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Bill Hughes, owner of Sitka’s Yellow Jersey Cycle Shop, riding on the Cross Trail in June 2024. (KCAW/Jeb Sharp)

E-bikes are ubiquitous in Sitka. Tourists rent them, commuters ride them, officials field complaints about them. But one aspect of e-bikes that is perhaps overlooked, is how they keep cyclists in the game as they age. 83-year-old Bill Hughes, the owner of the Yellow Jersey Cycle Shop, is a striking example. 

Hughes started cycling decades ago when he was competing in triathlons. He was good at it. Eventually he fell in love with mountain biking. But inevitably age caught up with him. By the time he was in his late 70s he was having trouble keeping up with his friends.

“I used to be sort of in the front of the group I rode with and all of a sudden I wasn’t able to keep up with the people I used to ride with,” Hughes said. “So I knew I had to switch over.  It feels like a regular bike, only you’re 20 years younger. I wouldn’t be riding if I didn’t have the e-bike.”

His favorite place to ride is the Cross Trail.

“I don’t ride on the road,” Hughes said. “I think it’s too dangerous. That’s why I ride on the trails. If I want to go to Starrigavan or something like that, it’s the Cross Trail the whole way. Coming back it’s the Cross Trail the whole way.”

Hughes invited me out for a ride to try out one of his electric mountain bikes. We left his bike shop on Harbor Drive and headed to the entrance to the Cross Trail near Indian River, making a stop at the old dam on the way. 

“I used to be a fisheries biologist so I always come out on my ride and check whether the fish are in the stream or not,” Hughes said. 

And then we were off. 

“We’ll hit our first little hill and when you hit that you get a chance to put it into turbo mode and it’ll walk you up the hill,” Hughes said. “If you see a walker or hiker you can use your little bell.” 

Hughes was right about the electric mountain bike feeling like a regular bike, albeit a fancy one since he had me on a high-end model.  The boost of power on the hills was smooth and welcome. He told me when he’s riding in a mixed group – some people on ebikes and some on analog bikes, they ride more or less the same speed until they get to a steep hill. Then the ebikes have the advantage and have to wait for the others at the top.

Hughes was faster than me but stopped and waited periodically. I was grateful to have him as a guide.

“Right ahead there’s a blind corner on a downhill; it used to be a little bit of a hazard,” Hughes said. “Terry Lovett and I ran into each other one day with our bikes. He was going one way and I was going the other. But we’ve cleared out the trees so it’s not much of a hazard to walkers or bikers anymore.”

We rode for a while. Long enough for me to become a convert. Before we finished, Hughes took me on one of the single track trails near the high school. 

“This is my favorite,” he said. 

I slowed down and pedalled carefully through the narrow twists and turns and ups and downs. I started to get the hang of using the extra momentum to overcome small obstacles without having to stop and put my feet down. It was exhilarating.

Hughes said he rides on the Cross Trail as often as he can. He also rides up Harbor Mountain or out on the four wheeler trails beyond the shooting range. He still has to work pretty hard, electric bike or not.

“I still come home after a long ride on Sunday and have cramps all night,” Hughes said. “You still have to pedal them; there’s no throttles on the bikes that we ride, just a bit of pedal assist.”

That bit of pedal assist has made all the difference to Bill Hughes in his ninth decade.

“I’m back. I’m not only back, I’m in front.”

Photo/Piggy Bank On Pennies

Later this month, Spruce Root will host a virtual financial wellness workshop. Haley Armstrong joined KCAW on the Morning Interview to discuss the interactive event, which covers a holistic approach to finances, including money mindset, budgeting, financial goal setting, credit and debt. The quarterly workshop is scheduled for June 23-23. Listen here:

Register for the workshop here

The Sitka Music Festival is celebrating its 54th year. Festival Director Alex Serio joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss some upcoming festival highlights, including a performance from Grammy winning fiddler Mark O’Connor on June 14.

Annual events such as the Seamart Family Concert, a crab feed, and a wildlife cruise are also scheduled. Tickets are available at sitkamusicfestival.org and Old Harbor Books. Volunteers are needed, for more information, contact 907-747-6774.

In a corner tank in the Sitka Sound Science Center, there’s a soft creature about the size and shape of a plum. She’s a deep, ruddy purple, and she blasts little puffs of sand when someone gets too close to the tank.

Matt Wilson has worked as the aquarist here for a few years. He manages the care of about 200 species in the aquarium. He says this stubby squid — also known as a dumpling squid, or Rossia pacifica — isn’t really a squid at all.

