McCarthy- my favorite Alaskan place
General Merchandise, McCarthy Alaska, Photo by Barry Epstein
Although Mount McKinley park and the Alaskan Mountain Range are awesome, the best place that I visited in Alaska was a small town called McCarthy located in the center of Wrangell St. Elias National Park. The town was built in the early 1900’ s to support copper mining efforts at the Kennicott Glacier. The small municipality was abandoned in 1938 and left its old buildings intact complete with artifacts and everything that were still there when we visited probably due to to the extreme geographic isolation. I drove from Fairbanks with a buddy of mine, his wife and young child and it took us almost 10 hours to get there mostly on gravel roads. I picked them up in my new Toyota Landcruiser that was fitted out with the most incredible stereo with box speakers mounted in the rear.
Unfortunately, a few minutes after picking them up, my friend said to me,“ Have you heard about Scientology?” So there I was, trapped and had to learn all of the details of this bullshit cult. What a bunch of total crap. From their hand held galvanomic e-meter to the alien heritage to the leveled advancement. It was pure rubbish to the smelliest level. But here is this extremely intelligent engineering buddy telling me this as his belief was so strong. I understand that he still has this conviction now, 40 years later and that his children had been sucked into this as well. Nonetheless, I listened to hours and hours of this nonsense but where I could, I turned up the music and changed the topic of conversation as much as I could to try and enjoy this fairly long trip.
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 27 of 156