Vintage Alaskan Villages: Chitina, Kennicott & Talkeetna

        
          by Wendy Johnson

Indecision weighed heavily on our minds as we headed down Alaska’s Richardson Highway toward the tiny town of Chitina. Our plan had originally been to navigate the slow and allegedly treacherous 61 miles of gravel road between Chitina and Kennecott – a legendary copper-mining-village-turned-ghost-town. But, it seemed we faced discouragement at nearly every turn.

The man at the place where we had rented our pickup camper in Anchorage told us in no uncertain terms that the road was a dangerous one. He said there had been some 120 breakdowns on it over the past summer alone, explaining that the highway department had dumped several loads of shale on the road to help stabilize it, and the sharp rock was responsible for damaging the tires on the vehicles of numerous unsuspecting motorists, leaving them stranded in virtually the middle of nowhere. “Don’t do it,” he warned. “If you do, I can guarantee that the company’s insurance won’t pay to get help for you, have the tire repaired, or, in the worst case scenario, to have the vehicle towed in to town. If I were you, I wouldn’t even think about it.”

Even the guidebooks tempered their glowing accounts of the rich history and lore of the old mining town at the end of the road with ominous warnings about the road itself. We had just about decided to scrap all plans to tackle it – just about.... But then, it was the young guide who accompanied us on our kayaking adventure in Valdez who was the first to scoff at all those warnings. “I’ll bet it was the RV rental place who told you all that,” he said. “They always say that because they don’t want to be bothered with any problems.” Only then did Ken and I start giving each other those questioning glances, wondering if maybe, just maybe, we ought to attempt the drive after all.... We honestly hadn’t even made a decision by the time we reached Chitina, which was located at the entrance to the ominous drive into Kennecott. When we stopped at the town’s only gas station to fill up the tank, Ken asked the proprietor, an elderly woman, about the drive and what kind of help we could get if we had a blowout and got stranded. She pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down the name, “Daniel Boone,” explaining to Ken that he was someone we could call if we needed help. “Of course, he may not get to you for a day or two, and it could cost you hundreds, but he’ll do it all right,” she said. “Yup, he’ll do it.”

Once again, Ken and I gave each other that questioning glance – and then, in the spirit of the vast and wild country around us, decided to try it. We headed out of town across a very modern bridge and traveled a couple of miles on good pavement before the road turned to gravel and wound up the side of a large hill. My heart began pounding, wondering if what we were doing was something that countless tourists before us had successfully attempted – of if was sheer lunacy. The gravel road is narrow, winding and rutted in places, and the rate of travel on it averages around 20 mph – slow going by anyone’s standards. We momentarily perked up when we passed a sign pointing in to a campground that also read, “Last repair station until Kennecott....” We pulled over to the side of the road, got out, and carefully wrote down the phone number of the place, thinking anyone had to be cheaper than Daniel Boone....

As we continued down the road, we began to relax a bit. It was actually built on the abandoned railroad bed of the Copper River & Northwestern Railway. “Railroad spikes infrequently appear on the washboarded surface,” I read out of the guidebook, “and rainy weather can make the road slippery.” Hmmm. It was the magnificent scenery along the way that really turned the tide for us, however, and took our minds (mostly) off whatever perils we might be facing out in the middle of nowhere. We very seldom passed another car, and those we did were headed out instead of in. At one point, I remember confidently remarking, “Why, we have gravel roads worse than this in northern Minnesota!”

Mile markers ticked off our very slow but steady progress, and we were nearly to the 17-mile point when we found ourselves on the approach to the Kuskulana Bridge. We were winding around the very steep precipice of a mountainside when we saw it in the distance ahead of us – 525 feet boards and rails so narrow that only one car can cross at a time. I cried out for Ken to stop so I could take a picture, and it was as I walked over to the edge of a near-perpendicular ravine that I discovered the antiquated bridge was suspended 238 feet above the Copper River! “Oh-my-God....” I uttered.

