Wasilla man honored at Coal Miners Ball

SUTTON - It may have seemed to Herb Belanger that his life was passing before him Saturday.

Thats because friends, family and colleagues were taking the opportunity to tell stories about Belanger and his lifelong pursuit of coal, fish and the wind under his wings.

He was the 2000 inductee into the Coal Miners Hall of Fame, and a big part of the festivities at the annual Coal Miners Ball.

Retired since 1995, Belanger said that flying his Cessna has become his number-one pursuit in life, especially when he can take it to get to a fishing spot.

As mentioned in his introduction, by his cousin Pat Ward, Belanger realized his real passion when he learned to fly in 1967. He has owned four planes since then, and uses them to get into the Bush and into civilization.

He said his life, since retirement, has been spent going places.

I go flying, go snowmachining and go fishing, he said. Time goes by so fast.

His 50-year career as a heavy-equipment operator, many of those years spent in Southcentral Alaskas mines, included at least one fun chore that has evidently outlasted local memory. A story was told about how he walked a Cat to the Eureka mine, some 70 miles away.

No one was sure what it meant to walk a Cat.

Except for Belanger, of course, who later explained that he had to get the Caterpillar-brand bulldozer to the mine, and the only way was to, literally, walk it at bulldozer speed.

This was long before we had low-boys, he said of the trailers that now commonly haul bulldozers from one job site to another.

Born in 1930 on his familys ranch near Chickaloon, he was one of nine brothers and sisters. He was 10 when he shot his first moose, which happened when he was out tending trap lines.

He was about 16 when he decided that he was not cut out to be a farmer. In the summer of 1946, he went to work with his dad at a placer mine and started a 50-year career on heavy equipment. Since then, he has worked for mines, on construction jobs, plowed snow off all three of the Anchorage airports, worked for the Alaska Railroad and, in 1990, became an instructor at the operating engineers apprenticeship school.

I made a good living at it, he said, but its been a tough life. I hardly knew my kids, because I was away from home so much.

Belangers induction into the Hall of Fame highlighted a full evening of entertainment at the Coal Miners Ball, held at the Alpine Inn. There were more than 20 local performers.Photo: Character-building events, such as the construction of Wasilla Wonderland, are considered vital to a community under a plan being used by the Matanuska-Susitna School District and the city of Wasilla.

Photo by LEW PUMPHREY.