“With every, you know, group of animals, there’s some weirdos that are out on the fringes,” he said. “They are most closely related to cuttlefish, more than they are squid or octopus. But they are not quite cuttlefish.”

Wilson found the stubby squid by accident. In March, he was walking along the beach next to the Science Center, looking for live crabs to feed to aquarium animals.

“I think she was trying to go after shrimp that were eating the herring eggs right after herring spawn,” he said. “She was only in a couple inches of water when I spotted her.”

Stubby squid usually live in deeper waters and burrow in the sand during the day. Wilson says finding one out in the open like that was a sign she was in bad shape. 

“She was a dark purple, which means that all of her color-changing cells had completely relaxed,” he said. “So she probably was almost sort of unconscious at the time, and she could barely move, and she couldn’t burrow in the sand.”

Wilson scooped the stubby squid up in a bucket. Over several days, he adjusted the temperature and salt levels in the tank to better resemble a typical habitat. Wilson said the animal stayed ghost white for two days — a bad sign — but then changed colors and started burrowing again.

“That was our first sign that she probably was going to start to improve, and from there, she has continued to make a full recovery from that, and is now doing all the normal behaviors we’d expect,” he said.

It was a fortuitous outcome – Wilson happens to be one of a handful of aquarium biologists with experience caring for the species. He first worked with them more than a decade ago, learning from guidelines left by the late octopus specialist Roland Anderson. Anderson cared for stubby squid during a three-decade career at the Seattle Aquarium — one of the only public aquariums that displays the species.

“It was about probably four years off and on working with these animals before I really felt like I was getting positive, good interactions with them,” Wilson said.

Kathryn Kegel is a curator at the Seattle Aquarium. She says stubby squid don’t often show up in aquariums because they can be hard to find, don’t live long, and they’re not easy to keep – they’re really picky eaters. 

“They hunt small crustaceans, and don’t always like to eat dead food,” she said.

Kegel says reviving an unhealthy stubby squid, like the one Wilson found, can be especially difficult. 

For Wilson, keeping the stubby squid alive and happy is a lot of work. He doesn’t often get to watch her hunt, but when he does, it’s quite a show. 

“They pop up completely out of the sand, start to basically hover and rise just above the sand and shoot those tentacles out really, really quickly, like just lightning speed, grab that animal, pull them back and bite it with their beak to immobilize and paralyze it,” he said.

Stubby squid typically live for one-and-a-half to two years. Wilson says that this particular pint-sized predator was already full-sized — a whopping three inches — when he found her. He estimates that she has another four-to-six months left.

“That’s the downside to working with cephalopods, is that they don’t live for very long in most cases,” he said.

After she dies, this stubby squid will be preserved as a learning tool. Wilson sees that as another way to respect the animal. 

“Skeletons, preservations, all of those are really important to me as somebody who wants to continue to respect that animal and have them continue to teach even after death,” he said.

He considers his relationship with the animals as a collaborative one – and he says that’s why he avoids giving pet names to animals in his care. 

“These are not my pets,” he said. “These are my colleagues.”

Wilson also hopes to expand the existing care manual for the species, sharing what he’s learned, so that other biologists can effectively care for this not-quite-a-squid, not-quite-a-cuttlefish creature. 

In the meantime, visitors can meet the stubby squid at the Sitka Sound Science Center.   

Ruth Underhill is with Tongass Mist Writing and the Sitka Writers Retreat. This is the fourth year of the event, and features faculty members Brendan Jones and Amy Butcher. The Writer’s Retreat runs May 29 – June 2. Full information and registration can be found online at the Sitka Writer’s Retreat. This Saturday night, May 31, the Retreat is having a public fireside reading with local authors. 7 p.m. Yaw Chapel, Historic Sheldon Jackson Campus.

Photo: Sitka election workers deliver ballots from Precinct 1

Sitka voters have overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure that would have capped the number of cruise visitors beginning next year.

Wednesday’s special election brought out almost 3,000 voters, 73% of whom rejected the proposition. This was the third largest turnout for any municipal election in Sitka since 2018.

Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal owner Chris McGraw led the opposition to the proposition. His group, called Safeguard Sitka’s Future, organized early in the process, and even campaigned to discourage residents from signing the petition initiative.

McGraw was heartened by the night’s results.

“I think it, you know, shows that the community understands the benefits of cruise tourism and that the proposed ballot initiative wasn’t the right answer at this time,” McGraw said in an interview with KCAW after the election returns were released at Harrigan Centennial Hall.