It didn’t help matters when we came upon a sign just before driving out on to the bridge that proudly boasted it had been built in 1910. Ken, who was at the wheel, kept his eyes straight ahead as we edged our way out onto the old structure, as I shakily shot photos of the vertical drop below us. It seemed like an eternity until we got to the other side, but, of course, we made it, and anything we might have encountered after that seemed comparatively mild.

With every pointed rock and stone we drove over, however, I couldn’t help wondering if one of them would result in an actual blowout – or merely a slow leak. I can’t say I truly relaxed the entire drive – which took three long hours to complete, but we made it.

At the end, there is a parking area next to a footbridge over the Kennicott River. From there on, the trek is on foot, unless you call one of the few establishments in either Kennecott or the little town of McCarthy at the foot of the mountain which sprang up as a support town during the heyday of the copper mining frenzy.

We used the nearby pay phone to call the Kennicott Glacier Lodge, the only establishment left in what is otherwise a ghost town perched on the edge of the Root Glacier. We didn’t have a reservation, but we hoped since it was so late in the season that there’d be a room available. We were told it was actually the last night of their season, and if there was enough food left in the kitchen to feed two more, they would take us. A quick check with the kitchen assured them the food would hold out, so we were in. A shuttle bus soon arrived to take us five miles up the mountain on an even more winding and rutted road than we’d come in on, but what awaited us at the end made the whole trip worthwhile.

      

Part IV

We bumped over the rutted road to the ghost town of Kennicott, Alaska, as it wound up the side of the mountain, and we were stricken by the sheer remoteness of the historic old mining town.

The history of Kennicott began in 1900, when prospectors spotted a patch of green hillside in the wilds of the Wrangell-St. Elias range that looked like good grazing ground for their pack horses. The grass, as fate would have it, turned out to be the green glint of an unparalleled vein of copper ore.

First opened on the site in 1911, the Kennecott Copper Corporation mined $21 million worth of ore in its first year and continued to make millions for its owners right up until the time its host town of Kennecott was abruptly abandoned just before World War II. Rumor has it that the closure was so sudden that tables were left still set for dinner....

At one point, the shuttle van in which we rode passed through what looked, for all the world, like someone’s front yard. On one side of the narrow road was a series of ramshackle buildings – one added on to the next – that apparently served as a house. On the other was a large garden, a pen with several pigs in it, a few old, lean-to sheds and a sled dog yard. In the middle of the road scratched a flock of chickens.

Our driver explained that the young couple who lived there had moved to this remote area of Alaska in order to set up housekeeping, adopt a sustainable lifestyle and “get away from it all” – which, for all practical purposes, they had. We later discovered, however, that they inevitably yielded to the forces of progress and accepted jobs with the National Park Service in order to support their existence out there.

In another five minutes, we finally arrived at the edge of Kennicott – and it took our breath away! Forty of the original wooden buildings are still standing, much as they had been nearly a century ago, and all still painted the barn red that had once made the community distinctive. Some had been repainted recently by the park service and gleamed a rich russet, while others had faded to a weathered pink over the years. The main street led through the now-largely-vacant town, where once families strolled to the silent movie theater in the wooden gymnasium, children ran and played on their way to the town’s little schoolhouse, the regulation-size ball field, or the wood-surfaced tennis court, and miners came and went on their road to riches in the hills above.

Being right there, the whole thing seemed so real that I could almost close my eyes and imagine I could see it.... Some would say it’s the ghosts. I tend to believe it’s just history that’s come to life. We scrambled off the van and climbed the long, white, wooden staircase to the town’s only hostelry – the Kennicott Glacier Lodge. Once a boarding house, the structure was destroyed by fire and later rebuilt, duplicating its original style, in 1987 as a lodge for visitors. The two-and-a-half story structure has a covered front porch spanning 180 feet across the front of it, overlooking a spectacular, panoramic view of the Wrangell and Chugach mountains, with the moraine of the Kennicott Glacier right almost directly beneath it. In the days when the mining town was in full swing, the shining white mass of the glacier itself loomed right at the foot of the town, and we read that the children were often made to wear dark “glacier glasses” to protect their vision from the blinding glare of the sun reflecting off it.

