Kennecott Mines

Kennecott is a company town left almost intact where a copper boom ended: a cluster of wooden buildings stacked up a hillside above the Kennicott Glacier, deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska. Its landmark is the concentration mill, a fourteen-storey building, raised mainly between 1909 and 1923, into which aerial tramways delivered ore from the mines high above, and down through which the richest rock was sent by chute straight to the sacking floor.

The story began in 1900, when two prospectors, "Tarantula" Jack Smith and Clarence Warner, noticed a patch of green high on a ridge that looked like a meadow in an impossible place. It was malachite over rich chalcocite, and the claim they staked became the Bonanza mine. The mining engineer Stephen Birch secured the ground and brought in the Guggenheims and J.P. Morgan, whose Alaska Syndicate financed a railway 196 miles to the port of Cordova. The first ore train ran in 1911; in 1916, the peak year, the mines produced copper worth $32.4 million. The camp took its name from the glacier, itself named after the naturalist Robert Kennicott, and the company's spelling with an "e" is usually put down to a clerical slip.

Five mines fed the town: Bonanza and Jumbo high on Bonanza Ridge, Mother Lode on its far side, Erie above the Root Glacier, and the seasonal open-pit Glacier mine. At the mill, poorer ore was crushed, jigged, leached with ammonia in a plant built in 1915, and floated in a flotation plant added in 1923. When the high-grade ore ran out the mines closed one by one, and the last train left on 10 November 1938. A later attempt to demolish the town was never finished, so the mill, the leaching plant, bunkhouses, the machine shop, the company store, the recreation hall, the schoolhouses and the firehouse still stand.

Kennecott became a National Historic Landmark in 1986, and the National Park Service acquired much of the mill town in 1998 and has been stabilising and restoring its buildings. Beyond the town, trails lead onto the Root Glacier and up to the ruined bunkhouses and tram towers of the Bonanza, Jumbo and Erie mines, all long, strenuous day hikes; the route to Erie runs along cliffs above the Stairway Icefall.

Getting there

Kennecott sits at the end of the McCarthy Road, a 59-mile gravel road that starts near Chitina, off the Edgerton Highway; the drive from Anchorage takes around seven to eight hours. Vehicles are left at the Kennicott River, where a footbridge leads to the small settlement of McCarthy. The mill town is about 4.5 miles (7 km) further on, served in summer by a private shuttle. McCarthy also has a gravel airstrip used by air taxis. The main gateway by air is Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC); the nearest airfield by straight-line distance, Northway (ORT), about 170 km away across the mountains, is of little practical use for getting here.