Although the outcome was a decisive “no,” McGraw is aware that the industry has work to do to address the concerns of the 27-percent of voters who supported limiting cruise visits to Sitka, like acquiring better buses, and refining the terms of a memorandum of understanding – or MOU – with City Hall to make sure the 7,000 passenger-per-day cap called for in that document is met.

“But I think that’s all a conversation that you have with the Tourism Commission, and the public, and everybody weighs in so that we don’t jeopardize the economic impact, but still maintain what makes Sitka great place to live,” McGraw said. 

Although it was not a good night for the proposition’s supporters, one of its authors, Larry Edwards, was glad to have had a chance to put the issue before voters – a process which took him two years, and four attempts.

Edwards said voters were faced with a very narrow choice on a complicated issue, and he does not consider the outcome an endorsement of the cruise terminal’s MOU with the city.

“There’s still the question of what numbers does the town really want, and would the town accept a regulatory approach, or does it really like the MOU approach, which is voluntary and really not that enforceable?” Edwards said.

Initiative co-sponsor Klaudia Leccese was unhappy in the outcome, but hopeful that Sitkans had a better understanding of the issue.

“It’s, of course, like he said, a disappointment, but on the other hand, the people got a chance to vote, and I think that’s really critical,” Leccese said. “Hopefully things will work out in the way that’s best for Sitka over the course of time.”

The final tally on Sitka’s Special Election to limit cruise ships was 773 in favor, and 2,071 opposed. Well over half of the electorate chose to cast their ballots early in this election. 121 absentee ballots will be counted on June 2, but they will not affect the outcome. The Sitka Assembly will certify the results at its first regular meeting in June.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story, and will be updated. 

Willa Johnson and Mel Beadle are two of the volunteers helping to organize Sitka’s Pride Month activities in June. Kickoff is June 6, at the main shelter of Halibut Point Rec. Sitka Pride events are open to all who support equality, visibility, and respect in Sitka’s LGBTQ 2+ community. Find a complete schedule here or on Sitka Pride’s Facebook Page.

It’s been nearly three years since the town of Bar Harbor, Maine voted to limit cruise traffic. In the years since, the citizen-led initiative has spurred lawsuits, an attempted repeal, and uncertainty about the future. While not entirely parallel, the case bears striking resemblance to Sitka’s, where an initiative to limit cruise traffic will be considered in a special election on May 28.

Bar Harbor, Maine is a picturesque coastal community, not unlike Sitka. It’s a small waterfront town of around 5,000 people, accounting for around half the population of Mt. Desert Island.

Charles Sidman is a scientific researcher and a small business owner who has lived there since the 1980s.  

“Our mountains are not the size of Denali, but they’re nice little mountains,” Sidman told KCAW on a call in late May. “It’s beautiful outdoors. I mean, you can hike, and boat, and camp, and picnic and do all the things that people do.” 

And, like Sitka, Bar Harbor is a popular tourist destination – millions of people visit the island every year to tour Acadia National Park. Most come by car, but some visitors come by cruise ship – until recently, the number of cruise visitors had grown to around 300,000 a summer. 

And, like Sitka, that didn’t sit well with everyone in Bar Harbor, including Sidman.

“For every Bar Harborite or land visitor on the street, there would be 10 people from a cruise ship. You couldn’t walk down the sidewalk. And that was really killing the town and its experience for the residents, the land visitors,” Sidman said. “This temporary, just absolute innundation.”

Unlike Sitka, where cruise traffic has been a part of the local economy since the 1970s, the industry has only been in Bar Harbor for around 30 years. In 2008, the community drafted a cruise plan and worked with the industry to limit visitors to around 5,000 a day.

Bar Harbor’s current Council Chair Val Peacock said at that time meeting those caps seemed far away. But in the last decade that started to change.

“They could see people liked coming here. They’re getting good reviews,” Peacock said. “The town was accepting more and more reservations in that space, and we started to get increased visitation. And around 2018 and ’19, it started to get really steep.”

The cown council discussed its options in a long, public – sometimes messy – process. Ultimately the council negotiated an agreement with the cruise industry. But Sidman felt the council wasn’t going far enough. So he organized a citizen petition to limit numbers to 1,000 passengers a day.

“We were the first ones, to my knowledge, to actually legislate serious limits,” Sidman said. “Some towns have been fighting it for a long time. The West Coast and your region has been agitating about it. Venice has been sinking and trying to keep them further away. But nobody has really taken the legislative approach.”