Almost immediately after we checked in at the front desk and stashed our gear in our small bedroom (the bathroom was down the hall), the first thing we did was order a cold drink and sit out on the front porch, soaking in the breathtaking sights before us. It was almost other-worldly – there was absolutely no trace of civilization in sight, and the sense of solitude was profound. It was hard to believe that a community of some 800 residents had once forged their way this far back into the wilds of Alaska and established one of the most sophisticated mining operations ever conceived – back then and ever since. Before dinner, we wandered down to the far end of town to its centerpiece – a massive 14-story wooden mill building where the copper ore was once processed. Incredibly, that and many of the other old buildings are still accessible to curious tourists.

Waking to the smell of fresh pancakes, scrambled eggs and sizzling reindeer sausage has to be one of the sweetest things in life – especially after spending the night in a ghost town in the Alaskan wilderness.

Our hosts at the Kennicott Glacier Lodge treated us like royalty, and it didn’t take long to revive our spirit of adventure. We headed out through the old mining town and along a densely shrubbed path that wound around the side of the hillside and over rushing streams, leading toward the Root Glacier.

After a 45-minute hike in the cold morning sunshine, we were just starting to warm up when the path began to wind precipitously downward and out onto the gravel-laden moraine of the glacier. Beyond, the glacier itself loomed cold and white, with treacherous crevasses punctuating its steep sides.

We had been told back at the lodge that there were guides who could be booked and crampons to be rented that would actually take you right out onto the glacier itself, but the cost was greater than we wanted to bear at that point. We mincingly ventured out onto the craggy ice a short distance, and Ken actually climbed to the top of the first short peak long enough to pose for a photo. As we headed back on the trail toward the lodge, we passed several hikers who were just headed out , including a couple with an infant strapped to the chest of one of them. We no longer felt quite so much like the bold adventurers!

The lodge was in the throes of closing down for the season, so after a quick lunch, we caught the shuttle van down the mountain to the little base town of McCarthy. We walked in on foot from the road and down the short main street of the historic town. This place, we had read, sprouted up during the heyday of the copper mining rush as a support camp for Kennicott. It reportedly offered the lonely miners everything from liquor to “ladies of the night,” and many of the original buildings are still standing.

This, unlike Kennicott, has many year-round residents, and the place to which we gravitated was a little clapboard hotel known as “Ma Johnson’s” (we took a picture of it to send to Ken’s mom!). The rooms were spartan but spotlessly clean, and the lobby was crowded with memorabilia of the town’s colorful past. Across the street was the saloon, still sporting the original long, wooden bar and adjoined by the town’s only dining hall.

We had expected that most of the residents of McCarthy would be old timers with a handle on its fabled history, but most seemed to be younger folks in search of an alternative lifestyle as far from civilization as they could manage. We learned how, back in the 1980s, one of its former residents had gone “bush batty” and launched on a shooting spree that left six of the townspeople dead and several more wounded....

The trip back out the 62-mile gravel road to civilization was a little less terrifying than on the way in – but daunting, nonetheless. Always, the specter of a tire blowout in the middle of nowhere haunted us, especially with the new-found knowledge that the wilderness can hold more chilling dangers than we had previously anticipated....

The little village of Chitina was a welcome sight at the end of the trail, and we camped not far outside the city limits, right at the base of Liberty Falls. The next morning, we headed northeast, retracing our steps along the Glenn Highway toward our final destination of Talkeetna.

