By car:  We fretted and debated as we considered whether to drive the 58 miles out Edgerton Road into the Park.  Scary stories litter the internet blogs about railroad spikes and ties jutting out of the road surface (it is built on an old rail bed) just waiting to puncture a tire.  One is led to believe that is as all teeth chattering washboard and car swallowing potholes.  We briefly considered taking a shuttle.  Anyone that knows Kent knows that even thinking of having someone else drive us somewhere is a rare event at our house.  Ultimately, we took our own car and took our sweet time, three hours each way.  It is by far not the worst road we have been on.

By air: 70 glorious minutes dancing among the mountain tops and glaciers.  We went flightseeing in a little 4 seater with Austin at Wrangell Air.  What a marvelous way to see this magnificent place.  A short way into the flight I lost track of which mountain was which and the names of many glaciers and rivers.  I was just totally absorbed in watching it unfold all around us.  Neither pictures nor words can really describe the sights.  The scale is nearly impossible to fathom as we glided along mile high cliffs, unbelievably broad braded rivers, and glaciers that are miles wide and covered with fissures and crevasse that are hundreds of feet deep.  The flow patterns of glacier ice and ancient uplifted stone are amazing.             

But why here?

This park has two goals: to preserve this vast wilderness and to preserve and interpret the human footprint on this land.  Specifically the mining of ultra high grade copper ore by the Kennecott Mining Co in the early 1900s.  That mining is why this washboardy, potholey, road to the heart of the wilderness exists.   We traipsed through Kennecott, the mining town, and learned all about ore processing/concentrating and marveled at the 196 mile railroad they built solely to move that ore to the coast.  I can’t help but marvel at the whole process.  They found this lode of ore in the middle of nowhere.  They convinced investors to fund it to the tune of $30 million (1920 dollars) before they saw the first load of ore come out.  They actually constructed the processing plant perched in a glacier filled valley dug mines on the mountainsides far above it.  They got the ore out of there and to market in NYC at what they calculate was .05/lb to yield some $200,000,000 in profits before the lode was depleted.  Then, they just walked away and left it all; another ghost town with an amazing story.