Understanding Kennicott and McCarthy

    The sister towns of Kennicott and McCarthy have been through several iterations over the last century.  Physical and cultural remnants of each iteration are still to be found today.

    As with many western locales, it all started with mining.  The hills around Kennecott produced millions of tons of ore in the early 20th century, feeding the world’s newfound desire for electricity.  The Kennecott Copper Corporation processed all that ore as it came down from the mountains in trams, at the massive Kennecott Mill.  While Kennicott became the all-business, company town surrounding the mill, McCarthy quickly became the hub for miners and residents who worked in or supported the mining operations.  Miners and other townsfolk could unwind and socialize in the saloons and boarding houses, or find that special someone-for-the-moment in one of several brothels.  McCarthy was the “wild west”... well after the wild west had been tamed in the lower 48.

 

    The mine shut down in 1938 when the copper reserves were depleted, leading to a sharp decline in the town's population.  In fact, the story goes that residents were given 24 hours notice before the last train left town…. and the community was a ghost town within a matter of days.

    Over the ensuing decades, various folks would come and go from Kennicott and McCarthy.  At first, it was folks still convinced there was enough copper left in the hills to make a profit.  But soon those folks realized there was far more money in the salvage and resale of all that “stuff” that had been abandoned so quickly by the Kennecott Copper Corporation and its former employees.  Squatters and homesteaders arrived over the years, while hunters and adventurers would use McCarthy as a base to access the wilds beyond.  By the 60’s and 70’s, an odd amalgamation of these homesteaders, hunters, explorers, Bohemians, draft-dodgers and others had made a community for themselves in McCarthy - a community bound by the ideal that they were far from civilization, and therefore more free than most of the rest of the world.
 

     Of course, by the late 1970’s, the Wrangell and St Elias mountain ranges were beginning to be explored by hikers, backpackers, paddlers, climbers and other outdoor adventurers.   And in 1980, Wrangell - St Elias National Park was created as part of sweeping federal legislation that set aside millions of acres of Alaska for parks and wilderness.  All of a sudden, McCarthy was set to be potentially reborn as a company town - this time for the biggest company in all the land, the dreaded federal government.

     The last forty years have seen internal deliberations and conflict within Kennicott and McCarthy, as this community wrestles with the questions of how to grow, how to not cede local control to the park service, and how to embrace the increasing amounts of tourism - all while keeping the independent and remote spirit that brought folks together here in the first place.
 

     For a full telling of the history, we found Tom Kizzia’s “Cold Mountain Path” to be a great read.  It helped us to understand just how weird of a place we were visiting, and allowed us a level of appreciation and fondness for this community that we were pretty skeptical of when we first drove through on day one.