Dynamite Road: Building the Seward Highway

Part 1

By Ted Spencer
Special to the Turnagain Times

The Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm and south over the Kenai Peninsula to Seward is arguably the most beautiful road in Alaska. As travelers glide along over the asphalt marveling at the incredible Alaskan scenery and wildlife, few of them realize the mammoth effort and hardship it took to build the road.

The Seward Highway of today took nearly a century to build and involved the labor of thousands of pioneer Alaskans to accomplish.

The story is well known about the voyage of the British Captain James Cook who attempted to sail the length of Turnagain Arm in 1778. Turned back by the virulent tides and emerging mud deltas, the turbulent fiord attained its name on Cook’s map.

The terrain on the North shore was of towering rugged rock cliffs and perilous daggers of rock jutting into the muddy waters of the Arm. The south shore was more benign with a sweeping gentle shoreline carpeted with forest and snowmelt rivers and creeks. Here gold and other valuable minerals were discovered with the arrival of the Americans in the late 1800s.

The settlements of Sunrise and Hope sprang up complimenting the enclaves of civilization at Tyonek, Ladd Station and Knik on the shores of Cook Inlet. One hundred miles away on the shores of the Gulf of Alaska, the town of Seward took hold in 1905. Early travelers, natives, explorers, miners and adventurers still hiked into the area over the Portage Glacier Pass Trail. Arriving by boat on Passage Canal in the area of today’s Whittier rail port, travelers could take a steam boat to Cook Inlet once they reached the shores of Turnagain Arm.

The big dream though was to find a way to travel expeditiously into Alaska’s vast Interior. The new Alaska frontier was chock full of minerals, timber and coal, a prime source of energy for the steam powered world.

The visionaries of the new Industrial Age saw that “railroad connections with open ports on the Pacific were necessary for utilization of the fertile regions of the Alaska interior and the mining resources, and to open up a large region to the homesteader, the prospector, and the miner, ….that construction of two independent railroad systems to be ultimately connected and supplemented was advisable, one to run Cordova by way of Chitina to Fairbanks, and the other from Seward around Cook Inlet to the Iditarod River.. (with) the 733 miles of new construction involved.”

A government department was created known as the Alaska Engineering Commission. They sent forth survey teams to reconnoiter the region and in 1915 they submitted their discoveries to President Taft. At the President’s direction a massive amount of supplies and equipment were sent to the mouth of Ship Creek on the mudflat shores of Cook Inlet. Hundreds of men swarmed to the area in hopes of jobs on the new railroad construction. A makeshift community of tents quickly sprang up. Lo and behold—the birth of Anchorage.

The grueling task of building the Turnagain Arm thoroughfare got underway. Using liberal amounts of dynamite, crews began blasting away the rock cliffs walls of the north shore. Work went on winter and summer until a narrow “construction road” was completed. For the first time people could traverse from Cook Inlet to the thresholds of the Kenai Peninsula via land. The initial mode of transportation was by horse drawn sled.

An undulating rail line was soon to follow. Using the rock debris from blasting down the cliffs, a rock rail bed was laid down upon which the rail tracks were placed. By 1923 a winding rail line hugged the contours of the jagged shoreline of Turnagain Arm. It was slow going but now Alaskans could travel by rail in relative comfort from Seward along the Gulf of Alaska all the way to the Interior town of Fairbanks on the doorstep of the Yukon River.

Part 2 next issue Sept. 16.

Ted Spencer is the Executive director of the Prince William Sound Museum in Whittier.