In November of 2022, the initiative to limit cruise traffic won with 58% of the vote.

“It went into effect in December, and on New Year’s Eve we had a lawsuit filed against us,” Peacock said.

The lawsuit was not from the cruise industry, but from the Association to Preserve and Protect Local Livelihoods, or APPLL, an organization of local businesses – restaurants, gift shops, tour operators and the pier owners, Golden Anchor, that formed in response to the initiative.

“There’s nothing wrong with people visiting your town,” said Eben Salvatore in a phone call with KCAW on May 23.

Salvatore is a member of APPLL and runs pier and tender operations in Bar Harbor.

“These people knew that 95% of our cruise ships would not come anymore, and that 95% of the ships that visit Bar Harbor are over 1,000 passengers,” Salvatore said. “So they knew full well that this was a ban, this was an extermination, and they didn’t care.”

In federal court, APPLL argued that the ordinance violated the US Constitution by restricting commerce and interstate travel. The council held off on enacting the ordinance at the time.

In February 2024, more than a year after the suit was filed, a federal judge in Maine District Court upheld the cruise limit. APPLL appealed the decision, but the town finally moved to enforce the 1,000 visitor limit, with just a few months until the 2024 cruise season.

“Any reservation that we had, we sort of kept, but we stopped taking more,” Peacock said. “And then we started to try to build up the rules to actually enforce the ordinance, which requires the town to count passengers.”

It was a bumpy summer. The pier owners allowed passengers to disembark without permits, and the town sued them. Sidman also sued the town council for delaying its implementation of the initiative.

With industry support, the council tried to replace the cruise cap with a higher limit last fall. Peacock, who isn’t a fan of cruise ships herself, hoped they could find a middle ground to manage cruise traffic.

“What’s the best way for us to do that without having all of this massive litigation and angst in the community,” Peacock said. “There’s a trade off there that I thought was worth putting in front of the voters.”

That repeal referendum failed by a little over 60 votes last November. 

Peacock said before the lawsuit, the city was budgeting around $40,000 a year for legal fees. Now that budget is closer to $350,000 a year. 

“We’ve also lost revenue because we’re not having as many cruise ships come. We were getting revenue from that,” Peacock said. “There’s two hits to the budget that way.”

“We went from 70 cruise ships last year, down from 170 to 70, and this year there’s only 17, because the cruise lines understandably won’t come if they can’t welcome all their passengers ashore,” Salvatore said. “So they’re not coming.” 

APPLL’s appeal of the limit is being considered by a panel of federal circuit court judges right now. The court heard oral arguments in January, and now it’s a waiting game to see whether the initiative will be overturned.

“Bar Harbor is very desirable, and we worked hard to make it that way and try to keep it that way,” Salvatore said. “So all we can do is hope that when this is resolved, whether it’s through the courts or referendum or some other structured settlement, that the cruise lines will return.”

Peacock worries that, if the initiative is overturned and the ships do come back, the town no longer has leverage to negotiate. If she could do it over, she’d try harder to get out ahead of it as a Council, and work with the community to find a solution.

“We could see this coming from a long ways away, and we let it get too far, get to the point of petitions, and then forcing the town’s hand in really uncomfortable ways,” Peacock said. “The key to it, I think, is to try to figure out how to help people understand that you are doing what they’re asking you to do, but you might be doing in a different way, or you need to adjust the way.”

Sidman is satisfied- the voters have been heard, cruise traffic is down and he thinks the town can weather that change, especially considering the other four million tourists that visit by land every year. 

All cities around the planet, some want more cruise ships, the better, and some would like them to go away entirely, and then there’s some in the middle,” Sidman said. “There’s no one size fits all, and I think the business of local determination is an important principle.”

And Sitkans on both sides of the issue would probably agree with that. 

Sitka Fine Arts Camp’s annual Jazz on the Waterfront event is coming up on June 28 at Odess Theater. The event will feature a 20-piece big band covering hits in a tribute to Quincy Jones. Roger Schmidt and Lily Pérez joined KCAW’s Brooke Schafer to discuss the event. Listen to the full interview below:

Doors open at 6 p.m. with dinner at 6:45 p.m. Tickets are available here and include appetizers, dinner, and an open bar. The event is a fundraiser to replace the deteriorating roof of the Odess Theater.

