Karen Brassard sits behind the counter at the Haines Packing Company store in Whitehorse on a Saturday afternoon, and tells me how she likes to cook haddock or lingcod.
“I cut it into bite-sized pieces, roll it in mayonnaise, and then get Miss Vickie’s [salt and vinegar] potato chips and crunch them up and roll them in there. Honest to god, it’s just as good as deep fried.”
We’re both lost in contemplation of biting into one of these morsels when a customer pushes the door open, and Brassard turns her attention from recipes to showing the way to the sockeye fillets in the bank of glass-fronted freezers lining the walls.
Brassard has been greeting customers, sharing recipes, unpacking, and pricing fish and seafood, and generally acting as the go-to Whitehorse rep of this iconic Alaska-based company for seven of its 13 years here.
Owner Harry Rietze brought the first Haines Packing Company outlet to Whitehorse in 2012, with a snowmachine trailer in a parking lot on Fourth Avenue. A retail outlet at the busy corner of Fourth and Ogilvie came next, and in 2018, the business moved to its current retail location at 21 Waterfront Place, in a mini-hub it shares with two other iconic businesses, Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters and Icycle Sports.
Rietze is a third-generation Alaskan from a fishing family in Haines who spent his teenaged years tendering (transporting fish from the fishing grounds to the plant), gill netting, and working in a fish plant in Excursion Inlet. In 2007 he took over the family business, running the plant in Letnikof Cove just outside Haines. He’s run it ever since, with retail outlets in Haines, in La Quinta, California, where Rietze lives seasonally, and in Whitehorse.
The Yukon has always had strong links to the coast—Indigenous peoples have travelled and traded from the coast to the Interior for thousands of years, and it’s fair to say the settler population has traditionally regarded our coastal Alaskan neighbors as another branch of the family.
For generations, Yukoners have relied on migratory salmon that are making the same coast-to-inland journey through the Yukon River drainage system. No longer. Chinook salmon have been in decline since the 1980s. Some Yukon First Nations voluntarily ended their subsistence harvest of Chinook as long as 25 years ago, and the majority has followed suit. In recent years the decline has been so severe that in April 2024, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Fisheries and Oceans Canada agreed to a seven-year moratorium on all harvest of the Chinook except subsistence fishing in limited circumstances. Chum salmon returns have also taken a dive, resulting in fisheries closures in 2022-2024 and a grim outlook for 2025. We all miss the Chinook and the chum, Indigenous peoples especially, who’ve lost both a food source and a vital cultural touchstone. We still have our freshwater species, our lake trout, pike, whitefish, and grayling, but we have a craving for the taste of the sea, for that connection to the coast. Seasonally, we can source sockeye and coho from the Taku River Tlingit and other Atlin, British Columbia-based fisheries. But not year-round.
Enter Haines Packing Company. Typically, the Whitehorse outlet carries Alaska sockeye, coho, halibut, lingcod, black cod, shrimp, Dungeness crab, and salmon caviar, all sustainably harvested. If the rate at which customers push open the door on a busy Saturday is any indication, these products are in strong demand.
“We feel we have a really loyal customer base in Whitehorse,” says Rietze. “And our customers appreciate knowing where the fish comes from.”
Like his customers, Rietze hopes the current political climate does not affect the close relationship between Alaskans and Yukoners. Yukoners travel to Skagway or Haines for the first breath of spring while we are still snowbound; we drop shrimp pots in the Lynn Canal, fish for halibut in Valdez. We look forward every March to the Buckwheat International Ski Classic at Log Cabin near the White Pass, or the Kluane to Chilkat International Bike Relay from Haines Junction to Haines in June, and the Klondike Road Relay from Skagway to Whitehorse in September. Alaskans and Yukoners buy groceries in each other’s stores, we stay in each other’s guestrooms on overnights after a ski day in one of the passes. We are pals, and we don’t want to lose that friendship.
Neither does Rietze.
“We’re neighbors, and we really value that relationship. As long as the people of the Yukon still want us there, we plan to be there.” He adds, “We see ourselves more as neighbors and fellows than part of the broader political scheme.”
A cross-border note on the potato chips Brassard uses in her haddock/lingcod-mayo-potato chip recipe. She favors the Canadian Miss Vickie’s brand because they make a thicker chip. If you can’t find them in Alaska, though, try Kettle Brand. Same deal. (P.S.: Did I mention? Cook those morsels for 10–15 minutes at 350° F.)
