The First Headquarters
at Mt. McKinley National Park

"It's probably my earliest memory. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight. I would lie awake in my bed in our cabin next to Riley Creek and listened to the echoing crash the boulders made as the flood water rolled them into the bridge supports."

It was the summer of 1993, and the speaker was Eugene H. Karstens. We had been thumbing through William E. Brown's excellent Denali: Symbol of the Alaskan Wild: An Illustrated History of the Denali-Mount McKinley Region, Alaska, and had been surprised to find that there seemed to be no record of where the first park Headquarters had been located. After a short walk from Denali Park station onto the north end of the railroad bridge, we found ourselves looking into the valley where this only son of the Park's first Superintendent had spent some of his earliest years. We knew that during the winter of 1921/1922, Harry Karstens had built that first cabin, a small superintendent's office next door, and a number of wall tents somewhere in the valley bottom.

"Dad, can you point out where the cabin was?"

"No, it's hard to tell because of way the trees have grown back so thickly to fill the valley. But I know that we were close to Riley creek, could see the railroad bridge downstream, and that the crash of those boulders rolling into the bridge supports was loud enough to keep me awake through those long spring nights."

It was the summer of 1999 before all the tools would be in place for us to attempt to locate where those original buildings had been sited. Fortunately Harry Karstens had kept a personal diary and he and his wife, Louise, had taken hundreds of photos during their years in the park. Much of the material still rested in a steamer trunk that had been in the family since it had accompanied an adventurous young nurse up the Yukon almost a hundred years before.

But it was still a considerable challenge. The diaries are seldom more than brief memory aids for their author, and that same young nurse, by now the proud mother of a growing boy, gave us location clues only incidentally as she recorded his early years. Still, Harry Karstens' great grandson, by using some interesting software for photo analysis, found enough in those pictures. The diary "word pictures" provided the rest.
In the end we simply climbed down into the valley, entered it the way Karstens had all those years before, and tried to see the problem he had faced through his eyes.

It was the summer of 1921 when H. P. Karstens first entered the Riley valley as the Superintendent of America's newest National Park. Accompanied by Woodbury Abbey who would survey its boundaries, he had journeyed to the "end of steel" from Anchorage and along the rough wilderness trace through Broad Pass from there. The Alaska Railroad, headed for the gold fields around Fairbanks with the same zeal that the transcontinental railroad had approached California, but with the same twenty years of tardiness, was building through the pass that summer. By that winter they would bridge Riley valley and change Alaska's transportation dynamics forever.

But that summer the valley, now safely inside the boundaries of the National Park, was outside, and in the process of being clear-cut for the construction of the bridge, a construction camp and the numerous service facilities that always follow a railroad's progress through a wilderness. 

Karstens' long familiarity with the area told him at a glance that although the survey would help him later, for now he had a serious problem. The Park had been created in 1917, but only this year had Congress appropriated the first annual $8000.00 for all infrastructure, personnel, and operating expenses. Insufficient funding for adequate enforcement would plague Karstens for his entire eight-year tenure. But it paled in comparison to what the four-year delay had wrought on the ground.

All useable land not immediately appropriated by the railroad had been tied up for years by Pat Lynch and Maurice Morino in homesteads filed in anticipation of this day. The wilderness trace came north, entered the valley, and widened into a pioneer wagon road. It then passed Lynch's Roadhouse, crossed Riley creek on a temporary bridge, and wound down the north side of the creek to Morino's first roadhouse. From there, it was again a simple trace to the end of steel coming south from Fairbanks.

Karstens' diary entry for July 22, 1921 indicates that Morino was already clear-cutting the bench where the campgrounds and Visitors Center now stands, and building a large new roadhouse alongside the railroad right of way. These "improvements" would be nearly impossible to remove through the few legal stratagems available, and it would be a generation before the Park Service could restore the natural beauty of this obvious entrance to the park. As Karstens coldly surveyed the reality of his situation, he set aside the "people's park" aspects of his stewardship and decided to concentrate on the preservation of its animal resources.

When Charles Sheldon had first broached the idea of a game preserve on the northern flanks of the McKinley massif during his expeditions there in 1906 and 1907, it was the Dall sheep that he was interested in protecting. His guide, and afterwards lifelong friend, Harry Karstens, agreed to serve as the preserve's warden, should Sheldon's efforts in Washington prove successful. Although their preserve had evolved into a National Park as it moved toward approval, it was clearly a designation several generations ahead of its time.

And now, with two homesteads sited carefully to control all approaches to the saddle between the Riley and Savage valleys, Karstens resolved to guard the natural gateway, Hines creek, from as far down stream as possible. On 10 September 1921, he wrote: "started clearing on Riley across from Pat Lynches, burned all the brush and refuse… will try and get Mellish logs from Brown, if not will cut set."

It was an excellent choice. He could monitor the fast, market hunting sleds traveling the Hines creek winter highway over the saddle, and watch the wilderness trace moving through Broad Pass. Karstens was thus perfectly positioned so that he and his considerable reputation were between the stewpots in the construction camps and roadhouses, and those animals whose descendents are the modern Park's chief assets. 

It would be 1925 before Park road construction opened a new avenue into the interior and allowed Karstens and his rangers to move from astride the Riley/Hines creek access and up onto the ridge. Chronically short of funds as always, they took everything. Everything, that is, but those first eight sill logs… that were still there in the moss for us to trip over.

Intro