Knik, Alaska: Little survives of early Cook Inlet commercial center

About 14 miles southwest of Wasilla on the western shore of Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm lies the hamlet of Knik. Its history may be most linked with the 1910 Iditarod Gold Rush and the...

Livengood Placers and its vagabond gold dredge

Warehouse at Livengood constructed by Livengood Placer, Inc as it looks today The building depicted in the drawing is an old warehouse near Livengood. Of heavy timber-frame construction, it has ship-lap siding (except for...

January 5, 2017 – Snowy, blustery day at the Chena River

I walked down to the Chena River last Thursday just before sunset. It had pretty much stopped snowing, but the wind was drifting in the tracks I had made just a few days before....

Parts of the Valdez-Eagle Trail can still be walked

Segment of Valdez-Eagle Trail at Eagle Trail State Recreation Site in Fall 2016 In the wake of the first wave of stampeders to the Klondike Gold Rush, U.S. Army Captain P.H. Ray was sent...

Vole tunnels in the snow – Fairbanks – December 2016

I went tromping through the woods today. We received about 15 inches of fresh snow in the last couple of days, followed by winds last night that strewed snow, leaves, branches and what-not around.  ...

Anchorages’s Fourth Avenue Theatre is opulent sister of Fairbanks’ Lacey Street Theatre.

  Anchorage’s Fourth Avenue Theatre as it looked in 1971 A few months ago, a funeral was held in Anchorage for the city’s Fourth Avenue Theater, Austin “Cap” Lathrop’s opulent re-imagining of what the...