Latest / Doug Has Questions / Episode 13: Reba Hylton; How A Tourism Director Balances Growth, Wildlife, And Community Needs

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Episode 13: Reba Hylton; How A Tourism Director Balances Growth, Wildlife, And Community Needs · Doug Has Questions

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, thanks for joining us for this episode of Doug Has Questions.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: We're available if you want to watch us on uh YouTube or if you just want to listen to the podcast version on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: And each episode goes live on Thursday morning.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope you enjoy this episode and we're happy to have you listening.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to this edition of Doug Has Questions.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: My guest today is Haynes Visitor Center Coordinator, Director.
• 0:32
  unknown: Tourism director.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tourism director for the Haynes Borough, Reba Hilton.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us, Reba.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit of your life story, and then we'll talk about tourism and Haynes.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: How's that sound?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that sounds good.
• 0:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start with the story of Reba first.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Where did that begin?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I was actually born in North Carolina.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: My parents uh kind of traveled around a lot.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um my mom, I'd like to talk a little bit about my mom first because this really is a big foundation of who I am.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um she was my family on my mom's side was came over from Mexico in the late 50s.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: And they were actually brought over by the government to work because there was a program back then.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't look it up what it's called, but like they were there's incentives to come be U to be citizens in the US and to get work, and they did.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so being a migrant family and a family of 12, they have 12 kids, 12 kids, 12 siblings.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: My mom is one of 12.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Your mom was one of 12.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: My mom was one of twelve, not me.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: But still, that's but still, it's kind of a big deal.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just to think how So when they came over, she was a kid, she came over with her family when she was a child, or was she older when she came over?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they've already had six kids, and she was born in the US soon after they arrived.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: So she was the seventh, and eventually they had a total of twelve kids.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: And once they reached seventh grade, they had to leave school and they worked the fields.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: That was just kind of their life back then.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, like I was the first generation to go to college, even from all of my cousins, um, which is kind of crazy.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: I know, right?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's not that far removed.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, so they were they went to North Carolina to start, or that was where you were born, but where did your mom's family, when they first came into the U.S., where did they start working the fields?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: In Texas, in McCallan, Texas, which isn't that far over the border in from Mexico.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: And was that what crops were they, did they ever tell you, or was it just whatever was in season?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh lots of what was seasonal.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: They did a lot of cotton, they did a lot of oranges, they did strawberries in Oregon, and that's kind of like where I ended up growing up where my family is from.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: But like my brother was born, I have a younger brother, he was born in Florida, and then my sister, who was younger than me, was born in Oregon.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it was kind of always just part of my family and when moving around and migrating, like migrants, right?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, what was what kind of stories was your mom telling you about?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I imagine before seventh grade, before they got out when they're working full-time, they were probably still working when they weren't in school as well.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: They absolutely were.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, it's interesting because when I got into high school and um I had to contribute to the family when I wanted my own things.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like my mom was like, You're not gonna work because once you start working, you're never gonna stop.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so for her, it was really important that I didn't work through high school.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: She let me do seasonal things in the summer, but I couldn't hold a job down like as a student, she just wouldn't allow it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that was always really interesting.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: But I definitely am a hard worker, and that comes directly from my mother.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, right.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so once they finally settled down, her and my dad, who my dad's side is kind of the opposite.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: They um bat very solid Baptist family.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: My grandfather was a preacher man, um and also kind of migrant as well, moved around a lot as well.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then so, but eventually my family, my mom, dad, and all of us settled in Oregon.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And where'd your mom how'd your mom and dad meet?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And where was that at?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they met in North Carolina when she was working the fields.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they were Catholic, but they still would like go to church, and like you know, there was a lot of big community going on in those kind of areas centered around migrants, like trying to get people into churches and whatnot.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of how they met.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, it's it's the dynamics were incredible because um a southern family and my dad meeting a Mexican woman and very Mexican, like my grandmother does not did not speak English, she never learned English, she wouldn't fly in a plane, she wouldn't take an escalator.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was like definitely third-world old school culture that she came from.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of that is passed down to my mother.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: My mother to this day doesn't drive, she just refused to drive.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: If she can find somebody else, good for her.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's doing a little bit.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so definitely an interesting childhood, but some of that shaped me a lot because I never learned Spanish.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: And for the longest time, I was like, yeah, once I was older, I kind of like, you know, resented that.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, what that's such a great opportunity, right, for someone to learn Spanish.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: But my mom experienced a lot of racism, including from my father's family.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about with Southern family, Mexican girlfriend, wife.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of backlash was there?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because they were getting married, I'm guessing, 60s, 50s, 60s?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in the six in the 60s.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: 60s?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yep, around 66.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're married in 1966.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I was born in 1968.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: That couldn't have been easy for them.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: No, it wasn't easy for them.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it wasn't easy for them.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Hence, they moved away from the family and, you know, kind of made that transition over to the West Coast.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: The West Coast is a little bit more accepting of mixed races.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but my mom had some interesting stories that I don't want to get into about some of the racism that she um experienced from family members and non-family members, just from strangers.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so it took me a long time to understand why she didn't teach me Spanish.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and I've talked to several people, a lot of indigenous people going through tourism conferences and whatnot, um, about how we were, this generation of mine was pretty whitewashed.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you need to be like the Brady Bunch.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's not okay to dress different, it's not okay to speak a language that's different.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like you, and our parents wanted that for us because they were protecting us.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so that is just a really interesting um way to be brought up, especially with current events and with wanting to show my son, because I'm a mother now of a 13-year-old who is um like learning about social studies and the constitution and just relating that to current events, is really it's a really interesting dynamic because you want to protect someone, but you also want to let them know your truth and what you've learned through what I've learned through my own personal experiences.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it's it's intense.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Did was there any change in perspectives from the families over the years towards your mom and your dad?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a lessening of that as they saw them building a family and being successful together?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or was there still kind of that divide that you really couldn't rec they couldn't reconcile?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: They couldn't reconcile.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: Once we moved to Oregon, um, we kind of left all that behind.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: There were a few visits that happened throughout the years that I remember, but for the most part, they were never a part of my lives again, my life again.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: And even my father, there my parents ended up divorcing when I was in high school, which I thought was kind of a blessing because like in the last couple years they were fighting, and and I've always believed that if you're gonna be a parent, you need to show your child what they deserve in a relationship.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, it was a good thing that they divorced.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that had to do with a lot of other issues.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think my mom was just married at a very young age and they went through so much together, and she really started discovering herself, you know, when she was married, that kind of thing, you know.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: How old was your mom when she got married?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, she was 18.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's yeah.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Just that's so young, I can't even imagine.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Just starting to get out there and figure out what the world's all about.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: But very common in that generation, though, really.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean But I you you see it, there's there's some people that that works out great for.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's some people it's later in life.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: We we all develop at different paces and different stages, and yeah, you make a choice with what you think is right at the time, and yeah, sometimes it's works out great forever, and sometimes it's for a shorter period.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, absolutely.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:32
  unknown: Yeah.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: So from my childhood, I mean, I we we took a couple trips back to Texas to visit my grandmother, and that was always some of my best memories.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we'd be catching fireflies out, we'd go in the canal and catch frogs, a lot of outdoor activities, but the the family, you know, I mean, they ranged from one wasn't a ended up um being a police officer, one was a firefighter, a lot of civil servant jobs that they ended up falling into.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so not that everyone was doing really well or anything, but they were making decent livings, you know, and so they bought my grandmother a house.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: She they had already had property um as a family.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I say that because a few siblings of my mom still lived with my grandmother for quite a few years.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they had this older house and like hand washing machine.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and they built her this newer house on the property because that one was just kind of getting old and whatnot.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: But till her till her dying day, she still slept on the floor on a mat because that's how she grew up.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, even though she could afford a bed or the family would buy her a bed and have this new house.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and those are just some lessons that really stuck with me, I think, throughout my life about the lack of material importance, you know, and like what really is important to me, um, which I hope to foster in my own child, you know.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So as you were growing up, what was was your mom still working fields?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Was once she married your dad and they kind of moved?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: You said it was still kind of an itinerant lifestyle, but did did they what what did your dad do for a living or what did they do while you were growing up?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my dad worked in a tire shop, is was my biggest memory of him um holding a job for the longest.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: My mom was always the stable one in the family when it came to employment.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: But a lot of that was because my dad like had uh a serious injury like when he was repairing a tire, like one of the giant tires, and so he ended up not being able to do physical work after that much longer.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I don't really rem recall the jobs that he did have.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: He kind of pieced together off and on.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: But my mom got a job at a university as a cleaning lady, and so gosh, she worked through retirement there.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how many years, over 30 years she worked um at Willamette University, which is what got me to college.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um they had a program there, great liberal arts college in um Salem, Oregon, where um one of the Chapel daughters actually attend.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's a great, great school.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: My grades were not awesome, but I also played softball, which um got me into college basically.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um softball was a big part of my life growing up once I hit high school.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um I attended North Salem High School, and as a freshman, they didn't have enough girl players to round out a team, so they talked me into playing.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um it was kind of a natural and uh yeah, it was it was it was very important to me because I just sports team sports, it changed my life, like um just being a part of something bigger than you, and like I really enjoyed the traveling that we did together as a team.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um I didn't really know the game.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: I started off as um shortstop, but I didn't understand because I'd never played before.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um and they moved me to the varsity team right away, and it was just too much for me.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: As varsity shortstop, I'm like, where do I throw the ball again?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like it took a while for it to click.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but eventually that did get me into college because they came and they the university looked at me, watched me play, and I I remember the day the scout was there.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and our softball fields at the high school were it was built on the old football fields, and so you we'd have, you know, JV and varsity playing at the same time, and of course, by then I was on varsity, and I hit a ball, not just to stop their game, I hit the wall on the other side of the fence, and everyone was just like, holy cow, you know, it was it was good.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: I was my coach always said if there were the Olympics for softball, I would have been on the team kind of thing.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Nowadays I can't throw a ball, my arm's like dead from it, you know, and all that.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I've enjoyed playing softball throughout the years.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: I made some good friends in Hanes when I for first rolled up.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: My first year, I remember rolling up to a softball field, and there's these ladies playing softball, and so I just stopped on my bike and I'm watching them.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, Hey, do you play?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Yep.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, any good?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Yep.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the ladies at the fog cutter.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I started playing with those ladies, and man, Connie Ward, I mean, just so many different personalities and people in this community.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then I played forever in uh in Skagway.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: That was also a lot of fun.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then this last year, I went up to dustball and played with a little bit with a Juno team, and then like pulled my hamstring on the first, my first at bat, basically.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I really don't play anymore, but my son plays and he's a natural, so it's fun to see that being carried on on my you know, my genes being like still going out there.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sports has a way of bringing people from a lot of different backgrounds together.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it also like you were saying, you kind of have that camaraderie and that teamwork that's that I've I've learned a lot in sporting activities over the years.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So much.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Challenges and you know the programs run right, and even like you were saying with the lady softball, that they're kind of forming their own team and putting that together, and you've got your natural leaders on the team, they're making sure everybody knows what's happening and just having that fun atmosphere.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's I wish I wish we had more opportunities for that here.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's not the softball league that we used to have when you first got here.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: No, but we've got a lot of volunteers that run a really good little league program here, which is impressive, you know.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's one that it looks like it for my history here.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of those is kind of the the roller coaster.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because you have a group of parents that are really invested in it, and it goes, and then their kids age out.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And everybody's like, well, why aren't you gonna keep doing it?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, because my kids are doing something else.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: I want to do things with them.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so then there's a lull, and then another group of parents gets really invested in it, and and so it's you don't you're not uh you can't build that consistency with yeah with it, but it's still when you when you've got those volunteers and they're willing to put the time in, it's it's cool to go out and watch the kids.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I hope we're not in one of those transition years because the folks that have been running it and have been doing a really good job or their kids are all aged out of it, so we'll see what happens.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: I immediately was like, I'll step in, but I was like, nope, I can't.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like I've got to learn those boundaries, which is really hard to do.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I do what I do prioritize my son, you know, he's 13 and now.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: That season's kind of like the busy part of your season as well.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've been able to like I've been in this role as tourism director now for three years, and last year the summer went great.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: Knock on wood, anything could happen, but like I just made sure any of the external projects that I'm working on, I saved them for the off-season, which means I've been so busy this winter, I can't even believe it's been winter.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but trying to t manage my time a little bit better within the job has been a priority, and so far, so good.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: So going to I'm assuming you said you're in Oregon.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: So where where'd you go to high school in Oregon?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh North Salem High School.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you're in Salem, so that made it easy for Willamma to come scout you.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's where my mom worked at the university, so it kind of all just came together.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: And are you is your mom still in Salem area?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: She is, she totally is.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she remarried um soon after she divorced.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think there was a little overlap there, which was also some life lessons I learned um and maybe repeated.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, yeah.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: But Salem, yeah, and we go back every Christmas because it's very important to spend time with our family.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Also trying to instill that into my son.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: So whenever he does start his own family, that he's always like, okay, I gotta be with mom.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, my sister and her husband went to Western Oregon State.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was at UW, I'd go down and visit them a few times a year.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was always going, and then we'd go into Salem, go shopping or whatever.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Salem, that whole area is a beautiful spot.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: It is really, really pretty.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you get through college.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: What do you what are you studying in college?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I wasn't quite sure actually.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: I never really found my path at Willamette University.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I ended up dropping out and then going back, so that was really interesting, of course, because then I did have to work.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was working in a fast food restaurant and took a big detour there.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I found a really good group of friends, but maybe not the best influences for me.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um regrets though.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: I definitely had some really good times.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I didn't really didn't get what I needed out of that university experience.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: I've always been like a late bloomer in life.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: It took me a while just to do everything a little bit later, especially when I compare it to my sister, who's younger, who did a lot of things before me.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um But leaving the house and still being in school wasn't the best mix for me, um, especially when I was working and partying a lot.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: We lived in this, I lived in this duplex, and our side of the apartment, I think there were six of us living in there, and I had my bedroom in the garage.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then our neighbors were in a band, um, and it just was they were sneaking into bars and doing things in the city.