para bellum
Diamond Member
I can assure you that Alaskans are very proficient with their guns. Deer and Moose is what people eat for meat- beef comes from the lower 48 either freezer barge or air freight and it's expensive. I maybe had beef once a year as a kid. Lots of really good seafood, and lots of venison. Very healthy.Plus there is a good chance the gun owners in Alaska are quite good with their firearms.
Southeast is littered with defensive installations from WW2. Every island, pillboxes on every W/SW facing point or cape. There was an abandoned underground hospital in Sitka that we used to explore as kids. 3 levels deep. We'd have to sprint across the runway at the airport to get there, there wasn't a lot of security in those days, haha. I remember racing my SL-70 across to beat a 727 on short final once, I wonder what the pilot was thinking about me.
Sitka was the capitol of Russian Alaska, and there was a Russian Orthodox Church in the middle of town that burned down in the 60's, it was a huge fire. The bell melted, but was saved and recast into a new bell when the church was rebuilt. I thought that was cool. It was made of silver.
The Russian docks were long disintegrated, but at low tide you could walk out and collect handmade iron nails from the rotted timbers. I would bundle them 10 to a bundle and sell them to the tourists off the cruise ships, $1/bundle.
The Russians fought skirmishes with the Tlingits and Haidas, and I used to dig old bottles from around their fort sites. They were heavy drinkers even back then, lol. Castle Hill had a ring of cannon overlooking Sitka Sound to the west, and there was a blockhouse that overlooked the channel to the north that also had cannon- we used to climb up to the ports and crawl inside and mess around. Sadly the cannon have all been removed, I don't know what became of them. I think Castle Hill has one in display piece in the center, but there used to be like 8 or 10 of them in a semicircle facing out.
In the 90's and 2000's, Russia was trying to raise hard currency, and you could buy religious relics at bargain prices from the Russia-Alaska Company. My brother bought a beautiful relic of the Virgin Mary in 2002. They stopped doing that after a few years, and are trying to get that stuff back now.