Glacier route? Not really. When, in 1898, men and women headed for the Yukon came to the Valdez Glacier they came in ignorance. Some left it a lot more educated. Some never left it at all. Valdez in Later History You hear that gold in some place called the Klondike is making men filthy rich. …
Tag Archives: Valdez
Rumble the Ground and Stir Up the Sea
Rumble the ground and stir up the sea, every now and again, as if Alaskans didn’t have enough to contend with from mother nature, earthquakes do that under them. They are relatively used to it. During the last few years Chris and I have worked on Far North History, traveled to the region twice and …
Gateways to the Alcan
Gateways… The Alaska Highway that General Hoge and the Corps proposed to build in 1942 would traverse some of the most remote mountains and forests on earth. And if men traverse the North Country on primordial paths, they access those paths through equally primordial gateways. Of the seven regiments that Hoge launched into the North …
Three Hundred Sixty-five Miles
Three hundred sixty-five miles of Richardson Highway, barren of towns or settlements lay between Valdez and Fairbanks when Richardson built it just after the turn of the century. For travelers, the rough road took a toll in exhaustion, and winter added snow and bitter cold. In summer people travelled it in wagons pulled by mules …
Menace of Mentasta
Menace confronted the soldiers building the Alaska Highway at every turn. But the black soldiers of the 97th had to conquer the most fearful menace of them all—Mentasta Pass. At the turn of the century the Army had built a pack trail from Valdez to Eagle. Alaskans found the trail dangerous, impossible to maintain and …
Suddenly Climbing
Suddenly climbing into Keystone Canyon, a truck driver found himself working his clutch, hurriedly shifting down through the gears to the lowest one. Driving from the Port of Valdez toward the interior of Alaska he had just covered about 15 miles of rough, muddy, but misleadingly flat road. Now as his truck struggled up into …
Every Bit of the Alaska Highway
Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …
Slana
Slana, Alaska lay 190 miles up the Richardson Highway from where the soldiers of the 97th jammed into their tent cities near Valdez. Assigned to start building road at Slana, they first had to get there. The trucks that would haul the soldiers to Slana began to make their way through Seattle, onto a motley …
Twelve Hundred Black Soldiers
Twelve hundred black soldiers jammed the hold as the David Branch pulled into frigid Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. The next morning when the ship tied up to the dock and dropped its gangplank, they waited to get off the ship and find somewhere to eat and sleep. To complicate things, strict orders …
Winter Still Gripped Valdez
Winter in Valdez, Alaska lasts well past April. The David Branch carried 1200 unsuspecting young soldiers 1,600 nautical miles north from springtime Seattle into a vastly different world. Valdez connected the rugged northern interior of Alaska to the oceans of the world. A long wooden dock traversed the mud flats at the edge of Valdez …