Ask people in the Chilkat Valley about Dick Rice and many describe him in terms usually reserved for comic book characters, or for a hero from one of his beloved Louis L’Amour westerns.
“His smile would melt glaciers,” said firefighter Al Badgley.
“He never got his feathers ruffled. He never got upset. He was always positive. Just an amazing human being,” said friend Darren Schweinefus.
“Guys wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him,” added fishing buddy Greg Schlachter.
Byron Richard Rice Jr., or Dick, was born on Sept. 26, 1951 in Vero Beach, Florida. He survived a bout with throat cancer in 2018. On Aug. 8, 2023 a hidden glioblastoma revealed itself while he was out shrimping and crabbing. He managed to get the boat and his passenger safely back to shore in Haines, but that caused he and wife Judi Rice to spend two of the last three years in Anchorage before moving to Jacksonville, Florida to be closer to family. He died peacefully early on Feb. 25, 2026 at the age of 74.
Rice made his way to Juneau in 1976, working a string of jobs — harvesting timber on Chichagof Island, teaching skiing at Eaglecrest, guiding raft trips down the Tatshenshini and Alsek. He joined the fire department as a volunteer and worked his way into a full-time job.
Thirteen years later, Judi moved to Juneau too. The first time she saw him, she was out for a run on the airport dike trail; he was walking the other way with a friend. They passed each other, smiled, said hello, and kept going.
They actually met a little while after that, teaching students on the same career day at a local school. By the time the two started dating, Dick had already decided on a better story.
“He’d tell people we met in a dark, smoky bar, and then embellish further by saying it took him ten years to get me off the pole,” Judi said, laughing. “But I knew where it came from, his crazy sense of humor. It always got a laugh.”
They dated six years before they married. He taught lessons in ballroom dancing, along with country and swing. He taught her too. She’d come to Alaska more of a hiker and a climber; “He used to call me ‘terrestrial,'” Judi said. He was a water guy — canoeing, kayaking, running boats.
Dick’s life on the water began with nearly losing it.
He was barely out of his teens when drafted to fight during the Vietnam War. He enlisted in the Coast Guard and was stationed in Hawaii on the Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis, which ran aground in the Aleutians in a violent storm in 1972. It was one of two things that happened to him young enough to leave a mark, Judi said. The other was a bout with Guillain-Barré syndrome which crept up his legs until he couldn’t walk.
“I think it made him realize that nothing lasts forever — you’d better enjoy every day, because you never know,” Judi said.
He came out of the Coast Guard knowing how to run a boat and spent the rest of his life making sure other people knew it too – through Alaska Rescue, a training company that took him from the Chilkat Valley to departments across the northwest. And through guides learning the rivers alongside him.
One of them was Greg Schlachter, who fished with Rice for 25 years. On the Chilkat River, Rice ran his jetboat like he was still teaching a course rather than just taking everybody for a ride.
“He had a protocol about running a jetboat that was way stricter than anything I would do, even with clients,” Schlachter said. Wading rivers taught more than years of doing it alone – including a trick for keeping his footing that Rice picked up from kayaking: brace with the rod, then slap the water with it to catch yourself before you went in.
Out on the ocean, Rice had a favorite place to push people past where they thought they could go – just outside the Haines harbor breakwater, where the water turns into a washing machine when it’s kicking up.
“Most people would never think to go in there,” said Joe Oesterling, who founded the town’s sea kayak symposium with Rice. “But with him, they felt confident enough. He’d say ‘it’s ok, let’s go do it.’ People would follow him in, and it’d be fine, and they’d learn a lot.”
Judi watched the same instinct develop over three decades. When she met him he was still primarily a guide, someone who liked to wander the world. Somewhere along the way, teaching became the thing he built his life around.
“He had an uncanny ability to work with a really wide range of people and somehow see their strengths and weaknesses,” she said. “He could identify what someone needed because he saw who they really were, and he loved people. He wanted to help them be the best versions of themselves, because that’s what he always strived for himself.”
“He was the guide’s guide. He was in his 60s and 70s and still jumping in rivers, teaching you exactly how to do it,” said Schlachter. “He had a way of teaching that felt like pointers from a good friend…without challenging your ego.”
Badgley felt that at the fire department.
“Even though he was really good at his job, he would not boast. You felt comfortable talking to someone that was a lot more knowledgeable than you are, so you don’t feel as intimidated,” Badgley said.
Rice came to Haines to run swiftwater rescue training for the fire department, not because Haines could ever have a full rescue team, Badgley said, but because if somebody ended up in the water, there’d be enough skill in the room to get them out without anyone getting hurt.
People who watched Rice under pressure kept coming back to the same word: control.
Darren Schweinefus was a Glacier Point guide when he met Rice. Schweinefus said he never once saw Rice’s composure crack.
“He never got his feathers ruffled. Never got upset. He was always positive,” Schweinefus said. “He had such control over himself. It was amazing to see.”
Now, when Schweinefus is out fishing or boating and puts himself in a risky situation, he thinks of all of the things he learned. “It’s like I got a book put in my head that Dick wrote a long time ago about how to survive,” he said.
Whatever it cost Rice to hold that together, he never let it show.
“I saw him get short with people sometimes, and I understood why he was doing it,” Schlachter said. “But he never got to the point where the stress was visibly showing. Maybe he had it on the inside – sure – but it didn’t show. ”
In 2020, when a mudslide tore down the mountainside above Beach Road, burying two residents, many in town would show up to the fire hall each morning, not entirely sure what they were walking into. They’d circle up around Rice who’d tell them where to search and how to do it without getting hurt themselves.
“There was a lot of chaos there, but if somebody was going to organize it, he was the prime person to make that happen because of his depth of knowledge on water events,” Badgley said. “People would trust his judgement and look for him to be a guiding light.”
Judi Rice said she feels lucky to have known him, which helps somewhat with the grief. But the emptiness he left behind is daunting.
“He would just give me a big bear hug as soon as we were both up,” she said. “And he would always make us lemon water in the morning after we kind of learned that was good for us. So yep, every morning before we had our coffee.”
It’s easy to understand how a medical condition that caused paralysis would make a man wallow. But Judi said her husband handled it with strength and grace, still trying to make every day the best day while the two were birdwatching, taking in the Florida sunsets, or reflecting on their decades of companionship.
There was one time they went on a river trip to help with a couple who had adopted a little boy, Zane. She said she and Dick fell in love with the three-year-old as the group made their way down the Black Canyon of Gunnison, right below Hoover Dam.
“One night around the campfire, Dick had Zane sitting on his lap, and we were all just looking up at the stars – and a beautiful night – and this three-year-old took a big sigh and said, ‘I’m so happy,’” Judi Rice said.
It stayed with them and became one of those things the two would say to each other when they were having way too much fun or something was so beautiful, there were no words.
During the last year, even when Dick Rice was hurting, he would take the time to look at her and get the words out: “I’m so happy.”
Dick Rice was preceded in death by his mother Ramona Rosa Rice, his father Byron Richard Rice, Sr., his sister JoEve Benedict and his father-in-law Karl Falk. He is survived by his wife Judi, brothers Drew and Dan, his mother-in-law Patricia Falk, his two sisters-in-law, four nieces, six nephews, close cousins and his best friend for 60 years, Joe Worsely.
A celebration of life for Dick Rice will be held Aug. 29 at the Chilkat Inlet Retreat, 1995 Mud Bay Road. A tribute to Rice and shared stories will begin at 2 p.m., dinner will be served between 5 and 6 p.m. Bring a small appetizer or dessert to share. Call or text Judi Rice at 907-209-4780 if you have any questions.