Haines

It was an early start for us out of Juneau: check in at the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS) terminal was 6AM for our departure to Haines at 8AM. It was a dreary morning, misty rain cloaked Juneau as we arrived at the Auke Bay docks. MV LeConte is a much smaller vessel than the MV Matanuska we traveled on in weeks past, and for our short journey north to Haines is was packed to the gills. We were one of the last vehicles to load and by the time we made our way upstairs to the passenger decks there were only a handful of seats left on the boat. We camped out in the cafeteria for the four-and-a-half hours to Haines, enjoying another canasta marathon – this time the kids wanted to take on Mum and Dad – and catching up on some reading. For the entire journey north we couldn’t see more than a few hundred feet either side of the boat, it had us thanking our lucky stars we were able to see the breathtaking peaks of the Takhinsha Mountains and its glaciers a couple of weeks earlier when we traveled the same route (in the reverse direction) on our way to Sitka.

Haines, like Skagway, had its local economy crushed by COVID. It relies on cruises to a degree, but is also the main launching point for travelers like us who traverse the Inside Passage and then continue on the road to mainland Alaska. Haines and Skagway are the two ports served by AMHS that connect to the mainland road system. There is, however, a stretch of a few hundred miles between Haines and mainland Alaska that passes through Canada and for the past year the Canadian government closed the border 40 miles/64 kilometers north of Haines to all but essential travel. The residents of Haines were effectively trapped in their tiny northern finger of Southeast Alaska: ocean to the south and a closed border to the north!

Haines was a bit of a ghost town as we rolled along Main Street in the misty rain. Unlike Skagway – where most of the stores were boarded up – business were open, but one of the town’s two RV parks was closed and the other had only two of its 60+ spaces occupied. With no campgrounds in town, our only option was the Haines Hitch-Up RV Park, a nice spot with hot showers and located a few blocks from central Haines. The skies broke once or twice as we were organizing ourselves during the afternoon, the picturesque Takhinsha Mountains visible to the west were quite an awesome sight.

We’d met a family moving to Haines on our Inside Passage trip a couple of weeks earlier, the husband was a mining engineer and was moving to Haines for a three month posting. Lisa texted with the wife and received a download on spots to hit for our one night in town: the Haines Brewing Company had some great beers and a real character as the brew master (Bob Dixon’s long lost brother…), and we all demolished the pizzas from Alpenglow after a few beers at the taproom. There was also a fantastic sporting goods store in town that had one of the most impressive collections of trophy animals I’ve ever seen: an example of almost every North American game animal you can think of, as well as a handful from places like Iran and Asia. Max spied a slingshot on the wall and used some of his hard-earned lawn mowing money to take it with us as a souvenir. Just what we need.