By Will Steinfeld

Chilkat Valley News

The Valley of the Eagles Golf Course, near 1 Mile Haines Highway, is, and always has been, an operation that demands constant labor and produces no revenue. For 20 years, it has been owned by people with no interest in playing golf. 

It’s counterintuitive, but all true – except for the statement that the course doesn’t produce any revenue. It did once, when longtime area doctor Stan Jones and his wife Kathy Pardee-Jones sold it in 2021. That was after it sat on the market for five years, no one willing to pay the $1.6 million asking price.

Jones wasn’t worried during that time, at least as he remembers it now. “I had said, when the good lord wants me to sell it, he’ll sell it for me,” the 94-year old Jones said in an interview this summer. “One day he sold it for me.”

It happened on a Sunday. There were two men interested in the property, they walked the course, and within a week they made an offer. Their offer was below the asking price, but still, for Jones, “very, very satisfactory.” 

Soon after the first offer, a second came in – a cash offer – this one above the original asking price. Jones won’t say who that second offer came from. But it eventually lost out to the two men with the Sunday offer, one of them current golf course owner Clayton Jones (no relation to Stan and Kathy): a much younger man and a successful businessman. 

The younger Jones wasn’t happy about the competing offer, Stan Jones remembers.

“Clayton could not believe it,” he said. “He called our realtor, and after, she told us, ‘I’ve never been talked to like that before.’ Clayton’s partner, he said, ‘well, he’s just a young buck. He’ll get over it.’ And he said we’ll top that offer by $100,000 and we’ll top subsequent offers up to a maximum of a certain amount.”

The bidding continued up to the maximum and Clayton Jones eventually won. In large part because of that sale, Stan Jones says he’s made more post-retirement than he did in his 26-year career as Haines’ doctor and clinic owner. 

When asked about the windfall recently, Jones responded first by singing a hymn: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below.”

“When I sold the golf course I gave a nice contribution to the Salvation Army,” he said. “I gave some other nice contributions. I’m not a big spender. But every day I thank the lord for my family, for my health, for my wealth, and I ask the good lord to help me know how to spend it.”

In some sense, Jones’ windfall came for free: well over a million dollars of land created out of submerged silt. 

A couple thousand years ago, the Chilkat Valley was covered by glaciers, weighing down the land. When they receded the land began to lift, inch by inch, until about 30 years ago, the golf course rose out from the river. 

At least, that’s the rough idea. Before the golf course existed as such, Jones purchased the property in 1965, without any grand plans of laying claim to rising land. Five years later, while building his medical clinic in town, he dug down and found an old bed of clams in the dry dirt. 

That all became relevant around a decade later, when the Alaska Supreme Court decided land created from post-glacial rebound could become the private property of adjacent landowners.

In the wake of that ruling, Jones resurveyed his land, adding 93.4 acres of former wetlands — the substrate that would become the golf course. Today, he recalls the acreage down to the decimal point. 

Through it all, the now-golf course remained unvegetated drainage. At one point a friend’s father visited town and hit golf balls into the area. They stuck and sank. 

In 1989, Jones’ first wife died. “We were married for 33 and a half years,” Jones said. “And she got up one morning getting ready to go to church and dropped dead.”

On the last day of that year, he retired from his practice and sold the clinic, citing rising costs and poor insurance reimbursement rates for rural physicians. Two weeks into retirement, he left town to spend half a year working in mission hospitals across Africa. 

Jones is so closely identified with his former practice in Haines that today, he’s still Doctor Jones to the people who stand to greet him everywhere he goes. When he returned from his mission work, however, he was no longer the town’s doctor, though, according to the newspaper at the time, he wasn’t retired either. “I don’t really look at myself as being so much retired as shifting gears to use my talents in another direction,” he told the Chilkat Valley News reporter. 

About a year and a half later he married Kathy Pardee-Jones, and a few years after that came the resurvey that added his 93.4 acres of new land. 

He considered a number of business ideas for the land, things he thought wouldn’t be environmentally harmful. At one point he considered a salmon-rearing habitat, but a fisheries biologist told him it would be challenging. 

“He said it would be very expensive,” Jones remembers. “So I said, well, maybe we could have a golf course.” 

Jones had never golfed. He would swing a club for the first time only years later, when some of his employees brought him out onto the course after the day to play a few holes. (Asked what he thought about the game of golf, Jones responded, “it’s fine.”) 

He had, however, seen a study by the Anchorage market research firm McKinley Research Group, then known as the McDowell Group, that, according to Jones, said 2% of cruise passengers wanted to play a round of golf in Alaska. If 2% of Haines’ cruise tourists came to the course, he reasoned, the course would have a hard time even accommodating everyone.

Jones showed up one day in the Seattle office of Mark Miller, a golf course designer. They had never met and Miller had just moved from Hawaii, where he was designing courses for a major firm. Generally, he said, he was contracted by large development outfits, not individual small-town landowners in Alaska. He invited Jones in, and Jones showed him the aerial photos of the wetlands. Miller remembers telling Jones his idea for a course would be basically impossible. Jones remembers it differently, Miller saying the permitting would be very difficult. But the course? Not necessarily impossible. 

