Valdez grew a bit between the Gold Rush and 1942, but not much. Robert Kelsey and his Valdez Dock Company had installed a rickety dock mounted on timber pilings across the mud flats at the water’s edge. The town had acquired a Presbyterian Church and a Café.
Gateway to the Richardson Highway
Valdez had acquired a newspaper, and various companies and individuals offered travelers buses and cars for transportation up the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Roadhouses, scattered along the Highway at one-day travel intervals, offered rough accommodations and meals.
Valdez Museum Walking Tour Link
A sleepy little town. Not so different, on the face of it, from the towns the young soldiers who would descend on Valdez in 1942 had left behind in the lower 48. But no… Subarctic Valdez resembled no other small town anywhere. Geography, geology and climate defined Valdez, and the Army might as well have sent the young soldiers to a distant planet.
Valdezians conducted their small-town affairs in a hostile and thoroughly dangerous environment. The San Francisco Examiner reported on Nov 13, 1941 “Six men, marooned since last Thursday in a territorial commission relief cabin on the Richardson Highway by heavy snow and gales, were rescued yesterday by Flyer Roy Dieringer.”
From the News Press, Ft. Myers, FL Jan 16, 1942, “You should see Valdez during a black-out on a dark of the moon night. I am a warden and have a certain district to patrol for lights. Honestly I am down more than up, snow is so treacherous in the dark, deep and shallow spots all look alike and trails and roads melt into wide open spaces.”
From the Nanaimo Daily News, November 10, 1941, “Gales of estimated hurricane velocity whistled through the Thompson Pass summit today grounding a rescue plane which yesterday brought Mark Neilsen and Mr. and Mrs. Ward Clay, an expectant mother, from the Territorial Road Commission relief cabin at Mile 35 where they had been marooned with six other persons for five days.”
From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, April 20, 1942, “The relaxing of winter’s grip on Fourteen Mile Slough, this weekend yielded the body of 71-year-old Jim Mooney, an aged sourdough and Richardson Highway woodchopper.”
Valdezians also conducted their affairs in almost total isolation from the rest of the world. Ships came to the dock and people and goods moved through Valdez—during the summer months.
During most of the year bush pilots provided the only connection to the outside—or to the inside, for that matter. Airplanes offered a tenuous connection at best. The difficulties and dangers of flying over Alaska winnowed the number of bush pilots down to a very few and turned that few into legendary folk heroes.