Remote Alaskan city offers small-town appeal

The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Whittier, Alaska were the mountains crisscrossed by waterfalls and dappled with snow, which surround the small town on three sides. The next thing I noticed were a pair of buildings. One was an abandoned hulk that looked like it could be the site of an ambush in a zombie movie. The other, perhaps even more incongruous, was a 14-story condominium painted in pink, blue and cream, looking more fit for Miami Beach than a remote Alaskan fishing town. 

The former, which has been uninhabited since 1964, is called the Buckner Building. The latter is known as Begich Towers (BTI). Whittier’s isolation makes it nearly impossible for single-family houses to receive water and electricity, so BTI is home to nearly all of Whittier’s approximately 300 residents.

Hearing about Whittier from an elementary school teacher of mine subconsciously inspired a short story I wrote years later about a mysterious high-rise building being constructed in a remote Alaskan village. The story won a local award, which was the first time I had received any recognition for my writing. However, it was not until much later that I remembered there really was a place like the one I wrote about. When I went to Alaska this summer to work on a fishing boat, I decided that I would go see Whittier for myself.

I had arrived in this unique town by riding a train through a single-lane tunnel, walled with bare rock and shared between road and rail traffic, which is the only way of reaching Whittier by land. Blasted through two and a half miles of solid granite, the tunnel was created because of the town’s remote location. Whittier sits on a narrow inlet of Prince William Sound, ringed by 2,000 foot mountain faces.

Originally, Whittier’s inaccessibility was a feature rather than a bug, according to Lisa Tolman, the cashier at Log Cabin Gift Shop on the Whittier waterfront. 

“We have really low cloud coverage most of the year, so it’s hard to see us from planes,” Tolman said. “We have a deep-water port where ships can dock, but if Alaska was ever invaded by land, we could just block the tunnel and we’d be safe.” 

This combination of seclusion and easy maritime access was what led to Whittier becoming a strategic military harbor during World War II. Alaska’s existing port cities, Anchorage and Seward, were deemed too vulnerable to a Japanese invasion, so the U.S. military set up their primary Alaskan base in a previously uninhabited fjord. Whittier was a natural fortress, the construction of the two-mile tunnel making it easy to control travel in and out of the town. The Buckner Building was built as a “city under one roof” to house the soldiers, with amenities ranging from doctors’ offices to a bowling alley. The BTI, meanwhile, housed military family members.

The military began to depart in the early 1960s. Following Alaska’s devastating 1964 earthquake and tsunami, which destroyed much of Whittier and left the Buckner Building unsafe, the city’s time as a military base came to an end. Over the ensuing years Whittier residents have found a new industry: Whittier became the port of call for the Alaskan rail barges. 

Since the state’s rail system has no direct connections to the outside world, entire freight trains are loaded onto barges in Seattle and shipped to Whittier, where they then travel on their own rails to the rest of Alaska. A significant portion of the goods shipped to Alaska — anything from lumber to Amazon orders — arrives on these rail barges. Today, much of the town is taken up by a large railyard and the thunder of train cars being shuttled around is nearly as constant as the smell of the town’s many fish canneries.

Not many people live in Whittier; Tolman estimates that while there are about 200 year-round residents in the BTI, they are outnumbered in the summer by seasonal workers. Even the young man behind the counter at Swiftwater Seafood Café, where a meal of fish and chips costs $22.99, admitted that despite his “prisoner of Whittier” sweatshirt, he was only there for the summer.

So, what leads someone to stay in Whittier? According to Postmaster Karen Dempster, people are drawn to the town because of how picturesque the surroundings are. 

“It’s drop-dead beautiful, absolutely gorgeous,” Dempster said. “There are so many things to do. The trails, the waterfalls, the coves. It’s the most beautiful place.” 

Dempster has been a year-round Whittier resident since 2012, when she moved there from Fairbanks, Alaska. In addition to the area’s scenery, she was intrigued by the idea of an entire town living under one roof. 

“I think it’s just great,” Dempster said of life in the BTI. “I can go down and see my neighbors in my socks.”

After talking to Dempster at the Whittier post office inside the BTI, I walked back to the waterfront, past a wooden sign denoting an odd assortment of records: Since 1979, Whittier has had thirteen mayors (one recalled), sixteen harbormasters, twenty-three evictions and eleven inches of rain in one day. For the record, the most rain Portland has ever seen in a day was 2.7 inches in 2017, according to KGW-TV. 

A freight train loaded down with shipping containers creaked out of the railyard and threaded its way into the tunnel. About ten minutes after the last container disappeared, cars began exiting the tunnel in the opposite direction. In the parking lot of a salmon-curing smokehouse, four men were skinning a deer. 

“You’re not in Kansas anymore.” one of them said to me, noticing my surprise. “Welcome to Alaska.”

Having spent most of the summer in Alaska, I can confirm that even in the Last Frontier this is not a common sight. In Whittier, though, it seems like anything can happen.

Photograph by Tor Parsons