Tourist in the Wastes

[cjearkham]

In about 2 weeks, my wife and I will be vacationing in Alaska, specifically in the Anchorage and Denali National Park areas. We'll be about 50 miles due east of the location of the fictive settlement of Endurance from Walker in the Wastes. As part of my usual "Mythos Tourism" routine, I plan to bring a copy of Walker with me as a guide and take pictures of, and otherwise be on the lookout for, anything which seems to be of appropriate 1929 Alaska vintage.

Are there particular things which Keepers (and the idly curious) might want me to look for? To be clear, I'm not offering to buy souvenirs for anyone, but I will make copies of anything I find related and post them here, hopefully to be useful to those who run this campaign in the future.

[Aspects]

You may already have this on your plans, but head up to Hatcher Pass in Palmer to check out Independence Mine. Also as you head down toward Homer, you'll find a few small villages like Ninilchik that feature Russian influences.

[neorxnawang]

I lived in Anchorage for 15 years and still consider it home. Today it is the size of Toledo with a Seattle/Portland coffeehouse type culture, overlaid with oddly Republican politics (a strange combination), and much prettier surroundings than Toledo. It wasn't really a city or even much of a town until WW2, though, and most of the old stuff fell into the Inlet in the 1964 Earthquake. There are a very few older buildings in the Ship Creek area (the "old part" of downtown that did not fall into the mudflats in 64). You would have much better luck with preWW2 history in places like Nome and Fairbanks, but they are off the beaten track from where you'll be. Denali is a good trip though and you will go through some pretty rural railline communities on the way (Talkeetna, the farming community of Palmer). If you had a couple of days and wanted to see something historic and cool from 1900ish, I'd suggest you go out to McCarthy but that is a long haul.

[cjearkham]

Thanks, neorxnawang. As it happens, we're staying in the Ship Creek area and will be stopping in Talkeetna, so I'll pay particular attention while there. But we're pretty much at the mercy of the railroad for travel, so side trips are unlikely.

[cjearkham]

I've created a photo album ("Endurance, Alaska") under my profile to hold the images I think might be helpful to someone running Walker in the Wastes. The sizes of the photos I took are necessarily reduced, to match YSDC's limitations. If anyone would like the photos in their original sizes, send me a PM with an email address, and I'll send them to you. Images I found on the Internet are in their original sizes.

What I learned from visiting Alaska

1) Alaska suffered a major earthquake (9.2 on the Richter scale) in 1964. Much of downtown Anchorage was ruined and needed to be rebuilt, so there were few buildings surviving from 1929, and none I could get to in my limited time there. However, I did take pictures of older buildings in other areas, so you can use them as examples.

2) Says WALKER: "Endurance, Alaska, is a small, fictitious community which is essentially a collection of shacks surrounding a small trading post. It is located in a densely forested region of Alaska and is overshadowed by Mount Hayes (13,740 feet) to the north. The town has no electricity, telephones, or other modern conveniences and the road to Endurance is suitable only for horse and livestock traffic..."

Given the topography of the area, I'm placing the site of Endurance somewhere along modern Alaska Route 8, or the Denali Highway. This road was only built in 1957 and is mostly gravel today (says Wikipedia). Sometime after the thwarting of the Ithaqua cult, I'm positing the US Government sent troops into the area to round up the remaining inhabitants, a la the Innsmouth raid, and allowed the town to fall into ruin. The road project bulldozed what shacks remained.

If you go to Google Maps and search for "Mount Hayes, Southeast Fairbanks, AK", I suggest Endurance was about 100 km due south of the Mt. Hayes marker and about as far north-northeast of the Nelchina Public Use Area marker.

If you zoom in on the Denali National Park marker, Alaska Route 3 comes into view. We stayed in the Denali Bluffs Hotel, over 100 km to the west of the Mt Hayes marker. So the view I had of Mt. Hayes was at a similar distance to what someone might see from Endurance, although from a western perspective. The type of terrain and vegetation I saw in the park was what someone might see in Endurance, as I also saw it in late July, a few days before the time when the adventure takes place.

Denali National Park was founded in 1917 as Mt. McKinley National Park. This spurred some development in the area around the park's entrance, south of the modern town of Hayes. The National Park Service has a book, A History of the Denali - Mount McKinley, Region, Alaska, available on their website, at http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/dena/hrs.htm . Chapter 7 has some pictures of the Park entrance area from the '20s and '30s which will give the flavor of the area at that time.

While Endurance itself may have been primitive, it was not too far from access to the trappings of civilization. The Alaska Railroad had a depot for the National Park, maybe 150 km NNW (as the crow flies, longer by the meager roads) from Endurance. Investigators can easily take the train to the McKinley station and ride (or walk, if they're unable to ship their own rides on the train) from there. There's no village proper there, just the park concessioner, which may be willing to rent horses and wagons to improperly prepared investigators. Such people may also be lucky enough to find space in the Morino Road House, near the depot, where the only food available is beans and reindeer meat (and coffee, no doubt). More luxurious fare may be found at Curry, where a first class hotel was built, because steam engines could not make it all the way to the McKinley Park station from Anchorage in one day. See the railroad map I copied from a National Park informational sign. Curry could be used as a headquarters for a well-prepared band of investigators; others may have to settle for the Road House or, if they're lucky, find an unused trapper's cabin (but still have to forage for their meals; mind the grizzly bears and reindeer).

I've made a Google Map of the area. (As soon as I can figure out its proper URL, I'll provide it.)

3) "Intruders who scout the area and use the cover of darkness have a good change at penetrating the defenses." This area is not far from the "Land of the Midnight Sun". As I learned, it's still dusk around 11 PM in late July, so there won't be very many hours of darkness for investigators. I found a calendar program at http://www.sunrisesunset.com and generated one for the Denali National Park area (parallel with Endurance) for August 1929 (the earliest any investigators would be able to get to the area). It not only shows Sunset and Sunrise times, it gives two times for "Twilight" (as the sun is setting or rising) and the length of the daylight hours. *And* the phases of the moon, of course.

4) One of the more interesting items found, and one that would certainly affect unprepared investigators, is a native plant called "cow parsnip" by our guides (but in Wikipedia as "Giant Cow Parsley" and possibly already known to some of you as "Giant Hogweed"). Like the more familiar poison ivy, it has an oil which, if it gets on skin, has toxic effects. But in this case, it makes the skin hyper-photosensitive, so that within an hour, sunlight will cause the unlucky person to break out in a rash, progressing to burns within 48 hours. Wouldn't it be amusing to have someone trying to sneak up on Endurance at night pass through a patch of this stuff?

5) Regarding 1920s equipment in general, a museum in Talkeetna had an Eveready Battery Powered Radio on display. This was a wooden box at least 18 inches on a side and contain not only heavy radio equipment but also three large batteries, resembling modern yard equipment batteries in size. And this is just a receiver. "Sure, you can bring a portable radio. Where's the hand-truck you'll need to transport it?"