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not the best study environment.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: No, and we did some crazy, crazy things that I won't talk about.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I had a really good time, and I actually ended up going back to Portland Community College, but that was years later when I did find my path and what I knew I wanted to do or I thought I wanted to do.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the love for it is still there, but it was early childhood education, was um what I ended up going back to school for.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's kind of a big story because a lot happened between then and there.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's let's dive into that.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go down that road.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I got I got married.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: That was one thing that happened.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: So how old were you?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: How old were you then when you got married?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh, that is definitely something I tried to let go of and I did let go of.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um The reason I'm asking is your mom was 18.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I was a lot older than 18, that's for sure.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like I said, late bloomer for sure.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: But during so I want to back up a little bit.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: During my waitressing days, because I went from fast food to waitressing, and I loved waitressing because it's just like unlike now, like you go to work and then you leave with a pocket of cash, and you're not thinking about work when you leave.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, there's no problems, like you just show up to work and do your job and then it's done.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, sometimes you'll have the serving nightmare, you know, which is a real thing where you're, you know, in a banquet hall and you can never get to anything fast enough.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, anybody who's ever waited tables or bartender, I'm bartended, I'm sure, has had those nightmares.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: But um I was waiting tables in a nice fancy restaurant for Salem, Oregon.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's still there, Da Vinci's.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: They just, I think, had their 30 year anniversary.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, really great place.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Family run, good food.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: High dollars.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was walking distance within the state capitol, so he had a really good clientele.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I served this table, and there were two younger men at the table that were similar to my age, and it was one of their birthdays, and they're like with their family, having families, having a nice big dinner, and I was their server, and they invited me to say, Hey, the parents are, you know, going home after, but we're gonna go to this bar, you should join us.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Oh, I don't know, but then they said where they were going, and I knew the bartender, and I was like, okay, I'll, you know, maybe I'll show up, whatever.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I showed up, and I instantly hit it off with this man.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like we were kids at the time, even though we weren't kids.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: I had to been like 22 or so at that time, and this is not who I ended up marrying, but it very much has to relate to the story of how I got married.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we hit it off.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: His name is Brett Jaspers.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: I do want to name him because he's no longer with us.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um but we had we are instantly fell in love.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: He was a teacher, he um he was just an incredible guy.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: He played guitar, very, very musical, very, very passionate, smart, maybe too smart for his own good sometimes, you know, one of those brainiacs.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was I don't know, I think I was the free spirit that he needed, you know.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: He had already just finished school, was recently started teaching, he's had this path, he had the same girlfriend since high school kind of thing, and they had recently broken up.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so we fall madly and deeply in love, and within six months he wanted to marry me.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I was and I was like, no, we just met.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're my first serious boyfriend, like really my first true love.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I love you, but I do not want to marry you.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to marry you right now.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's not.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And he was just hell bent he wanted kids.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: He knew what is he wanted his life, what he wanted out of his life.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: And um we kept trying to make it work for another six months or so, but he never would give up, give up on it.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then eventually he's just like, I'm sorry, like I really want to get married and have kids.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Okay, but like not yet.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, let's just cool things off.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know why I said no.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: I just I just knew I needed something else, you know, even though I loved him dearly.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: There are a few red flags about his personality and whatnot, like one wanting to marry someone you just met, basically.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um sometimes that works out for people.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it does, sometimes it does, yeah.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: But I just I just wasn't ready for that.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so he ended up getting back with his high school sweetheart after he broke up with me, and it crushed, it crushed me.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was horrific.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: I still loved him, it was horrific.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: And um eventually I met someone else, and you know, you know, within a year's time I met someone else, and I from the get-go, I didn't want to go out with him, but my friends are like, Are you kidding me?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: This guy is perfect.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: I refer I'll refer to him as Opie because he because it's wholesome.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: His family, like his brother was a um um a staffer for Senator Wyden.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: His dad was a city manager of Bandon, Oregon for a long time.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: And he was just out of grad school making six figures, and um when I met him, he was still in college, but he was, you know, finishing up.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: And he fell madly in love with me, and like for the first time, even when we went on a date, I was like, I don't want to go.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: My friends are like, You gotta go.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like the whole relationship was like that.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Even when he asked me to marry him, he had a beautiful ring, and he and I was like, Oh, I don't know, I don't know.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: I knew I didn't want to, but he's like, just put the ring on, just just put the ring on and let's see how you feel.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I put the ring on.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: The next thing I know, I'm walking down the aisle, like it had this life of its own.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I loved him and I cared for him, but I wasn't like in love with him like I was with with Brett.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that was doomed from the beginning, but he facilitated in me so much, like it was definitely a good thing in the long run for me.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, because he was, like I said, he's OP.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: He was an amazing guy, and he was like, you gotta stop waiting tables.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: What do you really want to do?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so, like, he supported me during school, but not just the support, like the emotional support, the support of like, let's follow your dream.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: What is your dream?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was a beautiful thing about him.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: But Brett's marriage did not last very long.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: And within a year's time, he came back to me after I'd been married, and I wasn't happy.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't unhappy, but I just wasn't happy, happy.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like I knew that I deserved.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so when Brett came back and he was just like, You're the love of my life, I'm so sorry.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what I did that for, you know, I'll wait for you kind of thing.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, oh my God.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: I had an affair with him, and I didn't want to be that person, you know.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was the Thanksgiving, and I, you know, I was supposed to meet my husband down in southern Oregon, and I was like, okay, give me a couple days, and I ended up going up to Washington instead with Brett, and then met him, and I came back from that trip after Thanksgiving, and it was like, you guys, I'm done.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I can't do any of this, you know.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I kind of left them both to find myself, and um that's when I first got introduced to Alaska because I had met randomly just shooting pool in a bar, this amazing being, Karen Faust, who I love dearly, who um we be we just instantly became friends, and she had known my husband.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like her boyfriend at the time was in grad school with my husband, so we had this acquaintance, and she's like, Come up to Alaska, this is exactly what you need.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: So she talked me going in from a November to working in April up in Alaska, and she's like, I'll get you a job, I'll get you a place to live, just come spend the summer in Alaska with me.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: And because I was finishing my degree in early childhood education, I had my summers free.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I got a job with Chilcat Guides and uh rented a room in Bill Fletcher's house, which I mean I was.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: This is kind of just an escape from you because you had all this emotional energy going on with moving on from two different relationships at the same time.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, your marriage is pretty much over with, yeah.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the Karen offered you an escape.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: She offered me escape, and I think that's very, you know, they always say people in Alaska are either running from something or running to something.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: I was definitely running from something, but it found my path here.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: It it changed my life.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't expect to come up here and move up here.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: What was your first summer in Alaska?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: What year was that?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: 1996.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, working for Bart Henderson.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: And at that, my first year I worked in the office.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: I just worked dispatch and making the schedule, which back then it was crazy.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: We're in the little red building, and you the parks would the trucks would be parked out back, everything squeezed in, and guides would come into this tiny little building, and you're trying to write this schedule that's like this, it's like a Rubik's Cube at that point.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like we are definitely going through growing pains.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but man, like biking and getting to know all these incredible people and going out on the river and fishing and living at Bill Fletcher's and sitting on the porch and beach barbecues.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was incredible.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: It really was so eye-opening.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I it really did change the course of my life.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't know it was happening at the time.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because I went back and we I tried to make it work with with Brett again, um, but it didn't work out.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: It just didn't.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: We we had our time and things were changing, and I was changing, and I was finding this autonomy and this that love and that passion I was missing that I didn't have in my marriage, I had in my life for me, you know.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was really wonderful.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was a really wonderful experience.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I met some incredible people that um I'm still friends with, I'm still friends with Karen now.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: She lives in Maui full-time, but her and her husband are building a little house here.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it's great that she's we're starting to reconnect a lot, like spending time together when she's here in the summer.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but coming to Alaska in so many ways, like I ended up, I was in school still, so I finished my degree in early childhood education, and I started working for Head Start down there because I eventually wanted to get my master's in social service work.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: But working in Head Start in Portland, Oregon in the late 90s was really um eye-opening.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like I have such a big heart that I wanted to this to be my life work to help others, but like the things I saw happening with those families, um the most the most dramatic thing that happened, and I I loved it.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: I know, I know I made a positive impact, and I did that even with this one family with these challenges.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we had this one family in Head Start.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: So part of the program was, and I'll always back Head Start.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's one of the most amazing programs that you can actually support on a federal level when it has to do with social services and supporting early childhood education and the families themselves.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: We had the children for three ages three to five.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: We'd have them for 12 hours a week, you know, three days a week, four hours.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then my job was also having to do family visits, in-home visits with a social service worker because these were pretty families in need.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: We had a lot of Kurdish refugees because that was the time of Saddam Hussein.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: Those families, the houses were always just sparkling clean.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we had a lot of Hispanic families that, oh my God, those kids had so much love growing up.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was great to see.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: They might have 12 people living in a three-bedroom apartment, but man, the family that they had and the support was amazing.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then we had mostly the families that were impacted by drugs and crime, and those typically were were white families, and that was really, really sad and hard to see.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: And this one family, the they had a restraining order against the father, and the mother obviously was a current drug user, and they had she had two little kids, and the eldest, the boy, five years old, was in my class, and the three-year-old also came to Head Start, but she was in the other teacher's class who went less hours than what the the five-year-old did.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: And whatever leftover food there was at the end of the week, I'd always give to them, you know, they needed it.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: The mom would always have money for smokes, but not enough for milk kind of thing.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was so freaking sad.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: But with the restraining order, knowing that that had happened, the um little boy came to school one day with a little black eye, and he, you know, trying to befriend him.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like I've had obviously had a relationship with him already, but he divulged to me that it was his dad who did it, and the dad wasn't supposed to be there.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it was my duty.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was my duty.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're a mandatory reporter.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: Mandatory reporter, so I reported it, and um he went to jail, and within 48 hours in jail, this man committed suicide.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the best thing that could have ever happened to this family, that little boy.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Holy cow.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that's pretty messed up.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: But that was the best thing that could have happened to that little boy.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: He had already had a part of him that was dead.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: When people talk about mass shootings and stuff happening in school kids, like one day that kid could have been that kid that kills other people.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, he just he had a short straw.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it was really sad.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that mom, that mom, oh she should not have had parents.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: If I could have one superpower, it would be the power of sterilization.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: But there are some people on this planet that should not have kids, and that is not fair to kids.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's always the kids that suffer.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that was something Cesar and I talked about, and we're gonna do another show, we're gonna delve into it more longer, is um talking about generational trauma.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And how the trauma from other generations, when unless you start acknowledging it and understanding it and treating it, it just compounds and compounds, and you get people in those situations.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and I and I guess that as as you're telling me that story, the thing going on in my back of my mind, because you're talking about these families that there's 12 in a house, but they're just full the house is just full of love.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you got these other houses.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Did you do at that time or even looking back on it?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Can you see things that this is the reason?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or was it just somebody gets into drugs, somebody gets into this?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Or that that seemed like a and I guess the reason I'm looking at that, Reba, is how do we break this cycle?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's more and more, there's so many kids that are in that situation.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: I know that how how do we break that cycle?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: I really don't know, but I do know that I do believe in the Head Start program very deeply, and I know we made a positive impact in so many kids' life lives.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um in so many different ways, you know, and so many different types of kids are in those programs.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I vowed never to work in one here in a small community because I don't want to know the mess up stories.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure it's different here where it's not like that.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there we know small towns have those problems too, but you can be removed away f removed from it in a bigger community.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: You just can be, you know, you don't know, you don't see everybody at the grocery store and whatnot.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I don't know, I don't know what the answer is.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: Drugs are definitely an issue.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the drugs are probably just, I think, I don't I think they're an issue and they're also a symptom.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because a lot of it is the the people that are using the drugs or alcohol or whatever are covering their own pain.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a self-medication with whatever pain trauma they've gone throughout in their lives.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's that's one of those things.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: I just I keep looking at these situations and hearing even family stories um of my dad's childhood and and kind of being abandoned.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you look at at how some people are able to come out of that, but it's usually the ones that have support of some kind.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, like you doing it that had to be really tough for you to reven though it's a mandatory deal, you know it's the right thing to do.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's still got to be some queasiness or uncertainty with you going.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how is this gonna work out for these kids if I do this?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: I doubted it.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to make the call, but I knew I had to.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: You had to.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: But there's people that don't make that call.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: I know, and I get that too.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I doubted it for years until now.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: I can look back at it and go, that had to be done, you know.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe those kids now, I don't know what their lives are like, but maybe they've got some help.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they're actually been able to been reached and have that help.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: That three-year-old girl had been sexually abused by her father.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Three years old.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's horrifying, it's absolutely horrifying, you know.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, coming to those terms of that was the best thing ever to happen to those kids, like that took years to figure out, you know.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I won't take that back for anything now.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't, I don't think, you know.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but going through that and then finding myself in Alaska at the same time, you know, like I came back my second year and just drove bus, you know, is a way to earn tips, and I just really enjoyed it.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: So I got my CDL, and then the third year I was up here, I went through guide school.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: So, and then that was the year I was like, all right, I'm gonna leave this behind.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: I want to stay up here in the winter and just kind of see where life takes me, you know.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: Left all of it behind, except for my family, still very much always connected to my family, you know.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: But my relationships, a lot of my friendships were just like it was time to move on.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you were here, you know, that that period you're talking about, 96, 97, 98, that was kind of like the heyday of Haynes cruise ships.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a couple more years after that, but that was kind of from 94 to 2000 was kind of like the peak forever of Haynes tourism, and you're right in the middle of that.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: I was making my money as a guide, you know, saving up my tips.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: I always did really well.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and would live off that for the winter months, you know.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: I traveled a lot.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: I go to Hawaii.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um I ended up getting an off-season gig, and I was fish tagging for Noah for the month of October, so I was able to piece together work.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where were you fish tagging at?
