Touring Haines

Haines was a town I hadn't toured before, but it has alot to offer. The Natural History museum has the best taxidermy work of all the Alaska wildlife and sealife that I have seen . The boys would have loved it. The Sheldon Cultural museum had one of the sleds used in the White Fang movie (Filmed in Haines. Dick Mackey, Iditarod winner who I met a couple years ago, was hired to work all the mushers for that movie, and he ended up being the one on the sled for most of the shots since the actors couldn't hack it). Some of the small buildings in town were built as backdrops for the set and are still in use today as shops. I found one of the few graveyards that exist in Alaska (too hard to dig in frozen ground most of the year in the rest of the state). All the residents of the graveyard had died around the Klondike Gold Rush years when many folks came through Haines to get to the gold fields. Only two had lived past age 35, most were in their twenties when they died, and the oldest was only 53. Life was hard then in Alaska, as the memorial wording in the picture above reminds us.