Glenn Highway’s King Mountain Lodge was once an essential stop | Sketches Of Alaska

The Glenn Freeway, which winds alongside the Matanuska River earlier than climbing over Tahneta Go to the Copper River Basin, opened in 1943. Within the late Forties the roughly 145-mile part of slim, gravel-surfaced highway from Palmer to Glennallen might simply take most of a day to drive. By the Fifties there have been eight lodges working alongside the freeway to serve the weary traveler.

Most of these lodges, whereas accommodating through-traffic alongside the highway, additionally catered to area of interest clientele, usually hunters. King Mountain Lodge, situated at Mile 78 of the Glenn Freeway, one mile south of the confluence of the Chickaloon and Matanuska Rivers, was one of many early Glenn Freeway Lodges.

“Lou Jacobin’s Vacationers and Sportsmen’s Pictorial Information to Alaska,” one of many earliest Alaska Freeway journey guides, signifies that the lodge in its earliest incarnation was known as the Chickaloon Roadhouse.

The earliest point out that I can discover for the Chickaloon Roadhouse (within the 1949 Jacobins’s information) states that the roadhouse, operated by Ray Grasser, specialised in guided hunts up the Chickaloon River into the Talkeetna Mountains. It additionally acknowledged that roadhouse services included non-public cabins, eating room, cocktail lounge, gasoline and oil service.

The roadhouse modified its title in about 1955 to King Mountain Lodge — named after a outstanding close by peak, Kings  Mountain. The mountain, and adjoining Kings River, are named for Al King, a neighborhood prospector.

In 1957 Jack Betts took over the lodge’s operation, ultimately shopping for the lodge from Ray Grasser. Betts’ spouse, Cecille, in her 2003 e-book, “Reluctant Pioneer,” writes that in its early years, the lodge constructing included a small cafe; a bigger bar room adorned with trophy heads of sheep and goats and an unlimited brown bear rug; and 4 small rooms within the again for the residing quarters. There have been additionally 5 small rental cabins behind the lodge. A five-Kw generator supplied electrical energy to pump water from a properly, function the lodge’s lights and home equipment, and run the one gasoline pump in entrance of the lodge. Cecille additionally associated that when pumping gasoline, not one of the home equipment within the lodge could possibly be used.

Betts regularly expanded the lodge services to incorporate a full-service storage, a small motel unit and trailer park, an airstrip on the north financial institution of the Matanuska River behind the lodge, a cable-crossing of the river, and a small cabin on the river’s south facet. The Quonset hut proven within the drawing was constructed in 1959 as a eating corridor for a building crew staying on the lodge whereas engaged on the microwave facility at Lion Head Mountain, 30 miles to the north.

Betts bought the lodge in 1968 and it was operated by a sequence of homeowners till the early 2010s when it lastly closed, sufferer of the long-term decline of Alaska’s rural freeway economic system. Now the lodge and repair station are vacant; the motel unit, trailer park and the river cable-crossing are gone; and the airstrip sits deserted.

The final profitable proprietor/operator, Judy Nix, was capable of prosper by internet hosting particular occasions, and at the moment the lodge served because the de facto social heart for the freeway group strung out between Sutton and Chickaloon. For a time the lodge had the one water properly within the space, and the one cellphone (now there’s a cell-phone tower behind the lodge).

Enhancements in automobile energy, gas effectivity and reliability; coupled with highway enhancements and better pace limits; and the rise of self-contained recreation automobiles, have meant that vacationers are much less and fewer prone to cease on their journeys to some other place. Except lodge operators can re-create themselves as area of interest locations their companies typically wither away.

Ray Bonnell is a contract artist, author and longtime Fairbanks resident. See extra of his paintings at www.pingostudio.us. 

Sources:

• “Lou Jacobin’s Vacationers and Sportsmen’s Pictorial Information to Alaska.” Alaska Vacationer Information Firm. 1946-1960

• Matanuska-Susitna Borough property information

• “Proprietor makes King Mountain Lodge extra than simply burger joint.” Ed Bennett. In Alaska Journal of Commerce. 7-1-2001

• “Reluctant Pioneer.” Cecille Betts. Privately printed. 2003

• “The Milepost.” Alaska Northwest Publishing. 1949-2005

• “Occasions are powerful for Glenn Freeway tourism companies.” Rindi White. In Anchorage Every day Information. 7-21-2009