Into Alaska - Alaska and Points North: Tips and Tales from the Road - page 85

Haines Junction
Haines Junction is a funky little place that epitomizes the can-do spirit of the north. There
is no Home Depot five minutes down the road so people learn how to improvise and use
what they have. Secondary use of everything was a way of life up here long before “ reduce,
reuse, recycle” became the trendy mantra of the south.
Nothing demonstrates that better than the brochure distributed at the Haines Junction Visitor
Center. The brochure outlines a walking tour of the town's historic areas and details the his-
tory of the actual buildings in terms of “the beams for this church came from that bridge”
and “the rooms in this motel are constructed of orange crates from the Public Works main-
tenance camp” and so on.
ContinuingnorthfromHainesJunction,theroadparallelsKluaneNationalPark.TheKluane
is home to the St Elias Mountains - Canada's highest range and the largest non-polar ice
field intheworld.Kluane National Park,Wrangell-St Elias National ParkandPreserve, Gla-
cier Bay National Park and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park - comprise the largest contiguous park
area in the world, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Being marked as a UNESCO World Heritage Site is a big deal - there are less than 200 “nat-
ural” sites so designated in the world, chosen for special protection by criteria that speak the
language of superlatives. These natural wonders plus 725 sites chosen for their cultural and
creative genius comprise my personal lifetime bucket list!
They are all photographed, detailed and mapped in a publication called World Heritage
Sites , published by UNESCO. Unlike the sites hyped by tourism propaganda, I've never
been disappointed by a UNESCO World Heritage site.
If you'd like to see the full list of sites by country go to the UNESCO site:
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list orfindthe bookpublished byUNESCO - World Heritage Sites
(ISBN 13: 978-1-55407-463-1 / ISBN 10: 1-55407-463-0). The topic features one site per
page with great photos, details about why a site is special and its location on the world map.