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, a place called Little Port Walter on the southern tip of Baranoff Island.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Seriously?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know Little Port Walter?
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, I've never heard of it, but Baranoff Island.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're you're getting paid to go down there and fish tag in just this really cool remote wilderness.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the it was life-changing.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it so much.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: One, the money was really good, so you're able to put it away in it every year, very good.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: You got a spot where you're not you don't have anything to spend it on.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you're not spending money, they paid for you to get down there.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: So we're like taking a float plane down two hours, you know, south of Juneau to get there.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: The whole experience was great.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: The um the lead on that uh team, um, ANOA employee, because we were just contract workers, uh, and we, you know, we the team changed throughout the years.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he was an old deadhead, so he was just like super chill, you know.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was such a fun gig, and it really wasn't about fish tagging.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: That was great, and our retention rate was really, really high.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: So he loved having us taggers back, and there's taggers and clippers, and there's only about probably six of us that would go down for this project and just do the fish until they were done.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: Hundreds and thousands of fish, too.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how'd you find out about this job?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: I had applied for fishing game here through Randy Erickson, and he was like, because I had his so one of the seasonal jobs, and I'll get back to that, that I had in those early years was working at Chilkat Valley Preschool.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I made a lot of different in between that and softball, a lot of different connections in the community.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: So went to fishing game, they didn't have any work, but he's like, hey, I know this guy's looking for work if you're interested.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, okay.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I went out and just checked out what fish tagging was upriver here and was like, oh, okay, I could totally do that.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then talk my way into this job, you know, no experience whatsoever.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: But they were more concerned about having someone that could live remotely.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh yeah, I live in Haynes, I guide rivers, blah, blah, blah.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: And this guy was like uh really into running rivers.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: So when I started talking about rivers, like we just connected.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: And um, throughout the years, I ended inviting him on a cataract canyon trip.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a couple of them, so that was really fun.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, his wife never joined, but he was just so, like I said, super chill.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: So he was easy fitting in with those friends taking those private long rafting trips.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I love the fish tagging work, and it really wasn't about the work because it was a NOAA facility, and there were two families that live there.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as you're off work, we were out, you know, setting skates for halibut, setting crab pots, so I would get all my subsistence stuff for the year by going down and doing this fish work.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it was just so much fun.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: There's hot tubs, I mean, TV room.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was great.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was great, it's one of the best times of my life.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: The job's still available.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really great way to spend October.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_02: They it's a great way.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: They just got the funding cut, so they just shut down the whole facility.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, just this year.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: How many years did you do that?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, eleven or twelve.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: You just kept going back.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: I just kept going back.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, if it's that cool of a gig, why wouldn't you?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean and I worked seasonally, like all my life in Alaska until I took this position.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: I was always a seasonal worker.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Hence all the trips to Hawaii and stuff.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a good place to go in the winter time compared to that.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: Great place, yeah.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you were so I'm trying to get my math straight here.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: 96 was your first year up here.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: Came up 97.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: 98, kind of 98 is when you started or 99.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: 99.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, when I started rafting, yeah, doing float trips.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Doing the float trips and stuff.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and at that time, because it was growing so much, like I didn't have that skill set.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I do remember there being a little like some of the senior guides that have like this incredible experience.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, what are you doing?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't just me, it was like it was changing, like putting these unexperienced people on the river with folks.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean, we had to get checked off.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: There was training.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: I can't tell you the amount of times I've done Swiftwater Rescue.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I earned my stripes on the river and was successful at it.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I really enjoyed it.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: When I started getting burnt out about it, that's when I knew that I'd need a change.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's when I took the opportunity to go over and manage the Skagway hike and float.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so when what year was that when you went to Skagway to do the hike and float?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh gosh, it was probably 2004, 2005, right around then.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you're here even after the cruise ships pulled out after the the head tax.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: You stayed and were still working the summers because there's it was because it still stayed busy, they're just bringing people over from Skagway.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, by then I had seniority.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: I was the I was a head boatman, so basically the lead of you have TLs, trip leaders, when you're rowing the daily scene, and then the the head boatman was the leader of the leaders kind of out there.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is this this is the we're gonna run 19 mile, or we're not doing, you know, this part of the river anymore, you know, that kind of thing.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of a managerial role, but also still being on the river.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: Still being on the river.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh yeah, so I was getting a little burnt out.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: I also was dating someone here, and that ended, and I was like, I was in the office one day upstairs.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: By then, they the new facility was built, and um they were just like we need somebody to manage Skagway, and I just happened to be in there when the management was talking about it, and I was like, I'll do it.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_05: Raise your hand.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_05: They're like, What?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: You're kidding.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: Are you sure you want to do this?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I'll go, I'll do it.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: And like my first year bus driving, and even a year or two after that, I'd always go over to Skagway and just help out on the real busy days.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I loved Skagway, and it already had friends over there, and just was like, I was ready for change, and um, it was a big business, and it was a really big job over there because it wasn't I ended up managing the whole program.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't just hike and float, it was Glacier Point, it was really big at that time, and the rafting was a lot bigger than it is now.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was a lot less expensive to get people over here, so the price point was different, and also a lot more tours have developed in Skagway since then as well, so it was a much busier scene.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um but yeah, that really got me into the Skagway scene and ended up just moving over there.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: And why I stayed over there my first year winter was because of the rec center.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was awesome.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: The rec center in Skagway is just incredible.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: But through that time I bought a house in Haynes here, and that was really because of my connections with KHS.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: I met Mick McCarter somehow, I don't remember how I met him, but he talked me into coming to be a DJ at KHS, and um, him and Michelle sold me my first house.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: They owner financed it, they just really embraced me as a new community member because when did you so back up here?
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, wait, wait there's more story here.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's more to the story.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: So when did you start DJing at KHNS?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: How how long had you been here before you started doing that?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: Probably around 99 or so.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: So a few years into it and then started.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: But really, it was like my first couple winters.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's when I was flashbacks and fresh tracks.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: I was doing I didn't like the morning show because I'd always do the water aerobics in the morning, so I wanted to be there.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_02: It was definitely part of my winter routine.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I also did some odd jobs.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: I worked at the video, what was the video store?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: 144.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Video 144.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: Video 144.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: I worked there.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: That was a lot of fun making nachos and renting VHS tapes out to people.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: It tells you how long ago that was.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: We validate ourselves.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it though.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: People would come in and I'd always know what was going on and get invited to different places because everyone came into the video story.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: Ever judging people based on the video titles that they picked up?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: No, even bad movies are bad movies.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I love movies, so it was a natural fit.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: But people would come in and play cribbage, and you know, I it was a great place to be in the winter.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then Chilcat Valley Preschool got to know Kim Phillips really good.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: It was her and I working there at that time.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I might have stuck with it longer, but at that time she was no point and she was not retiring.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like she was like immersed in it, and that was great, getting to know a lot of different families that way, you know.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd always fallen in love.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: I had fallen in love with Haynes very, very deeply, but it was time to move on to Skagway, and I loved my years in Skagway, but do you have my niece and nephews?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: Were you there when they were going through Chilkat Valley Preschool?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, I no.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: What years were you at Chilcat Valley Preschool?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the kids now were like, if I can think about them, Fletcher Sebens, um Dawson, Dawson Evident Evanden.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Year after me.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Year after year.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: So you were we were there, right?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think was it you or your brother?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think it one of them.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Chevy's like two years older than three years older than you would have been in you're in Dylan's class, right?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it would have been if you started with Fletcher, that would have been a year after you guys had gone through.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: But we we did preschool together for one year.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: For one year?
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember having Reba there?
• 49:56
  unknown: No.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: Come on, Marty.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Killing us here.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to remember all these things when you're four years old.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Four years old.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Four or five years old.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you guys are also little and circuit.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think I might have had you too.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: I know Janae was in there.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: That was uh when I got that news, that was really hard.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: That was older then, because that was Kaylee's class.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you probably if you had Janae, you probably had Kaylee.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember how many years I worked there though, but for a few years, definitely, maybe three to four, probably.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because it fit well with the seasonal work too, and that was my degree, so it was really easy to get a job, you know.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: And to apply that here.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Once you got to Skagway, did you do any of that work over in Skagway too in your season, or were you heading to Hawaii?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I was heading to Hawaii by then, and still fish tagging as well.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but working seasonally over there, like for Chillcat Guides, it was definitely a little more stress than I wanted in my life.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was just a really, really big job.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: And when you have the owners and general managers over here, they don't understand what you're doing on a daily basis over there.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um so at one point I had kind of just had enough of it after a few years, but um White Pass scooped me up pretty quickly after that.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: So for that next season, it wasn't hard finding a job over there.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: It still probably isn't hard finding a job in Skagway.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: A lot going on in Skagway.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: A lot going on in Skagway and a lot of opportunity.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: So in 2008 was my first year working for White Pass.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Or is it 2007?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: 2007 or 2008.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what'd you start out with with White Pass?
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was what they call a dock rep.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so you are the liaison between the cruise ships and the train.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_02: And White Pass is the largest tour operation in North America.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um they're still breaking records yearly.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_02: When I left, there were over 400,000 people a year.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the dock rep team was really small.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, there were four to five of us, four full-time, one part-time.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: And we were assigned a certain ship, and whenever that ship was in port, you worked with that ship.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_02: So you had a really good working relationship with the ship itself.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then an incentive program had started, but I kind of like took it upon myself to take that part of the job and run with it.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: I had a really, she's still there today, a wonderful boss.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I eventually grew into a sales position.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it wasn't a position that had been she created it for me.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like it was just was kind of my natural marketing and sales.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of how I got into marketing into deeper into tourism.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, is by just again having someone in my life that facilitated like my, you know, my talents.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where, you know, to follow my passion.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was really great at that point.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: They have one of the excursions, the Bennett, the Bennett Experience.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: It goes up to the follows the Chilku Trail.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: They have the Bennett Station up there, and it's the most expensive train ride, but it's also the longest, and it takes you further.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that that particular program was on the chopping block.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've talked about this maybe when I was in White White Pass with you.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: Took you over.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: When yeah, we went over there and we're at the office.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was asking you all about that, and you told me the story, but everybody else listened hasn't heard it, so continue it.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um that program was on the chopping block, and my boss at the time was like, I'd really like you to focus on saving this.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: If we can save it, we need to get the numbers up or it's gone.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so I took that to heart because you know, you've got you have at that time the eating house was open, you have the whole community of Carcross, which has been like this for tourism, and I knew if the train pulled out of there, it wasn't gonna bode well for that community either.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so, like, I really felt driven and off off also, I really loved White Pass and the product that we offered.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was, you know, that is the best train ride that they offer.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: So when they go to Bennett, not as somebody that's never been on the train.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody gives me a bad time about that.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: That I've never been on a long trip on Chill Cat Guides and I've never been on the train in the summer.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: The number, yeah, wow, the number of customers come in each year, and I recommend both of those.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: And like, have you been on it?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, no, not yet.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I've heard it's amazing.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: So when they get to Bennett, that's outside Car Cross, right?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: So is there do you do you have the opportunity to get off the train and then like go into Car Cross and everything and then come back?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: How long, how much time do they have in it?
