Valdez offered a point of entry–sort of.
Getting into Alaska and Northern Canada proved, over the years to be the biggest struggle for people who came to Alaska and Northern Canada. They found ways; and, in the finding, created a dramatic and fascinating history. Work on our next book has brought us to one of those histories, the path through Valdez.
The North Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean surround the unimaginably vast and forbidding territory of Alaska on three sides. The equally vast and forbidding wilderness of Northern Canada borders it to the east. Alaska offered little to draw outsiders until, late in the 19th century, a few prospectors began to discover gold in parts of the interior—especially along the Yukon River near the Canadian Border and, at the turn of the 20th century, most especially across the border in the Klondike.
On one of the very few routes to the Klondike, gold seekers came by ship up the inside passage, climbed off the ship onto the mud flats where the little town of Valdez sprouted, and confronted the towering Chugach Mountains. Directly across the mud flats rose the massive, Valdez Glacier. Its base, folded by time and erosion, climbed abruptly to two enormous peaks separated by a deep cut. The first prospectors loaded themselves and their sleds and pack animals and climbed up the gigantic glacier into the interior, and a lot of them died in the attempt. The glacier featured enormous accumulations of snow, as enormous as any in the world. Deep crevasses and avalanches swallowed and smothered men and women and animals passing through it.
Another Route–Yukon River Route
By hook or by crook miners came to the Klondike, trailing suppliers, gamblers, hookers and thieves. The Royal Canadian Mounties came to keep order. Across the border near Eagle, Alaska the United States Army came to do the same.
Needing a supply route from Valdez, the Army sent a soldier named Abercrombie to create one. From sea level at Valdez, Abercrombie bypassed the glacier, climbed into the towering mountains by way of Keystone Canyon and Thompson Pass. From the pass his rough “goat trail” wound through mountains and across rivers to Eagle on the Yukon.
Just a few years later, when Major Wilds Richardson came to build an actual road, things had changed. The Klondike Gold Rush had ended, and Fairbanks had become a more important destination than Eagle, so Richardson aimed his road at Fairbanks. He upgraded Abercrombie’s trail as far as Gulkana, and beyond to Slana to service the Nebesna Mines. But he left the road from Gulkana to Slana a branch road. Richardson’s main highway left Abercrombie’s path at Gulkana, went north through Big Delta, across the Tanana River and on to Fairbanks.
By the 1940’s the little town of Valdez billed itself as the “Terminus of the Richardson Highway.”
A Great Site on Roadhouses Along the Abercrombie and the Richardson