Roger and Mary Hames at their corporate offices in Sitka. Roger Hames says the prospect of selling Sea Mart and the company’s other related businesses first crossed his mind in 2009, when Carolyn Hammack – who built Lakeside Grocery shortly after Sea Mart opened – sold her store to the Alaska Commercial Company. Hammock (who died in 2014) was a few years older than Hames, but he realized that his own retirement was coming, sooner or later. (Hames Corp. photo)

KCAW: I wonder if we could get this conversation rolling by telling me about the opening day of Sea Mart.

Mary Hames: It was December 18, 1978 we were just back from our honeymoon. We had to change our wedding date so we could get back to be there for the opening day of the store. And I remember it was so much fun, because days and nights before the opening, we were in the store, and we had to price-check every item, because we were the first store in Alaska, or Southeast Alaska, to have those scanners and have UPC codes. So we took one item off of each shelf, every shelf, and we all had shopping carts. There were a bunch of us – friends came to help – and we just had to price check everything. It was so much fun.

KCAW: I imagine it was a big stretch financially to go from small downtown stores to a big place on the oceanfront. You probably had some people backing you who were very anxious about that opening day.

Roger Hames: Yes, interesting enough I left college after only a year and a semester because I wanted to come back and be a part of the family business. I sat with dad in and mom in multiple meetings trying to understand, you know, and we met with various financial institutions that we went to see all over the country, and this is in ‘77 (we bought the property in ‘77 I believe it), and then had to get the store financed to build. And I remember it was a $3 million loan to get that done. And it was not easy. And every time we turned around, we were turned down for financing. You just have to do everything you can to appease and please and make the bankers comfortable. So that was an education in itself for me. 

KCAW: I want to talk about the decision to sell. How long has this decision been percolating for you?

Mary Hames: At least a couple years. 

Roger Hames: Yes, a couple years at least. I mean it’s always been in the back of my mind. And you know, a family-run business –  it can be a blessing or it can be a curse, because it just can go either way. And the dynamics in a family operation, (family businesses are) just becoming less and less these days. And it doesn’t matter what the business is. In this case, it’s groceries. And so you think, ‘Okay, it’s going to be all right. You’ve got a lot of volume. It’s fast-paced. You’re turning your inventory all the time.’ But it’s not for everybody. And you know, I’m proud to say today we have five generations represented of the Hames-Rands family in our stores. It’s down to our grandkids who are checking in the stores…

Mary Hames: That’s really unheard of in a family business.

Roger Hames:  It is, but to pass along a family-owned business to the next generation, it’s not for everybody. And that happened.

Mary Hames: And running an independent grocery store today is not what it was like 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago. We used to go to a convention once a year in the Seattle area – the Washington State Food Dealers – and it was a huge group of independent grocers. We got to know all the family grocers, and we helped each other out. But that organization folded because the independents were just going away. So it’s kind of a sad thing, but it’s just the changing of the times. 

KCAW: How did the meetings go with staff? 

Mary Hames: A lot of them said, ‘Why did you wait so long?’ Some of them said, ‘We knew this was coming.’ And some of them ‘Oh no…’

Roger Hames: ‘…It took me completely by surprise.’ And I think about their futures. We think about their futures. And you know in releasing control of something how many lives you’re affecting? And over the years, every time I sign payroll, which my dad says, ‘As long as you can sign a check, sign it, because a handwritten check is very important.’ So you are responsible for people’s house payments, for their rent payments, for their boat payments, their car payments, (Mary: and their food,) yeah, to have food on the table. And that is a responsibility that I do not take lightly.

KCAW: What steps can you take to preserve that essence of SeaMart? Is that something that you can build into a financial transaction? 

Mary Hames: We’re hoping. However, we know ultimately that we’re not going to have any control. But finding the right fit, we have control of. We can help with that.

Roger Hames: I was surprised to know and find out there’s local interest that said, ‘You know, (we) wouldn’t mind talking to you about this.’ And it surprised me, and I’m thinking, wouldn’t that be cool to try to find someone locally, a group of people, another business, that could really make this happen? It’s not out of the question, but our net is cast very far and very deep and very wide.

KCAW: Who knows? But I have a feeling they’re going to have to come up with more than $3 million. That sounds like just inventory in a couple of aisles.

Roger Hames: At today’s prices, yes. (laughing) 

Mary Hames: That’s just the eggs, Robert! 

Roger Hames: Yes, our egg inventory: it’s in a vault now in the store. We have to lock it up. (more laughter)

Note: The Hames Corporation also owns Watson Point Liquors and the Cascade Convenience store in Sitka, and Newtown Liquor in Ketchikan. All will be changing ownership over a timeline that is uncertain. Roger Hames says the transactions could take months, or longer.