Doug Has Questions

Send us Fan Mail A single wrong boat can sink your plan before it starts, and a single good partnership can save it. I sit down with Glen Jacobson, one of the founders behind what many locals know today as Alaska Fjordlines, to trace how a kid from Kansas went from selling crawdads for bait to running hundreds of thousands of miles on Lynn Canal and building a ferry and tour boat business between...

Send us Fan Mail A passport application shouldn’t rewrite your life, but that’s exactly where Sandy Corbari’s adoption story starts. When she requests her records and opens a live birth certificate, she gets a name, a birthplace, and a new set of questions she can’t unsee. Years later, one spontaneous search turns up an obituary, two half-brothers, and a message that comes back fast: “You’re my si...

Send us Fan Mail A small town can make your life feel straightforward, right up until you zoom out and realize how many unlikely turns it contains. Kay (Haas) Dunning grew up in Haines, Alaska, with a family story that starts in the 1950s with the US Army, the Haines tank farm, and a mom who chose Southeast Alaska as home after falling hard for aviation and the north. We talk through the kind of l...

Send us Fan Mail You can hear the exact moment a life story turns into a healing practice. Susie McCartney grew up outside Philadelphia in a family shaped by Vietnam-era fallout, alcoholism, and the kind of “everything is fine” chaos that looks normal until you’re old enough to feel your own nervous system. We trace how that early wiring shows up later as the urge to flee, the need to belong, and...

Send us Fan Mail A nine-year-old gets hit by a stray bullet while playing second base. A 30-year-old nursing student hears the words “you have cancer” and still has to get dinner on the table for three boys. A seasoned Alaska RN crashes an airboat into a sweeper, wakes up pinned, and starts running a trauma checklist on herself while the boat sinks. That’s the real-life timeline Nicole Holm lays o...

Send us Fan Mail A kid from flat Kansas farm country ends up on the open ocean, clinging to a mast in a storm and wondering if he will make it back down. That is where Matt Jones’ story gets real, and where mine as a listener shifted too. Matt walks us through the unexpected chain of choices that took him to the Coast Guard Academy, onto cutters and tall ships, and into a career shaped by responsi...

Send us Fan Mail One minute Jim Stanford is a farm-country kid outside Cleveland pushing a mower across five-acre lawns. The next he’s caddying at a U.S. Open, running track and football at Kent State, and watching campus tension build until the Kent State shooting changes everything. Jim’s story has that rare mix of history, humor, and hard-earned clarity, and it only gets wilder from there.   We...

Send us Fan Mail A great-looking jacket is the end of a very long chain of decisions and most people never see the chain. We talk with fashion designer Shelby Steiner about what actually happens between a sketch and a product you can buy, from pattern making and prototypes to tech packs, factory communication, and the unglamorous details that make gear work (or fail) in real life. Shelby shares ho...

Send us Fan Mail Click here to watch this Interview on YouTube. Click this link for more information on David Simmon's book, "50 Countries, 50 Stories." We’re talking with Randy Simmons about his son David: a switch hitter raised on work ethic and personal growth, a natural connector who made friends everywhere, and an entrepreneur who could turn airline miles and sheer curiosity in...

Send us Fan Mail A cruise ship can be a vacation, a workplace, and sometimes a lifeline. From a room next to an aeroponics grow at Skagway Brewing Company, we talk with Christine Kessler, a former cruise director turned full-time travel creator, about the real story behind “getting paid to travel” and what it costs to build a life that never sits still. Christine takes us from Iowa to pageants, Op...

Send us Fan Mail A last minute email pulls Kim Clune from a normal life and drops her into Haines, Alaska, guiding photography tours through bears, whales, wildflowers, and northern lights. That leap becomes the start of a bigger story about what happens when you stop chasing the “perfect setup” and start practicing real attention. We talk about teaching photography across every skill level, why g...

Send us Fan Mail A sore tongue that wouldn’t heal turns into a cancer diagnosis. A small-town Minnesota kid winds up leading in Mongolia. A long-distance dating message turns into a marriage and another cross-cultural leap. Kim LeDuc’s story keeps forcing the same question: what do you do when life changes fast and you trust God to make decisions?   We trace Kim’s path from farm life in Austin, Mi...