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: So Bennett isn't actually in Car Cross, it's on the way to Car Cross.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're taking the train north, you're going, you pass Log Cabin, which is where the road crosses it, and you keep going in.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: Then Bennett is basically at the end of the Chilcoot Trail, which I highly recommend hiking when it's open again.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, it's currently not open.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Another thing that I haven't done that I've been told that I need to do.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's great, especially when you take the train out.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's a long list of things that I should do and have it.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta do it.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: Summers are busy.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: They are busy, but you have to make the time.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: I found what works for me is I put it on a calendar and then you start making it happen.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: My little motto in life is you think about it, okay?
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: This is something I really want to do.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: You say it, it starts giving it energy, and then you just do it.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: You can, it's that easy.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: You think it, you say it, you do it.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: I also grew up in Oregon, so it's kind of a little like the Nike, just do it.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: Just do it.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: That was grow, yeah, that's part of me.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: But like Bennett, the Bennett train ride, um, I'm not sure what they're calling it these days, because I really fought to get Yukon thrown in there because people don't understand what Bennett is, but they understand what the Yukon is, right?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's iconic.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so um you can take the train, and then once it gets to Bennett, which is at the end of the Chilcoot Trail, and at the I don't even, I guess western, southern or western end of Lake Bennett itself, it's like an eating house.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: So now it's just a museum.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_02: But the first few years of this tour, it was you'd stop and you'd get lunch there.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_02: Now lunch is just served on the train.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_02: But you get typically 30 to 60 minutes there, I think, maybe 45 minutes, depending on the train schedule, if everything's running on time or not, to wander around.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so you get to go up to the the trail itself, and there's an old church there, and there's a beautiful viewpoint that you're overlooking the entire lake.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so you get to make that 45 minutes whatever you want there, you know, the train guides or whoever's there's usually somebody there to talk to, that kind of thing, and then the museum itself is there, and then you get back on the train, and you know, it's another hour or so to Car Cross, and that's where you get fed lunch, and then you take a bus back from Car Cross.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the train's just one way.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: The train's one way and then bus the other, and they do it in reverse because it's so that they're busing people up and going, yeah, yeah.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a great experience, and yeah, White Pass was wonderful.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: I loved working for that company.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I did leave in 2018 uh when Carnival Corp came in and bought 45% of it, and the other um Bob Bertos entity bought the other 55%, and I was ready for change.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like that 10, 11 year mark for me had been like historically, that's how long I was at Chilcat Guides, I was at White Pass, and I was just ready.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: I like to be challenged and always kind of like I don't know, productive and not I don't like stagnation.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I it's not that I get bored, I just always want to be challenging myself and and learning more.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I don't really have a lot of set goals.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: I just like where's the path taking me, you know, and like choosing my own adventure kind of thing as it as doors do open because I think if you're open to them, there's a lot of opportunity.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so in 2018, um Skagway Brewing moved into their larger facility, and I don't remember if I quit first or if I was kind of I feel like I was wooed over.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: I remember having dinner with the owners and a big group of friends, and Mike Healy, the owner of Skagway Brewing, was like, oh yeah, and we're so excited.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: We're sitting in this the old Bruco, small one, and he's like, I want to hire this marketing director.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited about this new place, you know, blah, blah, blah.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, if anybody knows anybody, like, send them my way.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: You like raising your hand?
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, I haven't thought about it at the time, though.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went and talked to him after, and he's like, Reba, I was hoping you would come and see me.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was like, totally set me up for it.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: But he is brilliant that way, and I and I loved working for White Pass, but I loved working for Brucoe.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that family is amazing, and Mike is such a hard worker, and he does right by his employees.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_02: Being there through the pandemic, I mean, I remember him coming to us individually as managers and not to the whole staff, but his core group of managers that he relied on.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was a very, it's a very big undertaking to move from that small building to that big one.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_02: And he uh invested a lot, not only uh, you know, in the building and growing it, but like in his employees as well.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: And he during the pandemic, he took each of us into his office and is like, what what do you need to make it through this year?
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_02: What do you need every month to pay your bills?
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that stuck with me, you know.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: That was just it was incredible to have that kind of support through your a small business owner, you know.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_02: It was really sad for me to leave, but like I, you know, as a single mom, I wanted health care.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: There were a couple things that he couldn't offer that I know he wished he could, um, but but um I really enjoyed my time being the marketing director for Skagway Brewing.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like the freedom and the creativity and being able to take everything I learned in the industry and start a tour program with him, and then like you know, bringing the influencer in and that being a game changer for a small business and the amount of fish and chips they sell now is like I mean, Mike will tell you, it's just ridiculous.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Tell people that don't know, talk about the influencer you brought in there and how that if if you're comfortable with that.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure, sure.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: How that changed that.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh her name is Christine Kesselow, is her last name.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_02: She um has over a million followers now on Facebook.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_02: She also does Instagram, um, but Facebook's like her big her big following there.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I had met her in my white past days, and she like you get really close to the ships.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I have my ship friends, I call them my ship friends, but they're just as good.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: I just don't see them as often, but they are very it's a close-knit group because especially working with them for so many years upon years, and the managers don't change so much.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_02: So you always get to meet all these people from all over the world.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if I want to go to South Africa or Spain or you name it, I probably have a connection there.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so I've been able to meet all these different people, and like what I love about it is like my connections are genuine.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if I didn't connect with somebody, I didn't have to spend time with them.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: But if I did, like I was gonna spend time with them because it was just a way of life.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'd met Christine, she was dating one of my Shorex friends, and we just hit it right off, and then um yeah, she's just a very giving, genuine person.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Do you want to come into Bruco kind of thing, you know, and have lunch?
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um basically it's just a trade for food, and because she's very genuine, like what you see is what you get.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: She always has her phone on, but like that's it.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like and and she's the one that like if you're stopping in Scagway, if you want to know what the best things to do in Scagway are all the different ports, because she's kind of on a ship most of the year, right?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so her yeah, her little unique thing is that she has married an officer on board, and she used to work on ships, but now she just and she is an influencer.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: That is her job is social media, and she's got contracts with one of the jewelry companies.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so and what's really great about her too, or from a marketing standpoint, what's great about her is that her demographic are people who cruise.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: So you're you so you've got your target market down, right?
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_02: And they're listening to her and her advice about where to go and what to do in each port, where to eat, what excursions to take, whatever it is, you know, she'll go into a grocery store and be like, Oh, you know, the Skagway grocery store ones are funny.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you've got a lot of use, but they're very true.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like she tells it like it is, but in a very kind way, because that's just who she is.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_02: And she genuinely loves the Bruco products, you know, which is great.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_02: So the fish and chips there, which you know, the spiel was, they're caught over here from, you know, a local source locally from Haynes, you know, because that's very important to Mike and how he does business.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so it just translated to a really good working relationship as well.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so I've had her to Haynes um twice, I think, and I'd like to get her again, but like she's just so busy now, it's really hard to get time.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been so busy, but I definitely want to focus on that more, you know, whatever I can do to help Haynes, and she's all all about it too.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've watched the videos she's done of Haynes that you've forwarded to me in the past.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, you can see that she's got a gen.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just she's just filming it, you can tell she's enjoying what she's doing.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_01: It comes across really easily.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so when the the marketing job opened up over here, well, part more part of my job.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_02: So before we get to that though, why you're sure I have so much.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: We you got a lot in Skagway that we haven't covered here.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: You're also on the assembly in Skagway.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: What led you getting involved in politics in Skagway?
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it always kind of not always, like in my time in Skagway, I started paying attention more, right?
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and quite frankly, I was inspired by Bernie Sanders in 2016.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_02: He was running for president, and I became a delegate, delegate for the Skagway area and went up to Anchorage.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so, from that experience about finding somebody in politics that I admired and I believed and I heeded his word of like, you know, be the change, get involved on the local level.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, yes, sir, you know, that spoke to me.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I can't, I feel like I can't affect anything that's happening in Washington, D.C.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: and globally, but I can have an impact here, right?
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of how I lead my life.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like you affect those around you in a positive way.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: And in turn, hopefully everyone else will be able to do that to someone else in some way, right?
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_02: Spreading that kindness.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_02: So um that really made me pay attention more to things on a local level.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I had participated as you know, um uh a member of the public coming in and saying my piece about a few things when those topics would come up, so I wasn't unfamiliar with the process, and I'd listen to meetings here and there, but in once the pandemic hit, um, and I had more time on my hands.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: We are similar problem.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right, exactly.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I wasn't happy with how we were being represented.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_02: I felt there was and I know in small towns there are conflicts of interest.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: I get that wholeheartedly.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_02: But for me, there were some conflicts of interest that I thought were not okay, and so I decided to run against some pretty established.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: Members and I unseated them, so I was very happy about that.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there also wasn't a representative that from tourism on the Skagway City Council.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody was in tourism.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, everyone's impacted by it, you know.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_02: But there was never there wasn't anybody, and I know Andrew Kremada, God bless your heart.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: I love you, I know you're friends with him too.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: I works on the docks.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you don't, you know, he never worked on the docks.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_02: He worked outside the docks, and if a longshoreman, maybe so, but they didn't really understand tourism.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: They understand tying up a ship's and logistics, but like to have somebody had the full knowledge of the impact of tourism in the pandemic, I thought was vital.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so I ran and I got that seat.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_02: And boy, that was a lot.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: As you know, that was a lot to take on.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it was fall of 2020 is when you got elected to the Skagway Assembly.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was a lot.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even know.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was such a whirl when we started recovering from the pandemic and then the rock slide hit.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_02: And as someone who worked for White Pass and had that history, and I had since brought my niece up and worked the docks, you know, and having that rock slide happen.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I felt we were damned if we do and damned if we don't, you know.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_02: But like I remember being at the dais and having tears and asking my fellow assembly members to do something here because at that time White Pass had the knowledge that imminent danger was in the actual report, you know, catastrophic casualties was in that report.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: They had before the slide or after the slide?
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there had been little slides, right?
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: But like there'd been, yeah, af after the slide.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so there are so many slides.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of all running together now because basically we got it shut down.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that week that it sh could not shut down.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like I remember we had this long assembly meeting, and we got out of there super late.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was like 11 o'clock at night, just totally exhausted, exhausted, emotionally exhausted as well, because like I said, my niece was working on that dock, and coming out of the pandemic, it's everyone's livelihood is tied to those ships.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was a really, really hard decision to make.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: But the right thing to do, you have to do what's right, right?
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and like it was my niece down there, my sister's child, my mother's grandchild, my blood, my niece, my heart working those docks, and every single person crossing that path is somebody's daughter or son or father or mother or whatever it is.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the right thing to do was to close that dock down.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so I got up that next morning, like, okay, like let's work with White Pass.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went down there and like we were like, move the barricades here, this goes here.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do we still make it function by shutting it down, right?
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I was very much in it for everybody and for every reason in the economy, but like, man, I think it was that next week where they had the rock slide that happened when trains were loading unloading at the noon hour, and people were literally running, and there you can see the debris coming down.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that was just after we had closed it down.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like people would have died had we not make and taken that action.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_02: And um that was probably I don't know, not my calling, but definitely something I was meant to be there for, you know, to be on the assembly.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and there are other things, some great things, some not great things that happened being there.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_02: I do appreciate, I loved Andrew being a mayor.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_02: He ran a great meeting, he's very passionate, very smart.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um I felt we were pretty well balanced as an assembly.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_02: We worked well together.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_02: The the beauty of Skagway, and I definitely don't see this in Haynes, I'd like to see more of it in Haynes, and it happens occasionally.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: But something will get to the assembly, and it's been in committee before.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like it doesn't just get to the assembly table and get passed.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's very rare.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_02: It does happen on occasion, but I feel like things are vetted really well over there, and it gets to the assembly, it passes.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: And even the people that oppose it, there's just this natural acceptance of it.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like, all right, that's what our community has chosen, that's it, and you walk away.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you could still talk to somebody and you have those conversations afterwards.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's not ill will, there's no that there's none of this infighting, there's you know, there's not whistleblowers going on.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_02: There really is this, it's a different feel over there, and I think that has to do with the community.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_02: One, everything is tied to tourism, right?
