Chistochina - McCarthy
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27 Juli 2017 | Verenigde Staten, McCarthy
1)The McCarthy Road is a gravel-surfaced road that runs from the end of the Edgerton Highway in Chitina, Alaska, to about 1 mile (1.6 km) outside of McCarthy, Alaska. McCarthy Road starts at the end of the Edgerton Highway in Chitina. The road is gravel-surfaced, and often very rough with many washboards and sharp turns. The route follows the railbed of the defunct Copper River and Northwestern Railway, and utilizes the spectacular Kuskulana Bridge, built in 1910, spanning 238 feet (73 m) high above the Kuskulana River at mile 17. It is one of two roads leading to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, though it is not part of the park, and gives access to the abandoned copper mines at Kennecott. The road does not actually lead all the way to Kennecott; visitors must cross the Kennecott River by a footbridge built in the 1990s. The road is not maintained during winter. The road was the inspiration for the 2004 book The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland by Pete McCarthy.
2)McCarthy is a census-designated place (CDP) in Valdez-Cordova Census Area, Alaska, United States. The population was 28 at the 2010 census. McCarthy is 193 km (120 mi) northeast of Cordova at the foot of the Wrangell Mountains. According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP of McCarthy has a total area of 148.3 square miles (384 km2). None of the area is covered with water. It is connected to the outside world via the McCarthy Road spur of the Edgerton Highway from Chitina, and must be passed through to reach Kennecott, a destination of tourists seeking access to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Historically, from the end of the road one had to cross the Kennecott River and then a smaller stream using manually propelled ropeways, but a footbridge was built in the 1990s. Visitors can walk to McCarthy in about 15 minutes, although shuttle vans and busses are available during the tourist season from the bridge to both McCarthy and Kennecott.
Edge of Alaska, Discovery Channel (2014)
De spanningen lopen hoog op in het oude vervallen mijnstadje McCarthy dat verscholen ligt in de ijskoude wildernis van Alaska. De 42 inwoners wonen hier bewust omdat ze in vrijheid willen leven, ver weg van de bewoonde wereld. Maar een van hen, Neil Darish, wil McCarthy weer op de kaart zetten en toeristen trekken met zijn opgeknapte hotels en restaurants. Dit tot grote ergernis van de meeste inwoners.
Afgelopen zomer waren er al ineens 20.000 toeristen die een kijkje kwamen nemen in deze spookstad en als het aan Neil ligt worden dat er alleen maar meer. Hij heeft grootse plannen om een oude mijn met een stelsel van 130 kilometer aan tunnels te restaureren en open te stellen voor het publiek. De oude inwoners vrezen dat dit het einde betekent van hun vrije leven en komen in verzet. Veel tijd voor discussie is er echter niet, want ondertussen bedreigt een troep hongerige wolven het vee van het stadje en is samenwerking geboden om in elk geval deze indringers buiten de deur te houden.
3)Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is a United States national park and national preserve managed by the National Park Service in south central Alaska. The park and preserve was established in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.[3] This protected area is included in an International Biosphere Reserve and is part of the Kluane/Wrangell–St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek UNESCO World Heritage Site. The park and preserve form the largest area managed by the National Park Service in the United States by area with a total of 13,175,799 acres (20,587.186 sq mi; 53,320.57 km2), an expanse that could encapsulate a total of six Yellowstone National Parks.[4] The park includes a large portion of the Saint Elias Mountains, which include most of the highest peaks in the United States and Canada, yet are within 10 miles (16 km) of tidewater, one of the highest reliefs in the world. Wrangell–St. Elias borders on Canada's Kluane National Park and Reserve to the east and approaches the U.S. Glacier Bay National Park to the south. The chief distinction between park and preserve lands is that sport hunting is prohibited in the park and permitted in the preserve. In addition, 9,078,675 acres (3,674,009 ha) of the park are designated as the largest single wilderness in the United States.
Wrangell–St. Elias National Monument was initially designated on December 1, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter using the Antiquities Act, pending final legislation to resolve the allotment of public lands in Alaska. Establishment as a national park and preserve followed the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. The park, which is bigger than the country Switzerland, has long, extremely cold winters and a short summer season. It supports a variety of large mammals in an environment defined by relative land elevation. Plate tectonics are responsible for the uplift of the mountain ranges that cross the park. The park's extreme high point is Mount St. Elias at 18,008 feet (5,489 m), the second tallest mountain in both the United States and Canada. The park has been shaped by the competing forces of volcanism and glaciation. Mount Wrangell is an active volcano, one of several volcanoes in the western Wrangell Mountains. In the St. Elias Range Mount Churchill has erupted explosively within the past 2,000 years. The park's glacial features include Malaspina Glacier, the largest piedmont glacier in North America, Hubbard Glacier, the longest tidewater glacier in Alaska, and Nabesna Glacier, the world's longest valley glacier. The Bagley Icefield covers much of the park's interior, which includes 60% of the permanently ice-covered terrain in Alaska. At the center of the park, the boomtown of Kennecott exploited one of the world's richest deposits of copper from 1903 to 1938, exposed by and in part incorporated into Kennicott Glacier. The mine buildings and mills, now abandoned, compose a National Historic Landmark district.
3) Kennecott, also known as Kennicott and Kennecott Mines, is an abandoned mining camp in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area in the U.S. state of Alaska that was the center of activity for several copper mines. It is located beside the Kennicott Glacier, northeast of Valdez, inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The camp and mines are now a National Historic Landmark District administered by the National Park Service. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In the summer of 1900, two prospectors, "Tarantula" Jack Smith and Clarence L. Warner,[4] a group of prospectors associated with the McClellan party, spotted "a green patch far above them in an improbable location for a grass-green meadow." The green turned out to be malachite, located with chalcocite (aka "copper glance"), and the location of the Bonanza claim. A few days later, Arthur Coe Spencer, U.S. Geological Survey geologist independently found chalcocite at the same location.
Stephen Birch, a mining engineer just out of school, was in Alaska looking for investment opportunities in minerals. He had the financial backing of the Havemeyer Family, and another investor named James Ralph, from his days in New York. Birch spent the winter of 1901-1902 acquiring the "McClellan group's interests" for the Alaska Copper Company of Birch, Havemeyer, Ralph and Schultz, later to become the Alaska Copper and Coal Company. In the summer of 1901, he visited the property and "spent months mapping and sampling." He confirmed the Bonanza was, at the time, the richest known concentration of copper in the world.
By 1905, Birch had successfully defended the legal challenges to his property and he began the search for capital to develop the area. On 28 June 1906, he entered into "an amalgamation" with the Daniel Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan & Co., known as the Alaska Syndicate, eventually securing over $30 million. The capital was to be used for constructing a railway, a steamship line, and development of the mines. In Nov. 1906, the Alaska Syndicate bought a 40 percent interest in the Bonanza Mine from the Alaska Copper and Coal Company and a 46.2 percent interest in the railroad plans of John Rosene's Northwestern Commercial Company.
Kennecott Mines was named after the Kennicott Glacier in the valley below. The geologist Oscar Rohn named the glacier after Robert Kennicott during the 1899 US Army Abercrombie Survey. A "clerical error" resulted in the substitution of an "e" for the "i", supposedly by Stephen Birch himself.
Kennecott had five mines: Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode, Erie and Glacier.
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