We stopped in a little pullout for lunch between Sheep Mountain and Caribou Creek. As we gazed out on the colorful autumn mountainside, we spotted nearly a dozen white spots that were most definitely moving up near the rugged peaks of Sheep Mountain. Excited at the prospect of wildlife, we moved stealthily through the brush and shrubs, growing ever closer to the white spots. And sure enough, when we were several hundred feet directly below them, we could make out the shapes of Dall sheep, clinging impossibly to the sheer side of the mountain. Dall sheep are attracted to the mineral licks on the mountainsides, and they move along together in small groups, leaping deep crevasses and teetering along on the sparse footholds of scraggly underbrush. We moved steadily toward them, but we realized that what seemed like a short distance would probably take several hours of grueling climbing to traverse. Watching them was at the same time fascinating, and terrifying, as were transfixed with the possibility of seeing one of them lose its foothold and plummet down the side of the mountain. We at last decided we must move on, so we climbed back down to our pickup camper and continued along the Glenn Highway toward Talkeetna, the town from which climbers depart up the side of the mighty Mt. McKinley – and a fate more uncertain than that of the sheep.

      
I sat on a log bench in the center of Talkeetna as a golden retriever stared steadily at the Otter Tracks ice cream cone I was eating. This little Alaskan town (purportedly the inspiration for the once-popular television series, “Northern Exposure”) is a paradox between tourist attraction and vintage Alaskan village. The picturesque shops, restaurants and roadhouses are all situated in historic log buildings and the dogs outnumber the natives (well, almost!). The shop owners all seem to bring their dogs with them as they come to work each morning, and then the dogs are left to wander around town, snooze in the sunshine and mooch handouts from the tourists all day.

As we had awakened that morning in our campsite on the banks of the Talkeetna River, we debated whether to brew coffee and light the campfire – or to take the mile-and-a-half trek through the woods to town to have breakfast at the fabled Talkeetna Roadhouse. It didn’t take long to make up our minds – the Milepost (the “Bible” of Alaskan tourism) stated the Roadhouse is so famous for its homemade cinnamon rolls that you had to get there early or they’d run out!

With a growing feeling of desperation fueling our actions, we scrambled into our clothes and hot-footed it in to town (though the temperature was a frosty 29 degrees!). We were surprised to discover that the main street of town was nearly deserted. But as we rushed through the front door of the Roadhouse, we were greeted not only by the aroma of fresh ground coffee, but the pandemonium of a roomful of eager diners! This, it seemed, was the early-morning place to be....

With our apprehension continuing to grow (and our blood sugar continuing to dip!), we rushed over to the bakery counter and then heaved a sigh of relief as we discovered that there were still cinnamon rolls remaining! The waitress poured steaming mugs of hot coffee before she even took out her order pad. “Just what kind of cinnamon rolls do you want?” she asked. It turned out there were plain cinnamon rolls, cream-cheese-frosted cinnamon rolls, and raspberry cinnamon rolls with raspberry cream cheese frosting.... We sighed happily.

The dining area of the historic building is located in the former living room of the roadhouse, complete with authentic river stone fireplace, well-filled bookshelves and an ancient, chenille teddy bear resting in an old wooden rocker. The roadhouse still rents rooms upstairs to boarders, and we could hear the wooden boards overhead creaking as early risers walked about.

Suffice it to say that the cinnamon rolls – hot out of the oven – lived up to expectations, and we came back for more the next morning and even ordered a couple of them to go.



At first, they just seemed like riffles on the glistening surface of the river as it slipped over the glacial deposits along its shallow bottom. But then, one dark shadow darted at right angles to the current, and then, another sped after it, kicking up a furious spray in its wake.

Without realizing it, we had set up our campsite on the very edge of a river that was alive with the rush of silver salmon in the final throes of the journey that had taken them hundreds of miles upstream to their spawning place. Within them stirred that inexplainable and ancient urging that carried them, against great odds, back to the very place where they, too, were spawned – and the place where they would soon die following their last, greatest act.