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Everything is tied to tourism over there.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but also you're confined to this very small valley, so you are forced to see each other and work together.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like you go to the post office, you're gonna see way more.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, just numbers alone, like the grocery store.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's one grocery store.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_02: You don't get a choice over there.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_02: You're certainly not two and a half grocery stores, it's like one small store and one gym.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_02: And like you're you're just forced to work together more and to look each other in the eye more.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_02: And here, I never see my neighbors, like I just don't run into them anywhere unless you know I say, Hey, let's go for a beach walk.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And those are the people that live right next door to me.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_02: There are people that live here that I haven't seen since I moved back that I know that live here still, you know, like it's crazy.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's it, it's we were talking about this this morning that uh a lot of times at the store, people come in and I'm asking, I'm like, who is that?
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Who is that?
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, who is that?
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because I and it's it's a lot of it's my own fault because I I try and stay away from people as much as possible.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I'm not at work, I'm at my house.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and a lot of people do that here.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Try and just and and I I think part of that is just being doing as many public things as I have, and my dad was very public and very outspoken on a lot of things, and so I think I saw as a kid the blowback to a lot of that, yeah, and the the number of people that would hold things my dad said against my sister or I.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like that is crazy.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't say that, right?
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't me, but yeah, I'm I'm his son, and so I must have the exact same views, and uh yeah, so that gets it gets hard, and and it's especially you know, with you guys having the rock slider slide here.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's I don't know if I mentioned this on an earlier podcast, but there's a month or so after the slide that at the store I was hiding in the back room.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was sweeping the loading dock.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was doing everything I could just not to be around anybody.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_04: I bet.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Just didn't want to deal with it.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And some of that carries over now.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I do not enjoy being at the counter as much as I used to.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's days when it's it's fuels me, and there's other days when I'm at the end of the day, I'm just absolutely drained and have nothing else, no other energy.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_02: I get that, I get that.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it it depends, because yeah, I I need to for I I force myself now to do it more because there are those days that there are people in this community that absolutely just fuel me.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just when you see them and you're hearing what they're doing, just they're they're just a ball of energy, and it's just great to see them.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I I think learning more about those people and finding more of those instances um is better for all us.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of why I'm doing this, is just to connect with different people more than I have been.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, good for you.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is we all are, like you're saying, even though we're have a bigger footprint than Skagway, we're all connected.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, something uh Gershen and I talked about, it's like 85-95% of the stuff that we want is all the same.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's but it's how do you describe it and how do you get there?
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we differ on those.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's trying to come up with the means to to bridge that gap of how do we describe it and how do we get there.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think like with your situation coming up from the child development, everything, what you were talking about, it's the I think it's understanding other people's condition, yeah, under uh being supportive of them, helping them, raising that hand, treating people with kindness.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Goes a long way.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way you can get past that negativity is responding with kindness.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: But wears at you.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a toll when it's negative, negative, negative.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's really easy.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you, but it's really easy for me to slip into negative.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I can slip into negative really quickly.
• 1:15:48
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna demonstrate that, but I can I can slip just because when when when you have when a lot of the interactions that you see around, whether it's on TV, you know, statewide, fed, federal, whatever, the the interactions you see in different groups, is that is that that really negative, hostile?
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's really easy to learn that, right?
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we don't have a lot of people demonstrating a kinder way you used to decades ago, where you'd have leadership of whatever party just how can we work on it?
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're all one.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Let's how do we work on this together?
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: How do we work on this together?
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the people have found out that it's a lot easier to raise money based on fear rather than hope.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_02: I guess so.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_02: I choose not to live my life like that.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I mean, obviously, I get angry.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm only human.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_02: I make it a point to surround myself with good people and kind people.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, I think take that back to my relationship with my dad.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like after my parents' divorce and my dad said some really shitty things, I didn't want them in my life anymore.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I can make that choice, you know.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: I don't need that in my life.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it's really harsh words when you when you're talking about your own father, but you have to self-protect and you have to know what's right and what's wrong.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_02: And luckily, I could, you know, the things that he believed in, I found my own path.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I do that in a daily my daily life too, you know.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm not gonna take someone's bullshit.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like, okay, what's my path to problem solve this issue?
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have to take this from a community member about my job, you know, or an elected official when it has to do with my job.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_02: I could be what is my course of action to deal with this wrong, you know.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have to get mad, I don't have to be upset, I'm not gonna throw a fit, I don't have to undermine how do I problem solve my way out of it?
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_02: What are the next steps so they can be accountable for their actions without getting into too much detail?
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: But the nature of Haynes is different, and we can talk a good game, and you could have somebody in here completely thinks different than you, and you could talk all you want, but it's the actions that matter.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_02: The conversations don't matter, it's the actions.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I live my life like that, and I I hope we all can be better at that, helping each other.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_02: What action can you take to help somebody or to make our lives better as a whole?
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_02: We should be doing that.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_02: But Haynes is different because we are so segregated just physically.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_02: We're segregated.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_02: We can have politics talk all day, but we all have And and I think the other aspect of that is Skagway knows their economy's tourism.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Haynes, we have tourism, you have commercial fishing, you have small-scale logging, you have mineral development, you have the clinic.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: You have the clinic, you have artists.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've you you you've got a ton of different Which is which is great because way healthier.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's way healthier, it's more broad-based.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of people have their favorites, and that's going to be the salvation.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so instead of how do we feed all of these, it's we can only do this one, or we can only do this one, or if you it it's I I look at it that the pie isn't just one size, let's grow the pie.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Rather than keep it the same size and everybody has fights over the slice.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_03: I agree.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_01: How do we make these and and I think there are ways, and I I understand with fishing, there's a limited number of fish.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to clear cut our forest.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_01: We want to make sure our rivers stay pristine and clean.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's ways to do all of that and still have resource development.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_01: You look at what Harry did by putting in the cannery, reinvent reinvigorating the cannery when that was down at Excursion Inlet and processing.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems like every year he's trying something different out there to see what's what sticks.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: How can we make how can we make the product that we're catching, these fishermen are catching, he's buying, worth more?
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's great.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: You got people like uh Zen Bathworks that are started off in Bill Finlay's garage, and now they've selling stuff to seven continents.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: They're not using a lot of the wood that comes here, they're shipping it from other parts of the southeast.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_01: But how do we come up with another idea that's actually using timber and hanes to do something similar to that?
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that, I think there's it's just getting the how do we support the right people that got these ideas and how we can do that stuff.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know what the answers are, especially after going through this whole Letnikov thing and ACL, that was really disappointing, you know.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um there is an opportunity for two industries to work together, and really it wasn't a conversation about what can we do for this cruise line.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_02: It was always a conversation about how can we get this dock built for our residents, for our commercial fishermen, for our subsistence users, you know, because you know, being on the inside, knowing that it's gonna to find outside money is going to be very, very challenging.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_02: And a private entity seems like the way to go, but when you know, I don't know if it would ruin fishing.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it would.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think these ships are very small, and we could have had a pathway there where that could have benefited everybody in our community.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_02: But when you have one sector speaking out so loudly against it, you know, like so what what do you do?
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: So going down that road, one of the things that I was thinking about that is would would there been a way to set the days that those ships were over there?
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because usually your openings are usually Monday through Tuesday noon, sometimes till Wednesday noon.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you had the but majority of the dockings on Wednesday through Sunday noon or whatever, I don't know if that was something that had been explored.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many times a week they were planning.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't involved in any of those conversations, but that was something that was like, well, maybe we get most of the on the four days that they're not commercial fishing, but you have to work around the cruise ship schedule as well.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that ever got to that stage.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we had definitely had talks about how we could work together to make it work for everybody, and they were willing to do those kind of things.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I mean, they are they are a corporation, um, and they want to have five ships up here.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_02: So in the end, I think it might have not been the best thing for fishermen if we couldn't if they couldn't have the dockings they wanted, you know what I mean?
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_02: But again, it was only using a portion of the dock, and we had a long way to go to work out those details, but it was shut down by the community fairly early, I I think, you know, and I think it could have been handled differently by staff and and by our elected officials.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it didn't, so here we are.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_01: The scary thing for me on that project, six million dollars for a new trestle in the floating docks.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: That is I the more and more I see different things coming up, I'm like, how I I don't see how we can afford to to redo that at six million dollars.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: We can't the amount of the amount of use that that gets per year for six million dollars, that's a that's a huge outlay for that.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's extremely important to a lot of people, yeah.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: But trying to find six million dollars for that, and then you look at the other projects that are kind of tied into that, and it's over nine million dollars, yeah, and getting nine, it's like wow, that's a big ask.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's a really big ass, especially when we haven't used a very large grant already for another dock, you know.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like we don't have the best reputation.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a public safety building that's about ready to fall in upon it.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right, and those are those are priorities for the borough.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they absolutely are, you know, and this is not a priority, it was just a path forward that staff saw as a possibility, you know.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I don't know, I don't know, but where it takes us from here, we'll we'll see.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we got a h we gotta we got ahead of ourselves a little bit.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_01: You were in Skagway, you were on the assembly, yes, and in 23, spring of 23, there was a position for tourism director in Haynesborough.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_01: How did was that something as soon as you saw that out, you're like, I want to go back to Haynes?
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Had you been thinking about it before then, or what was your thought process on deciding to come back, or even do first of all to apply for the job?
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I never thought that I would come back to Haynes, but I also never let go of wanting to be here either, you know.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um again, just the door opening at the right time, and I'm going, like, I'm gonna go that way.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna see if that door completely opens for me, but I'm gonna try because I want that path.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but as soon as I saw the posting, I knew it was for me, and I and I was gonna go after it wholeheartedly, and I did.
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_02: I got my ducks in a row on my resume.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_02: The um I had two former tourism directors as my points of contact.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they knew I was more than capable of doing the job.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think uh a couple of local people wrote letters of recommendation for me.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um I just I did it right.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_02: I killed the interview.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I would I walked away from that interview going, there's no way they're not gonna hire me, you know, and I had no idea what I was up against.
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_02: It just that never came into my mind frame.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_02: I like I sent my intention like this is gonna happen.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I was ready to get out of Skagway.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_02: I loved the pandemic years and I love that community so much.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_02: I still miss the people.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_02: I don't miss the reliance on cruise ships, you know, which is a very real feeling in the pandemic.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_02: If it wasn't for Mike, I don't know where my income would have came from, you know, hadn't, you know, we had all the programs that we did as well.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it was a very eye-opening experience.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then the time away being on the assembly once work started up again was really like awe-consuming because you know, I I have a child and I wanted a better life for him.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, a better life meant more of this, more wilderness, more time with him in nature was my goal.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so that is really why I left Skagway.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I miss it.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_02: I do miss it over there, and I'm not saying I won't go back, I might go back one day.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_02: I could see myself running a small business over there.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I know right now this is my path and where it's where I'm meant to be.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, when I moved over here in 23, I was looking for a home to buy.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Just I didn't know, I didn't plan on taking this job.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't, you know, I just saw it and then I didn't think about the after effects and how things were gonna fall in place, right?
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty good about like, okay, let's just go for it.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing this is happening, how to, you know, work within that.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so I rented an apartment over here right away.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_02: I've God, I don't remember.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_02: I was in Hawaii when I applied for it because there was a big lull in time over here when Stephen the former tourism director left and the job got actually advertised.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I heard about him leaving.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I was watching, I was getting all I got everything all ready right.
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that happened when Emmett and I were in Hawaii on vacation.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_02: We are on a month long vacation in Hawaii.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was splurging.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think a part of me knew that some big change was coming.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably used to the wind hitting the building.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, this is.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can we're I can have a little Dorothy and Toto flying away in Kansas.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's also something I don't miss about Skagley.
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that over there for months on end, it feels like.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Are we doing on the sound?
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is it picking it up?
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're fine.
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so um where was I?
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Emma, and you guys are in Hawaii on a month-long vacation.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we are on a month-long vacation in Hawaii, Big Island.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Big Island.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've been to other islands, so the Big Island is mine.
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Every personality has a different island, and mine is definitely the Big Island.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh I'd like to, my my dream, not even my dream, one of my goals that I will accomplish one day.
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_02: And this is probably when I'll have a summer place in Skagway, like a job over there in a shop, but in the winter times I want to be in Hawaii with a food truck that I sell ceviche in avocado bowls.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_02: They've got those avocados that are like this.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_02: So like sell ceviche in that and do fresh juice, and only just do those fresh things and like know where you're gonna be, and I can market it no problem.
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and just you know, once your product sold out for the day, you're done, like sold out whether that be done at 10 a.m.
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_02: or 2 p.m.
