Alaskan woman with some stories to tell”. Come to find out, she is the winter caretaker for the Hitch Up and…she does have some stories to tell. She must be about 80 years old and lives 26 miles out of town, alone, in a cabin that is half underground. She sells and hauls firewood by the cord in the bed of that old POS. She was married before although no one is sure what happened to her husband. She had a daughter and some grandchildren that met with tragedy some years back. Her daughter and grandchildren were with a friend out along the Chilkat River in winter when the ice gave way plunging her young grandson and friend into the swift, freezing cold river. Her daughter left her baby ashore and jumped in to save the others. She saved her friend and her baby but sadly, Sally’s daughter and young grandson drown.

If you really want to get a good glimpse into life in this small, remote little town there is an excellent book I can recommend. It was written by a long time resident and the book gained national fame. The title is “If you lived here, I’d know your name” (news from small town Alaska) by “Heather Lende” in 2005. Here is a link to check it out on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=If+you+lived+here%2C+I%92d+know+your+name&x=12&y=25

It’s really a bunch of short stories about life and death. It’s strange, this beautiful area seems to create lots of tragedies because it is a dangerous place to live. There are not many miles of highway for such a huge state so air travel by small planes in very unpredictable weather is common. It seems most everyone knows someone who has died in a plane crash. There is also lots of travel and fishing on the some of the most dangerous waters in the world that result in tragedy. Here, it seems like highway travel (even with a 5^th wheel) is the safest way to get around.

Speaking of safe, we seem to have downloaded a virus into Lori's laptop. It deleted all the pictures we have taken since we left, however, our son says he can retrieve them if we don't use it until we send him the laptop. Hers was the good computer that I did the blog on and mine is the old, slow POS and that explains why it has been a month since the last post...not cause we got eaten by a bear and made into a new book chapter. With his skill and the US postal service, we should have it and our photos back soon.

PS...We have also decided to stay the winter in Haines and we will tell you all about that in the next post.