Tourism and National Park Service May Bring Alaska Ghost Town to Life

KENNECOTT, Alaska —  Half a century ago, federal officials made their first pitch to add to the National Park system the bright red buildings of this abandoned copper mill camp, the country’s largest ghost town.

Several decades and proposals later, the idea is alive again.

Appraisers have finished poking through 40 or so structures built in 1906 for Kennecott Mines Co., and a contract will be awarded soon to put a cost on removing any asbestos and industrial chemicals left behind, said Dick Martin, superintendent of Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which surrounds the frontier mining town and its adjacent glacier.

3,000 Acres

The deal would include about 3,000 acres plus buildings; Kennecott Copper Corp. has to donate the subsurface rights, Martin said on a recent tour of the decaying yet sound 14-story concentration mill and leeching plant.

“The figures go anywhere from zero to 4 or 5 million dollars. But those are shots at the moon. Until an appraisal is done and a cost of dealing with hazardous materials is known, no one is doing much of anything.”

The National Park Service hopes to know the costs by October or November, he said. “We’ll pass that along to headquarters either with a recommendation for acquisition or that it’s beyond our abilities or financial constraints.”

The first proposal to fold the privately owned historic mining town into the national park system was made in 1938, Martin said. “It came up again in the ‘40s, and I believe it was discussed again in the ‘50s. There were various proposals, like using the tramways for ski areas and the dormitories for hotels, but nothing has happened.

“I guess I’m a little more optimistic that something will be done soon because of the appraisals.”

Kennecott Mines Co. took its name from Kennicott Glacier in 1906. But the company, which still operates in Utah, misspelled the name.

Its 800 workers may be gone, but many of their books and papers still lie on desks and most of the machinery that they used to crush and extract ore from one of the richest copper deposits ever known remains.

From 1911 to 1935, the Kennecott deposit, about 235 miles east of Anchorage, produced 4.6 million tons of ore that was refined into 591,535 tons of copper and 9 million ounces of silver worth some $300 million.

The discovery of vast copper deposits in Chile and economic dislocations brought by the Great Depression killed Kennecott, even though millions of tons of high-grade ore may still lie within Bonanza Ridge, which rises several thousand feet behind the processing facilities.

But it is history that makes the site so valuable, Martin said. “There’s always going to be some great value here for the public, even if some of these buildings fall down. The more that are standing the better, clearly. But there always will be a great deal of value because of the people who lived here, the scenic value and what they did here.”

With help from volunteers, he said, it might be possible to make the area safe for visitors to roam outside the buildings, but it would be “simply beyond our ability” to pay for restoring all the buildings to safe condition. “We may fix up one of the buildings for visitor contact or interpretation.”

Only a few tourists now walk or ski the trails leading to mines with names such as Bonanza, Mother Lode and Jumbo. People either fly to the 4,000-foot gravel airstrip at McCarthy, five miles down a rutted road, or they drive scenic Edgerton Highway to its terminus at the Kennicott River, then pull themselves hand-over-hand on a cable tram that separates the road from the wilderness.

At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is the nation’s largest national park. It abounds in wildlife--Dall sheep, buffalo, caribou, moose, wolves and brown and black bear, among others. It also includes nine of the 16 highest mountains in the United States. Mt. Wrangell is an active volcano with steam and the odor of sulfur wafting near its summit.

Gold, Silver Mining

Miners still extract gold and silver from more than 900 active claims within the park, which is six times the size of Yellowstone but, because of its remoteness, has fewer visitors in a year than Yellowstone on a summer weekend.

More than a million acres within the park are privately owned. Several of the buildings and the Kennicott Glacier Lodge would not be part of the ghost town buyout, Martin said.

“If it’s acquired, we would like to work with other land owners on public access and architectural designs and types,” he said. “That’s not to get public access across properties, but to set up some definitions of what would be open and what would be off-limits.”