On 10 April 2001, Eugene H. Karstens passed away. The only child of Louise and Harry Karstens, he was born in a frontier hospital at Nenana, Alaska in 1917. Three years later, mother and son joined the pioneer Superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park in a tent beside the cabin he was building at his first headquarters along Riley Creek.

Louise Karstens, a nurse and pioneer of Alaska in her own right, was the first female park ranger. A strong minded, exceptionally capable woman, she often tended the growing headquarters compound alone with her young son, usually keeping five stoves roaring in the various buildings for days on end while her husband mushed the eastern boundary. Her wage of one dollar per year reflected only the Park's desperate financial situation. Family legend speaks of a chance encounter she and her toddler had with a grizzly in a berry patch. It was the bear that broke out of the thicket in panic. Louise passed away in 1974.

Henry P. "Harry" Karstens was a sourdough veteran of the Klondike gold rush. An Alaskan since the turn of the century, and the climbing leader of the first expedition to reach the summit of Mt. McKinley, he was a powerful, competent outdoorsman. He was also entirely incorruptible. When his friend and mentor Charles Sheldon, the man who had made the new McKinley Park a reality in Washington, needed a hard man to make it a reality on the ground, he chose Karstens.

Most commentators have considered Harry Karstens a flawed man; too often ready to settle disputes with his fists, and almost always in conflict with the obstructing homesteaders, moonshiners, railroad and road construction crews, market hunters, and other residents of the Broad Pass region. But Congress had sent an army and 61 million dollars to build a railroad into Alaska's interior. Almost as an afterthought they sent one man and appropriated 8000 dollars per annum to protect their newest national park from that army's appetites.

The national treasure that is the wildlife on the northern flanks of the McKinley massif should have been consumed. But it wasn't, and those bloodlines have come down to us uninterrupted since the end of the last ice age. Harry Karstens and his family, assisted by the one or two rangers he could afford to hire, built the early infrastructure, patrolled the boundaries, and held the line. He passed away in 1955.

Eugene was tasked from an early age with tending the kennel pups and breaking them to harness for the Park patrol teams. When, at age ten he wanted to drive his father's model T along the new Park road, it was taken apart that winter and the pieces placed on the barn floor. The boy was told that when he could put it back together he could drive it.

Eighteen years later, then Major Karstens, a recent graduate of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, was awarded the Legion of Merit for the battlefield redesign and fabrication of key structural elements of the A-20 Havoc light attack bomber; changes quickly adopted at the manufacturing level. He retired a Lt. Colonel, USAFR after 23 years of active duty and service in two foreign wars. He is survived by five children and nine grandchildren.