The night before, my husband Ken and I had pulled into the secluded campground on the shores of the Talkeetna River in central Alaska. Since it was mid-September, the rush of tourist traffic had all but dried up, and we found ourselves virtually alone. With our rented pickup camper tucked into a spot right next to the river and the campfire hissing and crackling as the kindling took hold, I had set about preparing dinner. Ken decided to make a solo junket on foot upriver to try a few casts with his fly rod. A half hour or so later, he came back to camp empty-handed and with a certain peacefulness about him not associated the excitement we had experienced the week earlier while battling silver salmon at our son’s remote fishing lodge on Lake Creek. “No luck, huh?” I quizzed.

“Actually, I caught about 14 of them....” he replied. “But there was something different this time – maybe something about being out there on my own, just for the enjoyment of being there and casting the fly rod into the current. I found that I felt almost a sense of respect for the salmon, knowing how far they’ve battled to get to this point....”

I could understand his viewpoint. And after all, we already plenty of nice salmon filets in the freezer back at the float plane base in Anchorage to take back to Minnesota with us. This was the final leg on our two-week sojourn in Alaska, and it was a bittersweet time – yearning for home, but at the same time reluctant to leave this magnificent land. For the past two days, we had been charmed by the little village of Talkeetna and the history and color of Alaskan life there.

Each year, the town hosts an annual Moose Dropping Festival. And no, they don’t drop any moose – they throw shellacked moose “nuggets” at a board game similar to a coin toss! One of the biggest highlights of the festival is the Mountain Mama contest, where local moms celebrate the joys of the rural Alaskan lifestyle by competing in a combination of lumberjack and mothering skills. Wearing hip boots, each contestant carries a backpack with a 10-pound baby doll on her back and two bags of groceries in her arms across a course that includes a 20-foot log and a series of stepping stones. On the other side, she puts down the groceries to chop firewood, loads it into a wheelbarrow, and hauls it to the woodpile. Then she shoots a 30-pound bow at an archery target, pounds a nail into a 2x4, and attempts to cast a fishing line 100 feet between two standards.

By then, the “baby” needs changing, so she changes its diaper, washes it, and hangs it on the line. And then, each “Mountain Mama’s” chores are not complete until she prepares a traditional cherry pie.... A recent winning contestant completed the whole thing in three minutes, 55 seconds. We were disappointed to discover we had just missed the final trip of the season of the Alaskan Railroad’s “Hurricane Turn” – the train ride that Alaskan “locals” have used to reach their remote cabins ever since 1923 and one of America’s last flag stop trains. On this wilderness run, passengers can get off the train anywhere along its 55-mile route to hike the back country, cast a fly in a local stream, or pack in to a remote cabin. And when civilization calls you back again, all you have to do is step out by the railroad tracks at any point and wave a white flag to stop the train to pick you up!

We dragged our feet as we pulled out of Talkeetna on our final day. The colorful village, along with so many other of the fascinations of Alaska, was an unfinished chapter in our lives, yet to be completed..... Our flight from Anchorage to Minneapolis was quiet – very, very quiet – as we mulled over all of the things we had seen and done. I had decided to check through not only my luggage but my overnight case so I could hand-carry the freezer box bearing our precious catch of salmon we were bringing back with us.

We got back into Minneapolis late in the day and decided to spend the night with our daughter and her family in Burnsville and get a fresh start home in the morning. Whether we had been out in the wilderness too long, or if we were simply reluctant to face reality once again, we had both completely forgotten one thing.... When we had departed for Alaska two weeks earlier, heavy fog in Duluth had forced us to drive to Minneapolis at the last minute in order to catch our flight. And since we left our car in Minneapolis, we knew we’d have to drive back to Duluth. What we hadn’t counted on, however, was the fact that our luggage was checked all the way to Duluth!

And so, we arrived at our daughter’s house to spend the night with only the clothes on our back – and a box of frozen salmon!

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-Wendy Johnson is the chief manager and columnist for the Cloquet Pine Journal located in Cloquet, Minnesota. To submit feedback on this article she may be contacted at wjohnson@pinejournal.com

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