Aug 25, 2009, 13:50 GMT
Hyder, Alaska - You down a shot and it feels as though your throat is on fire. Then the bartender tips the dregs onto the bar and ignites them, producing a blue flame.
With a roguish smile, he declares: 'Welcome to Hyder, Alaska. You've been Hyderized.' The fiery welcome drink is 75-per-cent grain alcohol by volume (150 proof), for which Hyder is (in)famous.
Situated at the south-eastern tip of the Alaskan panhandle with a population fluctuating between 60 and 95, the town of Hyder is the only place in the United States that you can enter from abroad without being checked by immigration and customs authorities. It is accessible by road from Canada and is three kilometres from the town of Stewart, in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
Hyder and the United States begin where British Columbia Highway 37A changes from an asphalt road into an unsurfaced one and then peters out. You pass abandoned mines, including the once gigantic Granduc Copper Mine, and are surrounded by the Coast Mountains' peaks and glaciers.
The mountains were once Hyder and Stewart's biggest assets. In 1898, the first settlers arrived in the area, at the end of the Portland Canal, a 148-kilometre-long fiord. More than 40 mines were cut into the rock over the years, producing gold, silver, copper, zinc and tungsten. By 1956, all major mines had closed except for the Granduc Copper Mine, which operated until 1984.
When Captain David D Gillard of the US Army Corps of Engineers built a stone storehouse at Eagle Point in 1896, the exact boundary between Alaska and British Columbia had not yet been delineated. Until this happened in 1905, Hyder lay in a kind of no man's land. Erected on pilings, it moved from Canadian waters to the Alaskan mainland in the 1930s. In 1948, the abandoned city of wood burned down.
Today the east wall of Gillard's storehouse marks the US-Canadian border. Between it and the Portland Canal stands a boundary stone. On the other side, a swath has been cut through the forest to highlight the international border, which is otherwise unmarked aside from an 'Entering Alaska' sign.
Hyder is a bit of a hybrid. Its inhabitants use Canadian money and have the same telephone area code as British Columbia. Yet Hyder is as all-American as the rest of Alaska.
'Here everything is completely different than in Canada, although it's just 100 yards away,' said Wes Loe, a white-haired Vietnam veteran who runs one of the two stores in Hyder. The town has no police force. 'When we have problems here, we solve them ourselves,' Loe remarked, sounding like a Wild West hero.
For eight months of the year, Hyder is a sleepy town. Not from June to September, though, when salmon swim up the Salmon River to spawn. Then black bears and grizzlies head to the river's tributaries to gorge on the fish and fatten up for their winter hibernation. The spectacle attracts tourists.
At the popular Fish Creek Wildlife Viewing Site outside of Hyder, tourists can watch bears and other animals at close range from platforms and decks for a fee of five dollars a day and 75 dollars a season.
US Forest Rangers staff the site 16 hours a day, seven days a week, from July until the beginning of September to make sure the rules are followed. Whether the rules are meant to protect the bears or the tourists is not quite clear. Signs are posted everywhere saying bears are wild animals and must not be fed. But accidents happen. In the summer of 2000, for instance, a brown bear mauled a man from Ketchikan, an Alaskan city nearly 200 kilometres away.
Hyder and Stewart also aim to boost winter tourism. The high point comes every April, when the Bordertown Snowbombers Snowmobile Club organizes the Big Missouri Poker Run. Participating snowmobilers negotiate a course with several stations, at which they collect playing cards. The winner is the one with the best poker hand at the end.
The competition concludes with a party at the Glacier Inn, the oldest bar in Hyder. Many patrons follow a tradition by leaving signed paper money, which is then hung on a wall. The bar's interior is papered with thousands of such bills.
'They now amount to about 85,000 dollars,' noted Jodie Bunn, the Glacier Inn's owner. The oldest specimen, a Canadian 25-cent bill from 1870, is framed and occupies a place of honour behind the bar.
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