“I kind of told him, you can’t design a golf course in a floodplain where you’re putting down fertilizer and grass and chemicals. But he just kept going, and kept calling me,” Miller said. “Finally, he said, what if I flew you up here and you could see the site.”

Soon after, Miller was in Haines, sitting in a canoe with Jones. (Miller remembers it as the middle of the night at a high high tide; Jones calls that impossible, saying it was during the day, based on his recall of a specific 6 p.m. tournament tee time the day before.) Whatever the hour, they agree that they were in a canoe, and that as they were paddling, Jones was pointing out submerged fairways which existed at that point only in his mind. 

“We got big rubber boots on, you know, up above our knees,” Miller remembers. “And he’s paddling around and pointing at the water going, ‘this is where the first green is gonna be,’ and it’s underwater. We get out and we’re trudging around in knee-deep water and he’s pointing out the layout of the course, and I’m kind of thinking, man, this is the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

By the next morning the tide was down. Seeing it dried out made it more plausible for Miller, along with the beauty of the site in the daylight. With Jones, they hatched a plan for a pesticide-, herbicide-, and irrigation-free golf course — something that could be permitted in the wetland area. They would plant it with a blend of grasses to find something that would survive the tidal inundation. 

“I think when he got it in his head he wanted to do that, there was nobody that was going to hold him back, and if I wouldn’t have helped him, he probably would’ve found someone else,” Miller said. 

Permitting took seven and a half years and, Jones said, $25,000 worth of design work. By summer 2003 they had the permits and Turner Construction was hired to drag the land level and put the course in. They waited for the winter freeze to truck in fill for the greens (“I don’t know what you call them on a golf course — the places where the holes are at,” as Donnie Turner called them). Stan Jones had pounds and pounds of copper slag brought in and brushed into the turf at those greens to weigh them down. 

“I said, geez Stan this seems like a bad place for a golf course, there’s not enough people,” the elder Turner, Don Turner Jr., said, also calling Stan a “real good man” — in his estimation “honest as the day is long.” 

“His wife wasn’t real happy about it for a bit, but it was something he wanted to do for some reason,” Turner Jr. said.  

After three years of work, in summer 2006, the course officially opened. As a business venture, it was tied into a deal with the cruise ships and Alaska Mountain Guides to send a tour over to the golf course — that 2% of passengers Jones had read about. But there was a gap between what the McDowell Group study suggested would happen and what did happen. 

“Yes I was disappointed,” Pardee-Jones said, of seeing only small groups trickle in. “No, we weren’t a groomed course. But the scenery was incredible, our blood, sweat and tears were out there. Sure, there were some that were expecting more than we had, but most people that came loved it.”

The margins were nonexistent after the cruise ships took their cut, which meant the couple couldn’t pay themselves a salary. Jones says after the cruise lines and tour company were paid out, the golf course got around $25 for each person on the tour. 

It took some of the shine off the course as a business proposition. And yet, even in hindsight, both Jones and Pardee-Jones are big supporters of the cruise industry in Haines, for the economic activity it brings, but also for the idea that there’s something worth seeing in the Chilkat Valley — golf course or otherwise. 

“We need an economy,” Pardee-Jones said on a recent afternoon, next to their big picture window overlooking the cruise-ship dock. “The cruise ship people are in and they’re out, and they get to see the beauty we live with. We have an awful lot to offer.”

Even as the cruise ship gambit petered out, the couple kept the course running. They ran charity events and veterans’ fundraisers and gave money to the Uglies Cancer Fund, and still they took no salary.

There were some differences between the Haines version of what a golf course would look like and what Pardee-Jones refers to as the “high buck” ones down south.

Golf pros who came in later would note the differences, too. Like high schoolers and families allowed to roam around at the course, playing holes out of order and at their own speeds. 

“Families are important,” Pardee-Jones maintains now, even after the course-as-business-venture failed and the property eventually sold. “The memories you make doing the fun things you do as a youth or teenager, that’s what’s going to stick with you. Not a tour of Disneyland. Where else were kids going to learn the right way to golf? At another course, you could do four people at a time. Here we had whole families get together out there.”

Jones, the man who took retirement as an opportunity to work, did constant physical labor at the course. Today, at 94, he still works on fixing things even without owning the golf course. On a recent afternoon, he sat in his living room annotating design drawings of the Lutak Dock. In his doctor’s script, he wrote his calculations and explanations for why one type of construction put forward by engineers would be clearly better for the tax-paying public than another. The triangle proofs in his notes are drawn with straightedges. 

“The good lord has put us here to help people, whether it’s practicing medicine, or doing a golf course,” he said, the drawings stacked in front of him on the table. 

For years, the couple practically lived out on the course. But eventually, they put it up for sale, because Jones says now, deadpan, he was “old and decrepit.” 

