Sept. 24 2009

A miner who was in the shack that blew off the side of a mountain near the border last weekend said the roof of the building was tethered to its base, not to the ground.

“It has been tied better than it was. You have to go directly into the ground,” said Dave Riep, 36, of Haines Junction, Y.T.

Riep, mountain guide Ashley Call of Haines, and Leo Clarkson of Manitoba had just taken refuge in the building at the 4,000-foot elevation on Sept. 10 when the shack blew down a slope during a storm.

“Leo had just said, ‘this is going to be cozy’ when the wind picked us up. We went up, down and over. All you could do is cover your head and go with the flow. None of us screamed or anything.” Riep said.

Riep believes the building rolled end over end, carrying the men 40 to 50 feet. When they crawled out from the wreckage, a piece of windblown tin from the roof hit Clarkson in the back. “We got out of there because the tin was blowing around too much”

Sept. 22, 1994

A Canadian toxic clean-up team has uncovered almost 200 gallons of buried DDT in the Canadian wilderness at Rainy Hollow.

The discovery early this week vindicated Loomis, a former Haines resident who claimed he saw stacks of the pesticide being buried when the former Army pipeline station was decommissioned in 1971. Excavation and soil samples last year at the site near 48 Mile Haines Highway found no evidence of his claim.

But using high-tech search equipment including underground photography, the crew this week located what is believed to be the heart of the trench Loomis remembered. Twenty-three five-gallon cans, Army green and labeled DDT, were excavated Sunday about 60 feet from the Klehini River.

Through Wednesday, 40 cans had been recovered, all but seven sealed and intact. DDT has been found in varying concentrations in water and soil on the site and tests are continuing to determine whether any of the toxin is leaching into the Klehini, a river rich in salmon that flows in to the Alaska Bald Eagle Preserve.

Sept. 22 1969

“Representatives of the International Nuclear Corporation spent four days flying in and out of their downtown heliport just off Main Street in the Mission field, causing rumors to fly nearly as often and as fast as the chopper.

Phil Holdsworth (at left) who heads the INC office in Juneau for the Denver-based firm reported only that he and his crew — pilot Dave Kortus, Peter Percival and Joe Britton (1 to r) — had been “studying prospects” for several of the firm’s customers based on prospectors’ information and what is generally known about the geology of the area.

Holdsworth, who was formerly Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources, would not be more specific.

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