Cultural Landscape Report for the Kantishna/Wonder Lake Area, Denali National Park and Preserve (DRAFT 12/21/2016)

Layton, Timothy; Foulds, H Eliot

This [draft] report’s study area is centered on the landscape which, prior to the construction of the Alaskan Railroad, was considered the primary entrance into the national park. With Denali reflected in the surface of Wonder Lake, this former western threshold to the park is the landscape setting where photographer and conservationist Ansel Adams composed iconic images of North America’s highest mountain. This place is also the locus of the early 20th century environmental threats, including mining and wildlife slaughter compelling conservationists to create the park in 1917. Currently located at the terminus of the central park road providing visitor access to Denali National Park & Preserve, the landscape described in this report is an unusually rich setting from which to interpret the cultural history of the park. This landscape is an uplands region encompassing the overlapping ranges of at least three bands of native Athabathcan peoples, the shape of the land itself making this place a convenient threshold to access the subsistence resources of the broader landscape. Historically significant persons in Alaska and park history, including Alfred Brooks, Stephen Capps, Judge James Wickersham, Charles Sheldon, Joe and Fannie Quigley, Harry Karstens, Hudson Stuck and Bradford Washburn, knew this place well. Testing the practical limits of standard cultural resource documentation and treatment methodologies, the study area of this [draft] report is drawn to roughly encompass an area within which an ambitious day hike might be made from points near the terminus of the park road. Despite these arbitrary yet practical limits, this report touches upon over 65,000 acres of park landscape, approximating the size of Washington, D.C., and being of greater acreage and topographic relief than many national parks of the lower forty-eight states. This report takes in a southwestern portion of the Kantishna Hills, the scene of a brief but intense gold-rush during the early 20th century and subsequent lode and placer mining extending through the 1980s. Another portion of the study area features a slender three-mile-long ice-carved lake that National Park Service planners once imagined as the setting for a grand park lodge. Another corner of the study area includes a portion of Denali’s designated wilderness area, defined by 1970s legislation to protect our nation’s last large undeveloped tracts of land.

Cultural Landscape Report for the Kantishna/Wonder Lake Area, Denali National Park and Preserve (DRAFT 12/21/2016)

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