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 crows
  
Location: Eastern Iowa
Il est interdit de faire smashy smash
 |  |  | Matanuska valley, AK.
< on 1/4/2013 8:36 AM >
|  | | | I can't stop myself.
It started off with an innocent question about the little radio tower I visited last week, posed to my physicist friend who knows everything and likewise grew up here. Then we talked about White Alice sites (http://en.wikipedi...munications_System), and then began the poring over Google satellite maps looking for the defunct scatter antennae an hour north of town. Then there was the building with the obviously collapsed roof and someone else's photos of an abandoned car salvage yard and...
Two days later, we're driving the old highway into the valley. Butte is... pretty jank, but suffers a terminal case of the abandoned stuff being more mixed in with the not-abandoned stuff (when you can even tell the difference, but it's pretty marginal in some cases) than I was comfortable getting out and exploring in.
A dramatic flood and shift in the Matanuska river last summer left us a couple of presents. One of these sites was definitely killed by the river, one of them was probably already dead, and one I've no idea. We'll start with that one.
Who loves baby?
Red satin heart box left on the bin in the bedroom closet was a nice touch, I thought. There was also a coloring book for 'Sparky the Energy Saving Squirrel' in the living room, but a bunch of my photos came out pretty blurry. I think I inadvertantly told my camera to do things it shouldn't do.
And away.
This was just a short distance away in the woods.
Naturally, I went up them.
We had a few companions along the way.
Now, the last place is a little more interesting. I photographed badly; we didn't actually go into the house. In wandering around trying to figure out whether I was going to try to get in, I neglected to take a full picture of the place. The river has washed it full of glacial silt, and we walked out around it on shallow ice.
The back of the house:
Here's the other side of that shot:
Now. This one's story I know. Here's the place, in just July of last year:
(Not my photo)
And August:
(Also not my photo)
Those come from http://nopeople.co...Matanuska_flooding, where you can see more about the site and what happened. I was completely floored when I saw the photo of all those trees behind that place.
The scatter antennae have been removed at some point fairly recently. There are some still standing somewhere in the state but I don't know exactly where. I'd love to see one. Whatever was left of that White Alice facility is now in use by ATT as a cellular site:
The collapsed looking building from Google Maps was a bust. We found the driveway down to it, but it was covered in NO TRESPASSING signs, gated down the way a bit, with snowshoe tracks whose time of creation we couldn't be sure wasn't fairly recently. Tom has a good friend in the area and says that neighborhood has a strong contingent of crazy survivalists, too, so we decided not to press our luck cavorting on private property. Not a bad trip over all though! And the mountains, oh, the mountains. They're so mountainy.
input: bacon | output: fiction |
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Freak
   
Location: Usually Alaska, now MSP.
Gender: Male
Hypocrite
| |  | Re: Matanuska valley, AK.
<Reply # 1 on 1/4/2013 7:05 PM >
| | | | Heh, I drove out to that AT&T site looking for White Alice remnants too  I believe the intact abandoned ones are pretty far out in the middle of nowhere, where it's harder to scrap/salvage/demolish without a lot of superfund money and goading from Greenpeace. You can see some at Clear if you drive by (or better yet, take the AKRR as it runs closer), but the base is still active.
Turn off the internet and go play outside.
http://spamusement...hp/comics/view/137 |
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crows
Location: Eastern Iowa
Il est interdit de faire smashy smash
| | | Re: Matanuska valley, AK.
<Reply # 2 on 1/5/2013 12:31 AM >
| | | | Yeah. I'll keep that in mind, re: the railroad (who doesn't like train rides? TRAIN RIDES!! ...cept that one time we were stuck behind a moose ambling along on the tracks for like, an hour.)
That was our general determination about WACS. Though Tom said the scatter antennae were removed from the Wasilla site within the last 10 or 12 years, after that place started being used as a cell station. Shame, too. They're so neat looking.
input: bacon | output: fiction |
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