Epic History With The Country Journal: Along The Trails To Fairbanks & Eagle

COPPER RIVER COUNTRY JOURNAL 

Tourist Season In The Early 1900s 

The History Of Alaska's Roadhouses, And The Old, Well-Trodden Trails That Passed Through The Copper Valley 

Fairbanks-Valdez Stagecoach. (As shown in 'Historic Structures Report' by Wrangell-St. Elias Park, May 1991. 

The old Gold Rush-era trails started in Valdez. When the trail got to Gakona Junction, it branched out. One section of the trail went on to Eagle, and the other to Fairbanks. The current roads closely follow the old sled dog and horse trails.

Sullivan Roadhouse sign in Delta Junction
along the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail. (Photo, Country Journal)

A Trail Every 10 Miles

A hundred years ago, Alaska's tourism schedule was completely reversed from what it is now.  Today, it's the summer months – June, July and August – that form the core of the tourism season. 

But, back in the days of trails and horse-drawn stage lines, travel through Alaska was mainly done in the wintertime. Why? Because there were few bridges over the hundreds of rivers and streams that trails had to cross. So the optimum time to travel was winter, when the creeks and rivers were ice. Summer trails were muddy and wet. Winter was far better, in spite of the extremes of cold weather in open-air sleds. The trail to Fairbanks was especially busy in winter. 

Fairbanks-Valdez stagecoach at Tonsina Lodge sometime between 1905 and 1917. (Albert Johnson Photograph Collection in the Alaska Digital Archives) 

Wrote one guidebook:

"Through a part of the winter season, every day more than a hundred sleds laden with supplies and equipment would leave on their trip to the interior..."

Sleds along the trails arrived at various small lodges along the route, and travelers would pile in. Men, women, children... Some finally ending their long day out in the elements by lying on cold floors and under tables, as more and ever more people showed up.

There were never "too many" people in these cabin-like lodges on those subzero winter Alaskan nights. Late arrivals would accidentally kick awake the earlier folks who were snoring underfoot. Noisy latecomers scraped chairs across the floor, took off their heavy furs, and sat down to eat, drink and talk – long into the night – before rolling out their own well-used blankets and joining the others, piling onto the rough lodge flooring. And then, they too were awakened by even more loud and boisterous "winter tourists" coming in for the night.

In a way, the lodges and roadhouses were more like bomb shelters than hotels. Their job was to protect visitors from the dangerous, raging everyday killer instincts of your basic Alaskan winter.

One famous roadhouse was up at the top of Thompson Pass. The Pass is well known even today as having the thickest snowpack in America. This lodge at "Summit" was made of piles of rocks.  

It had two doors. One was at tundra level, for summer. The other, winter door was high on top of the building. 

One of the most important and horrifyingly cold roadhouses on the trail was at the top of Thompson Pass, in the snowiest spot in America. The sign for the winter  'Door' can be seen above the Summit Freighting sign on the building. (Photo from the walls of the Valdez Visitor Center, Country Journal) 

The top door was used by visitors arriving during the deepest snows. They'd scramble down through a sort of chute into the frigid little rock roadhouse, joining the dozens of others who were already inside – finding hot coffee and some sort of comfort in the snowy, foggy heights of the Pass in dead of winter.