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 Harbor on enormous timber pilings. A tee across the seaward end of the dock allowed ships to pull alongside, and a warehouse at the tee sheltered incoming and outgoing cargo from Valdez weather.
Men and women travelling from or to the interior, primarily Fairbanks, crossed the dock in both directions. They shared it with incoming freight. One 360-mile road, the primitive and fragile Richardson Highway, connected the Valdez dock to Fairbanks.
Just twenty miles out of Valdez the Richardson Highway suddenly climbs into the Chugach Mountains at Keystone Canyon, climbs 3,000 feet in just a few miles to the infamous Thompson Pass. In a typical year, the snowpack in Thompson Pass accumulates to more than fifty feet—the height of a four-story building. In October each year, the pass closed and traffic on the Richardson came to a halt until the next May.
In May, as the pass opened, melt water from thousands of tons of snow cascaded down from the mountains to the ocean. The Valdez glacier thundered and groaned as ice melted and shifted. Water cascaded out of Thompson pass down through Keystone Canyon. The dirt and gravel Richardson dissolved into muck. And every year at least a few of its rough timber bridges washed away.
In summer travelers and freight jammed Valdez and her citizens scrambled to serve them. In October Valdez became a sleepy little town and Valdezians turned to surviving the winter.
Bush pilots provided limited transport to and from the interior, but Airplanes offered a tenuous connection at best. The difficulties and dangers of flying over Alaska’s frigid mountains kept the number of successful bush pilots to a legendary few.
A pure Alaska product, the subarctic Valdez that lay in wait for the young soldiers resembled no other small town anywhere on earth.