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_02: and just kind of go with the flow and do that.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I would love to get back to that that lifestyle.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_02: But knowing that this job was open, I mean, I set my intentions, like I knew I knew I didn't think about the aftermath and how things were gonna work out and leaving Skagway and what that meant.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I knew this was my path, and so I applied for the job once it got was open, and that's when we were in Hawaii in December.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um I was back in Skagway when I interviewed for it, and I had planned to drive around.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_02: There weren't any ferries that coincided with it, or there was a ferry, but it got canceled.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we had we had what are the chances?
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so gosh, I don't remember when that was.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_02: I want to say it was February by the time we set the interview up for February.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_02: Planned it around the ferry schedule that got canceled, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna drive around.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Pass got close, can't drive around.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that time it was Annette Kreitzer, Alecka Fullerton, and Carol Ann Wooten were the hiring committee for me.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And um, they're like, no, we can just zoom.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's fine.
• 1:30:32
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna have a couple of these interviews.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_02: We've got two great candidates, you and someone else.
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's gonna be more than one interview, and I was like, okay, cool.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_02: Made me feel more relaxed, and maybe that was their intentions.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_02: But zoomed in on this interview, and my experience, I mean, I lived in Haynes before.
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_02: I knew what I was getting myself into, and there were some very real questions about that.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I answered them very genuinely and with the passion that I do have for Haynes and with the knowledge I do have of tourism and all of my experience, which I really felt led up to this job, because this job, this job is what you make of it.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_02: And there is marketing, there's cruise ship relations, there, there's just there's managing employees, there's contracts for buses, you know, it's very, very all-encompassing, but it's only what you make of it.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like when I got hired and I was in the position, I was like, okay, what's the job?
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, it'll come to you.
• 1:31:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I came to the job.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I told myself, I know what Haynes is like, I'm not gonna come in and make a lot of changes right away.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_02: We need to be very subtle.
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_02: I want to learn it first and go from there.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then it took me about a year to implement the passenger head tax.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it took me about a year to get the new sign on the dock.
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because before it was a beautiful driftwood sign.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_02: I always enjoyed it, right?
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_02: It says, Welcome to Han's and Shells.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_02: But when one lady, and I knew I needed to change it just because you couldn't see it very well, right?
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that's no fault to the artist.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's beautiful work.
• 1:32:11
  SPEAKER_02: I wish we could have put it somewhere else.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it I had someone email me from the public and she's like, Listen, I'm in marketing and you guys are missing so many opportunities here.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I took that into Annette's office and I was look at this picture and this email that this lady sent me.
• 1:32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Can we please get this change?
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_02: And she's like, Absolutely.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_02: So had the sign changed.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um and now there's a line of people that stand when they get off the cruise line.
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_02: A line of people waiting to take their photo by it instead of something they just pass by or might see or might not see.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I'm a go-getter.
• 1:32:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I see things that need to be done, and I'm going to slowly build.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a big picture thinker, also.
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, what are the steps to make Haynes successful?
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's not going to be overnight, right?
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel like I'm doing a darn good job.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and there's so much more to be done, you know.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you think your time as a assembly person in Skagway, now you're working for the you're working for the manager, but you're also answering to the assembly.
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that makes you better at this role?
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Does it kind of give you a different perspective than it might have otherwise?
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways it's similar because I mean um we bring things forward as staff members.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_02: You can bring things forward for the assembly to make the decision, but we can implement change.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that is huge for me, right?
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like to make this place better, to make tourism work better for the residents of the community is very, very important.
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think because I have that experience of being on the assembly in Skagway and knowing how the system works, um, it makes me a better tourism director.
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_02: I know the path, you know, you know, and of the connections I have made.
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like, it was so great to go to this CLIA event, and I know people from all the communities, you know, in the cruise ship industry, elected officials, like it's just absolutely amazing, and that is to the benefit of Haynes in this role.
• 1:34:27
  SPEAKER_01: How do you balance the because it is about in my view?
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Correct me if I'm wrong, it is a balancing act because, like, you're talking about with the dock, the Letnikov dock, it would have helped with the tourism, but commercial fishing, sport fishing, subsistence users were giving you a lot of pushback on it.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:34:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's Chilcoot, that's one of the main attractants going out for the bears, but there's a lot of people that have issues out of Chilcoot.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that has issues out of Chilcoot.
• 1:34:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think anybody in Haynes has issues out of Chilcoot.
• 1:34:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've got Helischiing, which is getting ready to start up.
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's some people that don't aren't really fond of Hellaskiing, or some of them don't want it at all.
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so to balance that, where you're trying to go out and market and get as many people to do these activities as possible, and yet there's a segment of the community that's pushing back on that on just about every every option that you're trying to advertise Hanes and promote Hanes, there's also a segment that's pushing back on that.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: How do you how do you balance that?
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_01: How's how does that work out in your mind as you're going forward?
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you try and develop a strategy on that?
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Are you reaching out and kind of take in your cues from what the assembly or what uh borough manager's telling you?
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_02: All of it, a lot of it's just self-directed, though.
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like I said, I knew what I was getting myself into, and tourism is just a part of our economy.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not just, I'm not here just to bring more tourism, I'm here to manage tourism, right?
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I want to do that in the sustainable way that works for the community.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but there are people that think your job is just to increase the number of tourists that are here.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they're wrong.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying I'm not gonna argue with that with you, but that is a lot of people, when I was mayor, you hear people is like, well, our tour number down tourism director must not be doing anything.
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that is something that that perception is something that you have to deal with.
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I agree with you that your role is to manage it and try and figure out how everything works.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_01: But especially when there's that sales tax, that's the one percent that goes to tourism and economic development, and then there's like they got this huge budget, how can we not have more people here?
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, hopefully I mean can relate that to like the numbers with the sales tax revenue that we collect as a whole.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because this year we're up, I think, about two percent overall.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and honestly, the fact that we weren't down is a win because oh, I thought this last year we would have been I thought this last year we would have been down on sales tax.
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, right?
• 1:37:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, because we were down 30,000 passengers on cruise ships.
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there were some really significant concerns.
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_01: And wasn't it down about 30,000 on border crossings as well?
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:37:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of the same, so definitely a decline.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Our our large events were down 20% in attendance.
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_02: So the fact that our sales tax was not decreased was a real, I think, I see that as a win.
• 1:37:34
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's not just us, obviously, it's not just tourism, but it's definitely a part of it, you know, a definitely a big part of it.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope to continue to grow that in a sustainable way that works for the community, you know, and a lot of that is road traffic, and a lot of that is building out our shoulder season.
• 1:37:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm really trying to focus on that, you know.
• 1:37:56
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've proven we can do at the Bald Eagle Festival.
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_02: The town, it wasn't sold out this year, we're down probably about 20%.
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the fact that we didn't let it go, and you know, we still have a bald eagle festival because I was willing to step up and take on that role with other people in the community's support and help, you know, from the Bald Eagle Foundation, the Chamber, like it's it's more of like we're an organization here that's really like leading us so we can all work together.
• 1:38:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just Kiara and I just doing the work, right?
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it takes the community for sure, but it also takes leaders in the community to make that happen.
• 1:38:38
  SPEAKER_02: And getting the cruise ship survey done was a big undertaking.
• 1:38:43
  SPEAKER_02: I recently was giving my year-end report and had mentioned that to the assembly.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason I did that is to get a consensus from the community about what we want for our tourism, right?
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_02: We all know we don't want to be Skagway.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_02: Those of us that really know understand that we'll never be Skagway unless we were to get a big tram or something here that has volume that the cruise ships could make money off of.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um but the dock, the dock needs a lot of work.
• 1:39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Our dock needs a lot of work.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_02: It we have trouble berthing, especially the mid-sized ship.
• 1:39:17
  SPEAKER_02: So getting that cruise ship survey really told me one thing that I already knew, but I had to have the data to back it up is that we do not want to have the 4,000 to 5,000 passenger ship here.
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_02: Haynes does not want that.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so great.
• 1:39:32
  SPEAKER_02: So we can take that and put that towards the dock, that we don't want to expand the dock.
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_02: So take that off of the picture of how do we mitigate these issues with our dock.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that was a big telling, and that is not us, the tourism department, saying we want all the ships, because if we wanted just more ships and more people in Haynes, that would be the easiest way is to expand that cruise ship dock and have a mega ship here.
• 1:39:58
  SPEAKER_02: There is a market for mega ships, they need more docks in Alaska.
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_02: Our community does not want that.
• 1:40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think we have the infrastructure to sustain one of those large ships either when they come here, just as far as things for 4,000 people to do.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and that's part of why we don't want it here, right?
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_02: It would overrun what we have.
• 1:40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 1:40:19
  SPEAKER_01: It would be a terrible experience for Haynes, it would be a terrible experience for the people getting off the cruise ship.
• 1:40:23
  SPEAKER_02: Which is the same things that's happening right now in Skagway.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's the same thing that's happening in Juneau and in Ketchikan.
• 1:40:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, maybe not Ketchikan, it's spread out, and they've got two very distinct areas now for cruise ship people.
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I I do not want our community to go through those growing pains.
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_02: There's no reason to when we can learn from the lessons of these other communities, right?
• 1:40:44
  SPEAKER_02: So managing our tourism in a way where we still absolutely need to grow it, but we don't want to be run over it is a very real part of, I feel like, my responsibility as a borough employee.
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be different if I worked for a private entity, right?
• 1:41:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'd be like more the better, right?
• 1:41:03
  SPEAKER_02: That kind of thing, but I don't.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_02: I worked for the people, and they made that very clear what they want in that document.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I am concentrating on good relationships with the cruise lines because we don't want to lose what we have and we want more opportunity for these smaller luxury lines.
• 1:41:19
  SPEAKER_02: We need more consistent berthing so our businesses can do better, and so our entrepreneurs can start businesses, right?
• 1:41:28
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to have my own tourism business here as well.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um but we also need to concentrate on the road traffic, which is just we should be so busy here because of that road.
• 1:41:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's so much opportunity there.
• 1:41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we'll we'll get there.
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get there.
• 1:41:47
  SPEAKER_02: This whole Canada, there's some big issues going on with our neighbors right now, and a lot of people are not frequenting us, I think, um, intentionally.
• 1:41:59
  SPEAKER_02: Which I mean, hopefully we we work every day to to keep those relationships strong and to advertise so we don't lose any more of that.
• 1:42:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then um as speaking of Canada, that was interesting last year that there was there's a number of uh Canadians that came down and you know we're our business has been built on Canadian traffic and we always like to see them.
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the number of them that said that, yeah, we're not we're boycotting the United States, but Haynes and Skagway are neighbors.
• 1:42:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're that's that we don't consider that the same.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that there were still some that I didn't that normally come down that I didn't see all last year, but there was a lot of them that came down that it's like, yeah, no, you guys are neighbors, we're still gonna come visit you.
• 1:42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Which is great, which has to do, I think the mayor and the current sitting assembly because they put the olive branch out, and that's what we have to do, you know?
• 1:42:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because we are just neighbors and borders are ridiculous.
• 1:42:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean yeah, it's a big job, but I'm here for it, that's for sure.
• 1:42:58
  SPEAKER_01: So what are the what's the prognosis for this year?
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start out right now.
• 1:43:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're filming this.
• 1:43:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're this was gonna go live on the 19th of February.
• 1:43:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we're there's some people here helliskiing already.
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_01: We've got free ride coming up next month.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we've been so busy with that.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, it'll I think we'll see an increase in sales tax because of the assembly adopting the increase, the seasonal increase, so that will be good.
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um numbers are predictably the same as last year.
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um cruise ship traffic, we might get extra boats should have something happen in Skagway.
• 1:43:39
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't really have that this year, except for that one call of the New Amsterdam late in the season.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and typically we get more than one, so um, we'll see what happens there.
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um we are getting for when it comes to cruise ship traffic, we are getting more cruise ships, but we're getting less visitors.
• 1:43:59
  SPEAKER_02: So the number of visitors has changed, so we're getting less visitors.
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_01: So is that due to smaller ships?
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:44:07
  SPEAKER_02: But the we're getting more quality, we're getting quality over quantity, and so I think that'll be reflected in our sales tax dollars.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Bigger purchases, more buying power, that kind of thing.
• 1:44:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um including tours.
• 1:44:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's good.
• 1:44:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then yeah, we'll know, we'll have a better idea.
• 1:44:26
  SPEAKER_02: Beerfest tickets go on sale March 1st, and we've already got some Beer Fest is Memorial Day weekend, right?
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it the weekend before Memorial Day?
• 1:44:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's I don't know.
• 1:44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Third weekend of May is.
• 1:44:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't drink beer, so I don't go to Beer Fest.
• 1:44:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I've been like, whatever people show up in town, I go to the store and stand behind the counter.
• 1:44:56
  SPEAKER_02: And my head's already in 2027, so a part of me this season's already happened.
