Racers at Saturday’s snowmachine race slogged through eight inches or more of snow at the start of Saturday’s race north of Dalton Cache. The race is typically held on a plowed road, but that message didn’t get to the new plow driver. (File photo/Chilkat Valley News)

10 years, Jan, 21, 2015

‘Mud Bay Institute’ goes up in a cloud of memories

A bonfire amid a slushy downpour finished off the “Mud Bay Institute,” a ramshackle, beachfront cabin on Chilkat Inlet that provided refuge to wayward characters and wandering souls. Former resident “Wild” Bill Biggerstaff, a self-described pot smuggler and dealer, said he lived at the Mud Bay Road property 12 years, owing mostly to the generosity of landlord Pat King of Washington and the tolerance of neighbor Beth MacCready.

King charged only $150 a month rent and MacCready put up with rowdy parties.

“It was a fish camp. In the early days that I was there, it was a circus. We must have had 100 fist fights, but it was mostly under control,” Biggerstaff said in a phone interview from Florida Tuesday.

Although the uninsulated building was heated only by a barrel stove, Biggerstaff ran around in bare feet that friends remembered being black with dirt. The cabin’s summer-only plumbing was from a pipe connected to a creek out back.

“It was a wonderful time when I was there. They say it has a million-dollar view, but it’s $10 million, I think. It’s priceless. I was honored to live there,” Biggerstaff said. “I have thousands of photos and videos of the place.”

Biggerstaff said his memories included tethering himself to the cabin to ensure his return during a trip to the outhouse in a blinding snowstorm. Another time, a taxi driver saved him from a charging cow moose by driving into the animal’s way.

Other Institute tenants included Benner Jones, a rough-around-the-edges outdoorsman, and Marilyn Gunn, a recycling center operator and baseball fan who left Haines to chase a dream of working at Tiger Stadium.

Biggerstaff said Jones dubbed the place “The Mud Bay Institute of Higher Technology” for reasons apparently lost to history, but the name stuck.

Jones died in a commercial plane crash near Glacier Bay in 1991. When Jones’ mother came to town to settle his estate, she became so enamored of the property she wanted to buy it, Margaret Sebens said. “A lot of people fell in love with that place.”

Sebens said she was saddened by the recent sale of the property. “It was a place poor people lived that had a great view and access to the water. There aren’t many places like that left.”

15 years, Jan. 21, 2010

Borough gets price tag for Picture Point parcel

The Haines Borough this week received an appraisal of the five-acre, postcard-view property from Fairbanks attorney Mary Nordale, who controls it for the Narada Trust. 

As of press time this week, borough staff had agreed to Nordale’s request to not divulge the asking price of the property. 

Nordale told the Chilkat Valley News she didn’t want to negotiate a sale in public. 

In an interview earlier this year, Nordale said conditions of the trust mean she can’t sell the property for less than its full value. 

“I’ve told (the borough) I’m pretty much required to sell the property for what the appraised value is. I can’t exercise my opinion to do somebody else a favor or to help the borough.”

However, Nordale said this week that the terms and conditions of the sale may be negotiable. 

Juneau developer Jan Van Dort, who is subdividing property uphill of the point, has expressed interest in working with the borough to acquire the land, including a possible arrangement that would give the borough the two scenic pullouts and leave him a buildable lot on the north end of the parcel. 

Used by local tour companies and residents, the pullout has been a favorite of visitors for its dramatic view of Fort Seward against the backdrop of the Chilkat Range. 

But Nordale said that if the sale drags on, she would barricade the property in the summer and post “no trespassing” signs. “I don’t care if they want to take pictures or not. I don’t want the trust to be liable for anything that happens there.”

25 years, Jan. 2000

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a meteor

The spectacular flash and prolonged thunder created apparently by a low-flying fireball Tuesday morning left residents speculating for hours on the unusual phenomenon. 

At the post office, school and restaurants, even strangers swapped personal accounts of the celestial fireworks that apparently no one mistook for an earthquake or lightning strike. 