So arrived the other Jones. Clayton, who bid so much to buy the course, is neither old nor decrepit. The Montana native first came to the state rappelling out of helicopters in North Pole for the U.S. Forest Service, a bush pilot who shuttles friends to ski in the backcountry and describes himself as an “avid tinkerer.”

He also founded a company, Alaska Power and Engineering, in Haines 10 years ago. It’s headquartered in a small office on the golf course. Last year, Clayton Jones said, they managed $10 billion of energy infrastructure construction. 

According to the company website, it does a range of work, including construction oversight, inspections, and site management. There’s a solar project in Puerto Rico, solar in northern Indiana, solar outside Reno, four wind projects in Japan, battery storage in Glendale, battery storage in Saratoga Springs; the list goes on and on, from town to town. 

Despite the big business, he keeps a low profile. Earlier this summer, mayor and longtime resident Tom Morphet was sitting at the bar in Deerheart, talking loudly about Clayton Jones landing his private plane on the golf course. Morphet later said he hadn’t known what the younger Jones looked like; if he did, he would’ve realized Jones was sitting a few tables away from him in the room. 

Right now, Morphet is focused on the plane, but he’s long had an interest in public use of the golf course land. He had hoped, when the property was for sale, for public ownership.

Though he doesn’t much know Clayton Jones, the mayor describes him as “a type we’ve seen before.” In his decades in Haines, Morphet said, he’s seen a long string of private pilots at the heart of neighborly disputes: 

“I think those two things: expendable income, money for recreational aircraft, and kind of that wild west mentality, that anyone can do anything in Alaska. Those two forces keep returning in one form or another to our community,” Morphet said.

In a general sense, there’s a logic behind questioning why a successful businessman would pour so much into a golf course that, in a business sense, is an abject failure. The course continues to bring in no money, and it’s currently unadvertised to tourists and free to play for locals.

While course manager Joe Parnell in particular, as well as Stan Jones, do plenty of work, Clayton Jones handles much of the land himself. He bought two greens mowers this year from a club in Montana his parents belong to and had them shipped to Haines. The formerly artificial turf greens are now natural grass, demanding more regular upkeep. 

Meanwhile, Clayton Jones, like the previous owner, hadn’t owned a golf club until he bought a clubhouse full of them. He still doesn’t play, and when walking out on one of the fairways recently, he hesitated when asked which one he was on. 

Like the elder Jones, part of the value he sees in the land is that it continues to rise, continues to shake off the water. When he bought it, he figured it was getting to the point of fully drying out, and he was right. It’s vegetating now, with alders coming up in thickets, and there are no longer island greens by default at high high tides. That’s given him a huge stretch of waterfront acreage looking out at the mountains – the greatest untouched wilderness left, as he describes it.

Nevertheless, he doesn’t have any plans to subdivide the property, or develop it into anything else. There’s no “higher purpose” for it all, other than as a golf course, he says.

But a golf course for who?

Clayton Jones argues against the kind of characterization Morphet raises. The course, he insists, is about tying himself into the community, not separating himself from it. He only has a home in one place, and that’s in Haines, he makes sure to note.

“I’m a big believer in a local, year-round economy, so those are the people I take care of,” he said. “We built a successful company here in this community. This is our way of giving back.” 

“Those people in the dead of winter you see in the brewery?” he added. “That’s who I want to serve.” 

It’s not the most dramatic possible answer for why he has the land and the golf course in his backyard. But he’s delivering on his promise, with the course open Thursday through Saturday this summer, plus Wednesday afternoons. 

The other Joneses, Stan and Kathy, are glad to see the golf course still open to the public, still standing after their years of work. But when asked if he considers the course a major accomplishment, Stan Jones demurs. 

“Does it make any difference?” he asks, followed by a long pause. “It’s there if people want to use it and if the ownership wants it to be used. But I’m not going to lose any sleep either way. It would be nice if it was readily available to the community on a full-time basis but I wouldn’t care if there was a different interest to it.”

Stan Jones and Pardee-Jones now winter at a condo in Leisure World, a community in Mesa, Arizona. They have friends there and they dodge winter. 

But when they’re home in the summer, the self-described “old and decrepit” Jones is still out alongside Parnell putting in hours on the mower, in all sorts of weather. Parnell once joked that when he’s mowing the fairway with the rain whipping off the river, he imagines himself as a sort of Ernest Shackleton figure, the explorer who escaped Antarctica on an open wooden skiff. 

On a Friday morning earlier this month, the two of them went out to the course, and Stan Jones did donuts on the mower in the parking lot. He waited until someone looked up and saw before racing off toward the fairway by the river.

“Being born is a fatal condition,” Jones said. “I can die anytime. I’m happy for the things that I’ve been able to do, the life I’ve been able to live.”

And even though he claims he won’t lose any sleep anymore over the golf course, Jones sure lingers at the property even after the work is done. “This is my baby,” he said.

• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.