Chitina, Alaska

We began our exploration of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park by arriving in the small town of Chitina on the evening of Sunday, July 10, 2016.

Chitina, Alaska, is a little town located northeast of Valdez and south of Tok.  Its history is intimately tied to the nearby Kennecott Copper Mine, the site of which is located in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and which has been preserved by the National Park Service.  Chitina is located on the west bank of the Copper River where the Chitina River flows into the Copper River.  Athabascans have lived in the area around Chitina for centuries.  Before 1900, Chitina was the site of large village whose population was slowly decimated by the influx of European Americans, disease and conflicts.

Copper ore was discovered in about 1900 along the northern edge of the Chitina River valley. This brought a rush of prospectors and homesteaders to the area.  Stephen Birch, an engineer from New York City who was the future President of the Kennecott Copper Company, homesteaded the site in 1908. The Copper River and Northwestern Railway (known as the CR&NR, or, more perjoratively, as the "Can't Run and Never Will"), built by the Kennecott Copper Company in the early 1900's under the initiative of Mr. Birch, enabled Chitina to develop into a thriving community by 1914. It had a general store, a clothing store, a meat market, stables, a tinsmith, five hotels, several rooming houses, a pool hall, bars, restaurants, dance halls and a movie theater.

Here is a photo of Chitina, during its heyday, with the railroad depot in the center and the Hotel Chitina to the left of and in front of the depot:

The mines closed in 1938 and the remaining support activities moved to what is now the Glennallen area. Chitina became a virtual ghost town. Otto Adrian Nelson, a surveying engineer for the Kennecott Mines, eventually bought up much of the town. He built a unique hydroelectric system that supplied electric power to all his buildings. He also supplied much of the town center with hot and cold running water.

In 1945, work began to convert the abandoned CR&NW railroad line from the port in Cordova, through Chitina, to Kennicott, into a highway, but work halted on that project when the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake (see our blog entry, "Anchorage Antics") collapsed much of the original railbed between Cordova and Chitina.  As a result, the only access to Chitina, and to McCarthy and the preserved town of Kennecott beyond, is via the Edgerton Highway and McCarthy Road, east from the Richardson Highway, north of Valdez.  The rail route from Chitina to Kennicott is now the roadway of the McCarthy Road.

While a number of structures in Chitina survive from the pre-1938 days, only three are on the National Register of Historic Places, and all three were constructed in the earliest decades of the 1900's.  One is the Hotel Chitina, which was recently relocated 8 feet eastward to make way for the Edgerton Highway and refurbished by its current owner.  This is where we spent the night before traveling on to McCarthy and Kennecott.  Great White is comfortably tucked in by the curb to the left of the hotel in the photo below:

This was not the original Hotel Chitina, which has been lost.  The original portion of this building was built in 1914 as the Arctic Brotherhood Hall -- the predecessors to the Pioneers of Alaska.  It was used as a community hall and later a theatre for moving pictures.  It was converted to a hotel and restaurant in the 1950's, operated into the late 1970's, and at some point was moved to the location of the original hotel.  It lay vacant for almost three decades, until the current owners bought and renovated it in the early 2000's.

The interior of the hotel has been completely renovated, but consistent with its original construction and decor.  So, as Kathy demonstrates below, our room was plain but cozy.  We had nothing to complain about it or our private bath or shower.

The second certified historic building is currently an operating liquor store:

The third of the three certified historic buildings had not been renovated and is almost exactly as it was when it was built.  The retail shop that was recently located in it has closed:

From the site of the former railroad depot, the view across Town Lake is much as it was in the historic photo above in this blog entry.  However, most signs of the railroad, other than some rails, have disappeared.

As referred to above, the CR&NW Railway, which supplied the Kennecott Copper Mine and moved its copper ore to port in Cordova, Alaska to the southwest, ran through Chitina.  To get past Chitina, the railroad company had to blast through a cliff on the east side of town.  Originally, the passage was to be a tunnel, but because of continued rockfall and damage to the tracks, the roof of the tunnel was blasted away and it became a cut through the rock hillside.  The present-day road from Chitina to McCarthy (more about that in a future blog entry) follows the railroad bed and runs through the historic railroad cut:

Through the highway cut, the road outside Chitina runs high along a bluff with breathtaking view north up the Copper River (below) and east up the Chitina River, which joins the Copper River near Chitina:

Other than minor tourism such as the hotel, some B&B's, and shuttle services, current activity in Chitina revolves around the dipnet fishing for salmon that occurs every summer.  Residents of Alaska are allowed to dip a large number of salmon during their spawning runs and Chitina is an accessible and popular place for this activity.

Chitina is no stranger to wildlife.  We were told that black bear frequent the area.  As it happened, one of the evenings we were staying at the hotel, the manager yelled to the diners that they should run out to the deck to catch a moose cow and her calf ambling through town.  Sure enough, the moosey pair calmly wound their way among RV's, construction trucks and buildings, down to munch some willow leaves at nearby Town Lake:

We thought this was a most fitting way to remember Chitina.  It is a colorful, quirky place, outdone only by McCarthy and Kennecott, which are next in our blog entries.