A crashing jetliner, an errant missile launch, lights off a fuel barge and the biblical “Rapture” were among the first impressions left by what astronomers now believe was disintegration of a large meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere in southern Yukon. 

Local public radio station KHNS at first attributed the blast to an explosion at Mosquito Lake, but town residents who saw the dawn’s cloudy skies blink twice had their own theories going by then. 

Postal worker Greg Podsiki said he’d heard speculation the flash and ensuing rumble were from an anti-missile defense test, which had been scheduled for later in the day. 

Resident Kathy Pardee-Jones said that from her home near the harbor she first thought the bright light was coming off a fuel barge tied to the Port Chilkoot Dock. 

She spoke to a person who believed that the time had come for the bodily ascent into heaven that some Christians believe is prophesied to come just before Armageddon. 

Highway residents whose views were not obscured by clouds that were moving in Tuesday had a better idea of what happened. 

Mike Kinison at Mosquito Lake clearly saw what to him looked like “a meteorite, comet or missile,” with a white head and fiery tail. 

But coming on the heels of the millennium doomsday predictions as well as strange weather including Christmas flooding and an earthquake less than two weeks ago, invaders from outer space maybe didn’t seem so unimaginable. 

Jim Stanford, who runs his dogs in the remote Kelsall Valley, said experience tells him to be ready for anything. Besides an angry moose that recently stomped his team, wicked weather had washed out his training course, splitting it with trenches and sending landslides over it. 

“This year has been really unbelievable. Today I fully expected to run into little green men running around back there. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all.”

40 years, Jan. 24, 1985

Sewage in the streets creates an emergency in Haines

“In my 15 years of dealing with sewage treatment plants and other such things like this – 10 years here in Alaska and five years in the Lower 48 – this is probably the most dangerous situation I have ever encountered.” 

Alex Viteri Jr., sanitary and civil engineer for the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), was talking about the sewage which is overflowing manhole covers in several places in the city, including the high school parking lot. 

“This is the sort of thing that has very grave potential for public health around Haines and which needs to be addressed,” echoed Alan Kegler, also of DEC. 

“I’d really like to emphasize that Haines has a real potential health hazard,” added deputy director of public health David Bruce. “It’s not a matter of if but of when an outbreak of disease will occur.” 

Since October overflows had occurred at the sewage treatment plant and as the months have gone by, the overflows have been increasingly frequent and larger in volume, and cover a larger area. Both the city and state have agreed that an emergency situation has arisen. 

“Many of you are aware that the sewage is surfacing from manholes and overflowing the treatment plant,” Bruce said, “running into ditches around the city, and flooding some of the lower marshy areas.” He said the hazard would increase with the warmer weather.

“Down through history,” said Bruce, “sewage has carried more deaths than all of the wars put together.”

50ish years, Jan, 1975

For your winter reading needs at the Haines Public Library

Need to thatch a roof – shoe a horse – make a cricket bat, lay a hedge – tan leather – make a clay pipe, cider, a dew pond? These and many more answers appear in J.E. Manners’ Country Crafts Today. Companion book is Country Craft Tools by Percy W. Blandford, fully illustrated with photographs and line drawings. 

Esther Gibbs is one of only a few women who broke the traditional barrier of “no women in lumbering camp.”  We Went Loggin’ is her account of the winter’s cooking, and working in the Wisconsin woods. 

Edwin Newman’s wry eye focuses on the sorry state of the English language as a reflection of the sorry state of society in Strictly Speaking. He skewers stereotypes, cliches, errors, and jargon used by weather forecasters, presidents, vice presidents, sportscasters, diplomats, senators, etc. All with malice aforethought but humor aforethat. 

A gift from Maryhouse in Whitehorse is the Apostle of Alaska, the life of the Most Reverend Charles John Seghers. 

For young readers: 

Sung under the Silver Umbrella has sing-songs, rhythms and rhymes. 

The girls will be glad to find two new Cherry Ames nurse stories. 

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