• 1:45:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just like, you know, as we wrapped up the 2025 season.
• 1:45:05
  SPEAKER_02: But um on paper, it's supposed to stay stay the same.
• 1:45:09
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll see.
• 1:45:10
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see.
• 1:45:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:45:12
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that has been kind of bantied about is the boroughs put in$100,000, or is it$75,000?
• 1:45:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's been I've heard both numbers.
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_01: What was the official put-in of the borough for free ride coming here?
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_02: It ended up being$75,000 because I was able to get$30,000 in donations.
• 1:45:33
  SPEAKER_02: Nice.
• 1:45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Good job.
• 1:45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:45:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um Vistla Corporation gave us$25,000.
• 1:45:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:45:40
  SPEAKER_02: A little controversial, but I my my goal was to hit up our businesses in town that do business in town that have a business license in Haynes that were not our mom and pop shops.
• 1:45:56
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted, and I think this was the goal of the assembly too, is to support our small business members and not go to them and ask for discounts.
• 1:46:06
  SPEAKER_02: So you do that by hitting up the corporations.
• 1:46:09
  SPEAKER_02: BISLA obviously is a large mining corporation that needs they have a very large, they have a$600,000 marketing budget.
• 1:46:19
  SPEAKER_02: I asked all entities, the larger corporations, from five to twenty-five thousand dollars.
• 1:46:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so they came in with a twenty-five thousand dollar donation.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_02: First National Bank also came in with five thousand dollars, which is great.
• 1:46:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that was very, very helpful.
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then so we'll see what happens next year, but we only have a one-year contract, and so the borough did pay$75,000 to free ride for them to come.
• 1:46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one of the newspaper articles, and I think on the radio station, they're talking about the amount of sales tax generated is not gonna equal$75,000.
• 1:46:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think I would hope people wouldn't think that the only benefit we're getting from free ride is from uh sales tax dollars.
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing from the tourism perspective, you're hoping that in future years this is gonna be used as something that's gonna be bringing people in.
• 1:47:09
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of a time frame do you think that we're gonna be, as we were talking about earlier, if somebody sees an ad now, they're not probably not gonna come to Haynes this summer, but he'll be 27, 28.
• 1:47:20
  SPEAKER_01: How long do you think we'll reap the benefits of this free ride as far as people that are watching that into that activity are gonna use that as motivation coming to Haynes?
• 1:47:30
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa, that's a good question.
• 1:47:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's when you don't really have without doing a detailed of everybody coming in, it's hard to hard to measure that.
• 1:47:39
  SPEAKER_02: It is, and that's marketing in general is really hard to tough to find out.
• 1:47:44
  SPEAKER_02: It is tough.
• 1:47:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you do magazine, you do TV, and you can't, you know, get your return on investment.
• 1:47:49
  SPEAKER_02: You don't know what that is.
• 1:47:51
  SPEAKER_02: There aren't stats for it.
• 1:47:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's why I like social media so much, because there are analytics that come along with that, so you know exactly how well you're doing or not doing.
• 1:48:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um so for free ride, I don't know, but I can tell you, as a big picture thinker, that we're trying to showcase not just teleskiing, that's on its own, right?
• 1:48:14
  SPEAKER_02: And quite frankly, it's why I originally spoke out about not supporting.
• 1:48:22
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like they should be paying us to be here, that we shouldn't have to pay them to come to our destination because we are that special.
• 1:48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Regardless of that feeling, we'll have that conversation when they're here.
• 1:48:32
  SPEAKER_01: We'll press upon them a little bit more.
• 1:48:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so whatever.
• 1:48:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's happening.
• 1:48:37
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with you.
• 1:48:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's my job.
• 1:48:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, this is what the assembly wanted, so that's my job to take it from here.
• 1:48:42
  SPEAKER_02: Great, okay, so I'm gonna work and do my best while this entity is here.
• 1:48:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so, really, the goal is to showcase the best of Hanes besides heli skiing, because heli skiing's maxed out.
• 1:48:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like we're for five years, permits are issued, there are gonna be no more operators unless there's some big change, which I don't see happening, and they're pretty much at capacity, like you don't have to do any marketing for heli skiing, not very much, anyways.
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I could do it all on social media, and you know, that be enough.
• 1:49:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't put our marketing dollars into heli skiing, it's it's at capacity.
• 1:49:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, showcasing the best of Hanes is the goal.
• 1:49:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, we have some excursions from hiking and rafting and other things going on in town.
• 1:49:27
  SPEAKER_02: CIA is gonna do some totem carving, they're gonna showcase that.
• 1:49:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's kind of the goal, and so I think those marketing, it's a great marketing opportunity, and you can't really know what your return on investment is going to be.
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_01: But it's hard to measure.
• 1:49:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're looking at this as more of a whole, a more holistic opportunity to show more of Haynes rather than just the hell scheme.
• 1:49:52
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, absolutely, yep, for sure.
• 1:49:56
  SPEAKER_02: We need that.
• 1:49:56
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, there'll be some fishing um.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_02: Taking folks out on a boat, you know, let him drop a crab pot.
• 1:50:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um just showcasing the best of Haynes and what we have to offer is the goal.
• 1:50:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're gonna be bringing the film crew and everything to do those kind of things, and hopefully it gets in part of the broadcast.
• 1:50:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're uh the aspect of that, or uh we're offering these things up, and I get to make the suggestions, and then the film crew on their down days gets to go and see which ones they want to do.
• 1:50:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and what they showcase.
• 1:50:29
  SPEAKER_02: But because we do have this opportunity, um, I'm bringing on an extra staff member, Amanda Painter, who is, you know, her job is to go on these excursions with them.
• 1:50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um and she's just a wonderful, joyous, adventurous younger person who um loves social media as well.
• 1:50:51
  SPEAKER_02: So to capitalize on that and look for opportunities, whether that's befriending someone she's connecting with who already happens to have a hundred or two hundred thousand followers on their social media and getting them to tag us in that.
• 1:51:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's all about connection and using those opportunities.
• 1:51:08
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes you don't know what those opportunities are until you put yourself out there, you know.
• 1:51:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm doing that.
• 1:51:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also bringing Danny and her boyfriend Jake, the influencer from the Yukon, who has gosh, I think she's over 200,000 followers now, um, maybe more, um, to be a part of it as well.
• 1:51:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because she just she's young and athletic and wants to be around these writers.
• 1:51:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know, I know that will definitely benefit Haynes in some way.
• 1:51:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and just capitalizing on free ride as much as possible for the good of the community, you know.
• 1:51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that leads me to you in Haynes.
• 1:51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pick three seasons spring, summer, fall, in the spring.
• 1:52:01
  SPEAKER_01: What if you have friends or family for the first time in Haynes in March?
• 1:52:07
  SPEAKER_01: What's Reba taking them to do?
• 1:52:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and March?
• 1:52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Can we go do April?
• 1:52:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can do April.
• 1:52:13
  SPEAKER_01: We can we can move ahead to April, yes.
• 1:52:15
  SPEAKER_02: We move ahead to April, and it would be um the Hooligan run, everything centered around the hooligan run.
• 1:52:24
  SPEAKER_02: By then you can hike on down to Chilcat State Park and get out to Moose Meadows, that kind of thing.
• 1:52:29
  SPEAKER_02: I love doing the little round trip out there.
• 1:52:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of my favorite things to do.
• 1:52:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but like everything related to wildlife and the hooligan run, the birds coming up the Chilkat, and man, that's just the best time.
• 1:52:43
  SPEAKER_02: Everything.
• 1:52:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we're starting a new migration celebration this year to kind of like build out the season.
• 1:52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, when's that gonna be?
• 1:52:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be centered around the hooligan run.
• 1:52:53
  SPEAKER_02: So this year it's gonna be May 1st through 3rd, because I wanted to do the last week of April.
• 1:52:57
  SPEAKER_02: I just took the hooligans runs for the last two years and just like hopefully they'll they'll be here during that.
• 1:53:02
  SPEAKER_02: But at that time, that time is done enough.
• 1:53:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:53:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that for spring, that's where I would take my finger.
• 1:53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so spring you're hiking on the lower level trails, you're going trying to plant it around the hooligan and all the wildlife that's happening.
• 1:53:17
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 1:53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Middle of July, between 4th of July and the fair.
• 1:53:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you can't you can't use those because those are always fun times in Haynes.
• 1:53:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh taking uh paddle paddle boarding out Chilcoot Lake, going over to the Sockeye spawning area there on the left-hand side.
• 1:53:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's no prettier place or magical place that can touch that area.
• 1:53:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 1:53:40
  SPEAKER_02: I could spend all day out there just looking at fish and photographing fish and watching the birds fly in and out, getting scared about the bears that are gonna come down eventually to the water.
• 1:53:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's for real.
• 1:53:51
  SPEAKER_02: I got startled by a mama and two cubs.
• 1:53:53
  SPEAKER_00: While you're on the paddle board.
• 1:53:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 1:53:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:53:56
  SPEAKER_00: That had to feel safe.
• 1:53:58
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to go with somebody with a gun to the glory hole and get back in there, but I'm not going to go without somebody with a gun.
• 1:54:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because I used to be dumb and mountain bike back there.
• 1:54:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was so But I've heard there's not many fish in the glory hole anymore.
• 1:54:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we saw photos from this year, and there were some.
• 1:54:11
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, there's a lot of things.
• 1:54:11
  SPEAKER_01: There were some, but the numbers weren't nearly as much as they used to be.
• 1:54:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's like log jams and some silt buildups.
• 1:54:17
  SPEAKER_02: They're talking about maybe digging that out a little.
• 1:54:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:54:20
  SPEAKER_01: I've been I've been trying to get them to dig that out for 20-some years.
• 1:54:23
  SPEAKER_01: It would be great.
• 1:54:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's gonna happen.
• 1:54:25
  SPEAKER_01: We can keep our fingers.
• 1:54:27
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go up with some shovels.
• 1:54:28
  SPEAKER_00: We might have to do some shovels and some dynamite.
• 1:54:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but being out there for that is just magical.
• 1:54:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's my favorite place to go in the summertime.
• 1:54:36
  SPEAKER_02: Or Pyramid Island.
• 1:54:37
  SPEAKER_02: I love hiking around Pyramid Island.
• 1:54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love spending time.
• 1:54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, be careful.
• 1:54:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's definitely a bear that's holed up underneath the tree with the eagle's nest.
• 1:54:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's magic out there.
• 1:54:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:54:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's so cool.
• 1:54:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's so beautiful.
• 1:54:53
  SPEAKER_01: It looks cool and everything.
• 1:54:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just never felt the need to paddle out there.
• 1:54:57
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 1:54:58
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh.
• 1:54:58
  SPEAKER_04: It's amazing.
• 1:54:59
  SPEAKER_01: I look at it from Riley all the time every time I go to the top of Riley.
• 1:55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Riley's Riley and going all the way to the end of Battery Point for the long trail there.
• 1:55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Those are kind of two of my favorites.
• 1:55:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:55:09
  SPEAKER_01: I like Rapinski too, but just Riley.
• 1:55:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're up and back in a little over two hours, and it's just a really quick hike.
• 1:55:15
  SPEAKER_01: And same thing for Battery Point.
• 1:55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Those are just you don't need a boat, you don't need a kayak, you don't need anything like that, just your two feet and away you go.
• 1:55:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:55:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now we're into fall.
• 1:55:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's end of October.
• 1:55:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Eagles aren't here.
• 1:55:29
  SPEAKER_01: Cohos are kind of dying off.
• 1:55:32
  SPEAKER_01: Picking a tough one for you.
• 1:55:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, October's beautiful because, well, when you get clear skies, it's the my favorite time to watch the northern lights because it's not freaking cold yet, but it's super dark.
• 1:55:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I would try and plan that around northern lights, you know.
• 1:55:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um but boy, that that's a hard one.
• 1:55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um October's a challenge.
• 1:55:55
  SPEAKER_01: The weather's not usually the best.
• 1:55:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not as fun to be outside.
• 1:55:59
  SPEAKER_01: You got usually have a lot of rain.
• 1:56:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:56:01
  SPEAKER_01: Most people are here for coho fishing, um, a little bit of hiking.
• 1:56:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Usually a few eagles showing up, but not as much as in November.
• 1:56:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know that was gonna be my fall, was definitely the eagle preserve and those birds.
• 1:56:15
  SPEAKER_02: Chilcoot can still be pretty good for birds and wildlife in October.
• 1:56:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:56:21
  SPEAKER_02: Going out there, bear watching.
• 1:56:23
  SPEAKER_02: I just ran into some Skagway friends that were here this summer, and they were like, we just had to tell you, our kids still talk about watching those bears.
• 1:56:29
  SPEAKER_02: I took them out there.
