The Mill Tour

A recent guest to our McCarthy Alaska Lodge shared her personal essay on the Kennecott Mill Tour experience.

Looming fourteen stories high against the side of a mountain, faded now to a dusky shade of ruby red, sits one of the most imposing buildings I've ever seen. The Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, tucked deep within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, is part engineering marvel, part ghost story.

Set against the staggering backdrop of the Kennicott and Root Glaciers, the abandoned copper mill seems almost impossible. The wilderness is so immense, so commanding, that it's difficult to imagine anyone believing they could bend it to their will.

And yet someone did.

I arrive expecting to marvel at engineering. Instead, I spend the next two hours marveling at ambition. Or maybe a better word is hubris.

Our guide, Liv, leads us through the mill from the top down, navigating narrow stairways, swaying catwalks, vertical ladders, and dimly lit rooms where giant gears, weathered beams, and rusting ore chutes still stand exactly where workers deserted them nearly a century ago. Every floor creaks beneath our boots. Despite the cherry-red hard hats and signed liability waivers, I can't quite believe visitors are allowed inside.

Outside the windows, glaciers spill down mountainsides with indifferent majesty. Inside, Liv tells us the story of Stephen Birch.

Folklore in the Wilderness

It begins like folklore. In the summer of 1900, two prospectors wandering through this remote wilderness notice brilliant green cliffs high above them. Curious, they climb closer and discover what would become the richest vein of high-grade copper ever found in the United States.

Enter Birch, a twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker representing wealthy investors. He recognizes opportunity instantly. Armed with little more than borrowed money and remarkable powers of persuasion, he secures the rights to the mine. Soon, America's most powerful families, the Morgans and the Guggenheims, join the venture, financing the Copper River North West (CRNW) a private railroad stretching 196 miles through nearly impossible terrain. Locals mock it as "Can't Run, Never Will."

But it does. And for thirty-seven years, it makes fortunes.

As Liv tells the story, I find myself wondering whether Birch ever looked up from his ledgers long enough to notice where he was. Because while he saw copper, I can't stop seeing glaciers and a breathtaking ice fall just shy of the largest in the world.

An Alaskan Robber Baron

Liv explains that Birch refused to let the mill's temperature rise above thirty-two degrees, even during the brutal Alaskan winters. "A cold worker is a hard worker," he reportedly said. The sentence hangs in the cold air of the mill long after she's moved on and rattles around in my mind through the remainder of the tour. I instinctively zip my fleece another inch. It’s July outside, and I still can't shake the thought of men spending twelve-hour shifts in this building at freezing temperatures because one man believed discomfort increased productivity.

Liv moves on to tell us the hospital next door housed Alaska's only X-ray machine—not because Birch cared deeply about his employees, but because he didn't want the inconvenience of workers traveling elsewhere for treatment. Injured men were compensated by body part: twenty-five dollars for a finger, fifty for a thumb, one hundred for an eye.

He grouped the mostly Scandinavian immigrant workers by nationality, keeping Norwegians together, Finns together, Swedes together. Separate languages made organizing unions far more difficult. The efficiency is almost as breathtaking as the landscape outside.

Almost.

At one point I stop listening.

Sunlight filters through dusty windows and lands on enormous wooden beams worn smooth by decades of labor. Beyond the broken glass, the glaciers stretch toward the horizon, utterly unconcerned with the fortunes that were made here.

I imagine the noise. The grinding gears. The shouting. Steam hissing through pipes. Ore crashing through chutes. Water from the sorting tables dripping down through cracks in the floor to drench the baggers at the bottom.

Hundreds of men chasing one man's impossible vision.

Now there's only silence.

Near the end of the tour we gather around a series of towering ammonia tanks. Their riveted steel walls tattooed with with chemical stains that once leached the last traces of copper from crushed rock. In the filtered afternoon light, the rust shimmers with surprising beauty. Even decay has become picturesque. And that's the contradiction I can't shake.

Kennecott was both exploitative and extraordinary. It provided livelihoods for hundreds of people. It also demanded an astonishing human cost.

It transformed an isolated valley into a thriving company town complete with a school, baseball field, recreation hall, general store, and dairy.

It was a triumph of engineering. It was also a monument to greed.

For nearly four decades, Stephen Birch had managed to outwit geography, logistics, weather, and thousands of miles of unforgiving wilderness. He'd extracted unimaginable wealth from a mountainside that had stood untouched for millennia. He controlled the temperature inside the mill, the workers' living arrangements, even the language they spoke to one another.

And then came something he couldn't control. The Great  Depression. The price of copper collapsed.

Liv pauses before telling us what happened next, almost as if she wants us to appreciate the cruelty of what she's about to say.

The Cruelty of (no) Time

One hour.

That's all the notice the people of Kennecott received. One hour to pack up a life and make the final train out of town.

I picture what that looked like. A mother hurriedly stuffing clothes into a suitcase. A child wondering why everyone suddenly seemed afraid. A miner taking one last look at the mountain that had provided both his livelihood and his hardships. What would you choose when you have sixty minutes to leave behind a life you've spent years building?

For Birch, it was a business decision. For six hundred people, it was the end of home.

As we step back into the sunshine, the mill still dominates the valley, improbably red against the ice, stone and green pines. The railroad is gone. The machinery is silent. Birch's fortune has long since been scattered into history.

But the glaciers remain, at least for now. They continue their slow, patient work, inching down the mountains exactly as they did before copper was discovered.

Standing there, I realize the lesson isn't really about mining. It's about us. Human beings have always believed we could conquer landscapes, master nature, and bend the world to our ambitions. Sometimes, for a while, we succeed.

But eventually, the wilderness reminds us whose timeline we're living in.

Stephen Birch built an empire. 

Wrangell–St. Elias barely noticed.