Send us Fan Mail A lot of people talk about “ending up” in Alaska. Scott Rossman actually did it, and the reason is almost ridiculous: a roadside lunch stop, a broken moving van, and a young mechanic who thought he could fix anything. Scott walks us through the full arc from a dairy farm in western New York to 41 years in Haynes, Alaska, building a life around logging, firewood, and the kind of ha...

Send us Fan Mail The hardest part about trauma is not always the moment itself. It is what happens after, when we go quiet, try to “be fine,” and carry the story alone. We sit down with Nicole Bringsli, owner of Creative Works Psych Services, to get honest about trauma therapy, forensic psychology, and what it takes to keep people functioning when life includes violence, disaster, and loss.   Nico...

Send us Fan Mail Copper is the metal that makes modern life work, yet new supply can take nearly two decades to bring online. That mismatch is why I wanted to sit down with Craig Parry, president of Vizsla Copper, to talk about what mineral exploration really looks like from the inside, and why the decisions made early can shape everything that follows, from environmental risk to long-term communi...

Send us Fan Mail He grows up between Montana and Germany, studies volcanoes and geology in Europe, and then hits a breaking point: the “right” path feels like a box. Michael George walks away from academia, follows a pull north, and eventually lands in Haines, Alaska where he becomes a CNA, home health provider, and one of those rare people who can sit with someone at the hardest moments and make...

Send us Fan Mail  Hospice can sound like a single frightening word, but what we’ve learned is that it’s really a promise: you don’t have to do the hardest part alone. I sit down with Shannon McPhetres, director and volunteer coordinator for Hospice of Haines, to talk honestly about death, grief, and the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor support that can change a family’s final months. Along the way, Sh...

Send us Fan Mail You can hear a whole era of Southeast Alaska in Charlie DeWitt’s voice: Salvation Army roots, moving from post to post, then landing in Haines and deciding it is home for good. Charlie walks us through the early days, from small boats and cannery rhythms to the way a town shapes you when everyone knows your family and your work ethic actually matters. From there, the conversation...

Send us Fan Mail Dropping a signed contract into a FedEx box and immediately searching “how to recall a package” is a special kind of panic, and it’s exactly where Lee Robinson found himself after agreeing to buy The Rusty Compass in Haines, Alaska. Lee’s journey to small-town business ownership is anything but linear: film photography in school darkrooms, newspaper assignments in the pre-digital...

Send us Fan Mail  A home birth in a ham radio room on a Fairbanks-area homestead is only the opening scene of Mike Machowiak’s life, and it explains more than you’d think. Mike grew up around improvisation, cold mornings, and the kind of grit you don’t learn from a manual. From there, his family history stretches back to WWII Europe: the Polish underground, a POW camp and escape, Switzerland’s mou...

Send us Fan Mail  A family story can be entertaining, but it can also explain why a community looks the way it does. Sitting down with Harriet Brouillette, lifelong Haines resident and Alaska Tribal Administrator of the Year, I hear how one family line stretches from France to Louisiana to Southeast Alaska and then collides with some of the hardest chapters in Alaska Native history. The details ar...

Send us Fan Mail Something is off about a guy who can casually mention getting lifted by a humpback whale and then move right along to the next story. Tod Stevens has spent decades stacking real adventures the hard way, through mechanical skill, odd jobs, and a stubborn willingness to try things most of us only talk about. We sit down and follow the thread from growing up between Virginia and Cali...

Send us Fan Mail Denali is the easy part compared to the people. That’s one of the clearest lessons we pull from our conversation with John Svenson, a Haines, Alaska mountaineer and working artist whose life somehow spans Yosemite dirtbag years, Alaska state surveying by rope, high-altitude guiding, and a studio full of watercolor, fused glass, and beadwork. We talk in John’s Extreme Dreams Galler...

Send us Fan Mail A town can start with a big dream, but it survives on unglamorous details: heat that actually works, water that keeps running, and neighbors who show up when the plan falls apart. We talk with lifelong Haines resident Lee Heimiller, president of the Port Chilkoot Corporation, about the unlikely chain of events that helped turn Fort Stewart from a postwar military site into the hea...

Send us Fan Mail A fishing boat flips in the dark in a 60-mph blow, and a 23-year-old stays calm enough to get everyone into a life raft. That same steady nerve shows up again and again in our conversation with Sean “Sean Dog” Brownell, a longtime Haines resident and one of the old-guard voices in Alaska heli skiing. We go back to where his winter obsession starts, how the Juneau ski-bum years tur...