• 1:56:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, it was the mom and four cubs, and we were on the bridge, and they were under.
• 1:56:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was just like a memory these kids are gonna have the rest of their lives, you know.
• 1:56:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty cool.
• 1:56:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hoping we can figure out a solution out there where we can keep that magic and also not have anything bad happen.
• 1:56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're on the verge of it, seems like each summer you're just crossing your fingers and hoping somebody doesn't do something stupid out there.
• 1:56:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I got a couple ideas, so we'll see where we go from here.
• 1:57:02
  SPEAKER_02: But that's in the infancy stages, and I don't want to talk about it, but I'm only one person, and it's gonna take like we have this Chilku corridor working group right now, which is awesome, right?
• 1:57:10
  SPEAKER_02: But like other groups should be working on it.
• 1:57:13
  SPEAKER_02: We shouldn't be just upon us right now.
• 1:57:16
  SPEAKER_01: The state needs to be more involved with that.
• 1:57:18
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:57:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we'll see, we'll see.
• 1:57:24
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see.
• 1:57:24
  SPEAKER_02: My we did our last meeting.
• 1:57:26
  SPEAKER_02: I had a little epiphany during the meeting, and it seemed to go over well.
• 1:57:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know why someone hasn't thought of it before, but it sounds like they haven't.
• 1:57:34
  SPEAKER_02: But the weir's not going anywhere, right?
• 1:57:37
  SPEAKER_02: And people want it, people don't want it.
• 1:57:40
  SPEAKER_02: The fact is, it's not going anywhere.
• 1:57:41
  SPEAKER_02: The weir's going to stay there.
• 1:57:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, with that in mind, how do you problem solve that issue?
• 1:57:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you problem solve that issue when the state is at capacity with what they can provide for park rangers, right?
• 1:57:57
  SPEAKER_02: But if the weir is going to be out there, the weir people need to manage the human people and the bears around that.
• 1:58:04
  SPEAKER_02: So if they can contribute to that, you know, and it's not just fish management that they're doing, that they're also having to provide safety for the people that are out there.
• 1:58:14
  SPEAKER_02: And they seemed really open to that idea with working with state parks and what would that look like.
• 1:58:20
  SPEAKER_02: But so they, you know, even if their schedules are overlapping, whatever it is, it's for them to work out the details.
• 1:58:25
  SPEAKER_02: But they seemed like, yeah, we absolutely are interested in doing that.
• 1:58:28
  SPEAKER_02: How can we help?
• 1:58:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great response, right?
• 1:58:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was a wonderful response.
• 1:58:33
  SPEAKER_01: You usually don't get that response from people.
• 1:58:35
  SPEAKER_02: No, but that was from Fish and Game themselves, so we'll see where we go from here.
• 1:58:41
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, one one little thing, you know.
• 1:58:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:58:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was the one who got the signs put up on the borough property off limits because I was out there it's several times, but this one instance, it was a beautiful day, and we were seeing bears out there regularly.
• 1:58:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, that little white beach you see on the other side.
• 1:58:59
  SPEAKER_02: There is a freaking family out there fishing, guys out there fishing, mom sitting on a blanket, and they got kids over on the far end playing by themselves.
• 1:59:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, someone is gonna get killed.
• 1:59:12
  SPEAKER_02: This is not okay.
• 1:59:14
  SPEAKER_02: Can we please just make this off limits for the time that the bears are there, not have not wanting to interrupt the hooligan run and any kind of subsistence that's happening out there, but that needed to be closed down immediately.
• 1:59:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I was really happy to get that part of it done.
• 1:59:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I would like to take it further and maybe get a boardwalk over there, a raised boardwalk in that borough-owned land where we can have better management of bear viewing, you know.
• 1:59:43
  SPEAKER_02: I do have concerns about the bear habitat and wanting them to have a place for themselves.
• 1:59:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think that they'll could get habituated to that and know that that's their safe spot.
• 1:59:53
  SPEAKER_01: But my job is tourism.
• 1:59:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I go back to the glory hole.
• 1:59:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 2:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because in the 80s and early up until the early mid-90s, there weren't that many bears down on the river.
• 2:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because they were, I think they're mostly fishing up in the glory hole.
• 2:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: And as you got less fish up in the glory hole, they were looking for the easiest fish, and it was down on the weir.
• 2:00:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's their animals are gonna, even humans, so we go where the food's easiest.
• 2:00:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 2:00:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's where they're gonna go.
• 2:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna go find, and so I I think that weir is, and that's why the weir is gonna stay there, is for fisheries management, but also the tourists that go out there on tours, they're paying a head tax to state parks.
• 2:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't have the bears down at the weir, if they're eating fish somewhere else, they're not there, they don't have as many people going on a tour out there, so it's in the state's best interest to have all these people on a tour going out there.
• 2:00:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it's only five dollars per head.
• 2:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think it needs to be managed differently.
• 2:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it is only five dollars a head, but everybody that's on a tour bus is paying five dollars more than the people that are just driving in there in their own vehicle.
• 2:01:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, but there's no other place that you can go and just drive in and go see bears.
• 2:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: You're paying thousands of dollars if you can get into the lottery for the reservation at the lodge.
• 2:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I agree.
• 2:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: Thousands of dollars, you know.
• 2:01:18
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, there's so much we could do there, but one step at a time, and we need to figure out what the state's going to do this year.
• 2:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: I just got word that they are going to require just the little buses.
• 2:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing more than 15 passengers can go in this year.
• 2:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 2:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it'll be interested to see the fallout from that.
• 2:01:41
  SPEAKER_02: I um I feel for our tour providers that have invested in large buses.
• 2:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Large buses, yeah.
• 2:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: But I've also been out there and I've seen large buses um stop and idle, you know, in areas they shouldn't be, and that definitely affects the bears and their habits.
• 2:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I I don't know what the right answer is, but um we need to we need to work on those, and and I am working on them as much as I can.
• 2:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: Free ride and marketing and going to cruise ship conferences.
• 2:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: And last September I had some friends in town, and they we went out there to look at the bears, and we'd just gotten in.
• 2:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can tell there's a bear on the beach that you were talking about.
• 2:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple bears over there.
• 2:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's cars stopped in front of us, so we're looking, and we've been watching for a little bit, and and I was like, okay, there's a whole ton of people here.
• 2:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just drive up and see if there's something else, because my friends were from Alaska, they've seen bears, we didn't need to sit there for a long period of time.
• 2:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm trying to get around this car, and as we're as finally as we were able to pull around it, they'd parked right in the center of the road.
• 2:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's nobody in the car.
• 2:02:51
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 2:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't even pull over to the side one way or another.
• 2:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: They just gob out.
• 2:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I was looking, I was like, Where where are the people for this car?
• 2:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, they just left it running in the middle of the road.
• 2:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, how yeah, how is that a good idea in any shape or form?
• 2:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's where where do you go and just leave your car in the middle of the road and think that's okay?
• 2:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a crazy thing.
• 2:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: That it just shows it's just a small example of when people see wildlife that they don't see that close anywhere else.
• 2:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that the excitement, it kind of just overrides any kind of rational thinking.
• 2:03:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they're just doing things that, and anybody that's out at Chilcoot has seen people do, you're just like, what is that person thinking?
• 2:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're not, because they've never been in this situation.
• 2:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: There, it's probably the only time they're gonna see a bear that close in their life, and they want to get the perfect picture to explain it to everybody back home, and they're looking at it, and it's like, wow, it looks really close.
• 2:03:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then they look through their phone or their camera, and they're like, wow, that looks a lot further away.
• 2:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: I should get closer.
• 2:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, you shouldn't.
• 2:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's still really close.
• 2:04:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know what the answer is.
• 2:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: We'll give you another big problem in tourism and hands for sure.
• 2:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: We'll come back and ask in in two days and see now.
• 2:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: Ten years.
• 2:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, you've got a lot going on.
• 2:04:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what yeah, so long term, because I you said you're about ten years that you stay in places.
• 2:04:20
  SPEAKER_02: It seems to be about ten to eleven years.
• 2:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you got seven years left?
• 2:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what is that what you're saying?
• 2:04:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm hoping seven years long.
• 2:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: Seven years left if if if all goes well?
• 2:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 2:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: Where all goes well.
• 2:04:31
  SPEAKER_01: If all goes well in seven years, and you're looking back on your ten years uh in this job, for you to go, man, crushed it.
• 2:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: What does what does it look like?
• 2:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it looks like new businesses in town.
• 2:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: It looks like restaurants that are open, you know, throughout the season, and a few open during the winter with regular hours that are successful.
• 2:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's what it looks like to me, a thriving community.
• 2:05:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and more people staying here year-round as well, and younger families here year-round because I mean it impacted my life being a guide because I did come during the heyday of tourism, and I think of all of my friends that were guides at that time or somehow were connected with tourism and how we all made our lives here and we raised our children here, or came back.
• 2:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: I come came back to raise my child here.
• 2:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's what is successful.
• 2:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm successful at my job, I hope that I can could contribute to that.
• 2:05:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I can, or I wouldn't be here.
• 2:05:47
  SPEAKER_02: I do, I really do.
• 2:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a great goal.
• 2:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would be very successful.
• 2:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a pretty big ask with only seven years left, though.
• 2:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yes.
• 2:06:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, big picture.
• 2:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: Can I add something into that?
• 2:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 2:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: That I think will help, but it's also gonna be the biggest task that the the hardest part that you're gonna have to solve in order to get that.
• 2:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Increase year-round access.
• 2:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 2:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things that holds us back from doing a lot of the things that we want to do is the lack of ferries on irregular schedule of ferries, weather conditions, just access in and out of here for six months out of the years.
• 2:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: What challenge?
• 2:06:39
  SPEAKER_02: I feel good advertising up until about December, mid-December, because the Eagles are here that long.
• 2:06:45
  SPEAKER_02: I do not feel good about advertising anything in January, and I hesitate about February just because of the cancellations of the ferries and because of the road closures.
• 2:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: And as someone who gets stuck in Juneau occasionally, like the out-of-pocket expense is sometimes unbearable.
• 2:07:03
  unknown: Yep.
• 2:07:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I can't, you don't want to leave someone like, oh God, I can't go back to Hanes again because I got stuck there for four days and I spent a thousand dollars, you know, at a hotel.
• 2:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like it that just can't be.
• 2:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: As long as we get them stuck in Haynes and not in June, Reba, you're doing your job.
• 2:07:19
  unknown: No.
• 2:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just joking.
• 2:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: Just joking.
• 2:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 2:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, that isn't that is a big part of that.
• 2:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: That when people look at traveling here in those months, when I've had friends, whatever, come in in those months, like this is where you're like, Well, I want to come this day.
• 2:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, no, don't plan that because there's not a ferry backup.
• 2:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: The ferry might not make it, but you need to plan on that ferry.
• 2:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you plan it around, and that's gonna give you your best chance of, yeah, you're gonna have to spend an extra night in Juneau because when the ferry leaves and and the to get here or going back there, you know, there's not a jet.
• 2:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's educating people on the best way to get in and out of here on those months uh as part of the plan.
• 2:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it absolutely is.
• 2:07:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we are very fortunate that we are connected to the road system and the ferry system, and that compared to other communities, we do get a lot of ferry traffic here.
• 2:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that is really good.
• 2:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: But that that needs to change um the federal funding, the support for that, um, and the state funding needs to be better taken care of, our marine highway system.
• 2:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: Our road's good, our road is really good.
• 2:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: We've got great border hours, you know.
• 2:08:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's only so much we could do, but our ferries could be better for sure.
• 2:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'll let you get to work on that.
• 2:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I yeah.
• 2:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: I met with Prince Rupert this week, so that was very productive, or two weeks ago when I was in Anchorage.
• 2:08:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: Are they our ferries going to be docking there this summer?
• 2:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or is that still on hold?
• 2:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's still on hold.
• 2:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's still on hold.
• 2:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful drive.
• 2:08:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:08:55
  SPEAKER_01: From anywhere that is they're on road access to drive to Alaska and come down to Haynes.
• 2:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful drive.
• 2:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, it sure is.
• 2:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: So Okay.
• 2:09:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's good.
• 2:09:08
  SPEAKER_02: I got a sick kid at home I want to get to.
• 2:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 2:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, before I let you go, I want to thank you for first of all uh talking to us, telling us all about this and sharing your spot so everybody can see the Google Earth image of the Chilcat Valley here and having that here.
• 2:09:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, no.
• 2:09:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Reba.
• 2:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're welcome.
• 2:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate the job you're doing as our tourism director.
• 2:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 2:09:28
  SPEAKER_01: Keep up the good work.
• 2:09:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 2:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for watching this episode of Doug Cat's Questions.
• 2:09:34
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• 2:09:39
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• 2:09:43
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• 2:09:52
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• 2:09:56
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