"An Unruly Road"

Cat skinner Morris Coursen (across Slikok Creek) works to build a passable "bridge" across. Watching are (L-R) Lawrence "Mac" McGuire,
Marvin Smith, and Grant and Craig Phillips--1956, between Soldotna and Kenai.

AN UNRULY ROAD

JANUARY 2010

Although Grant Phillips and Marvin Smith each toted colored toilet paper as they crossed the Soldotna bridge early one mid-April morning in 1956, they were not about to visit a two-seater outhouse. Instead, they were preparing to snowshoe through the woods and mark a trail to Phillips’s new homestead.

Phillips said that he and Smith carried different colors of tissue—most likely blue and pink. In the days before plastic trail tape, colored bathroom tissue, invented only two years earlier by the Northern Tissue Company, must have seemed like a convenient substitute for breaking off branches or using axes to hack blazes into the sides of trees.

The men were on long wooden snowshoes because the winter of 1955-56 had been one of Southcentral Alaska’s snowiest on record. In Anchorage that winter, 128.8 inches of snow had fallen—topped only by the 132.6 inches that had fallen in the previous winter—and a great deal of the white stuff had yet to melt.

Navigating with a Land Office map, the men aimed due west for Slikok Creek, where they planned to cross and then head north-northwest for Phillips’s 150.66-acre parcel, located just west of the Ed Ciechanski homestead along the banks of the Kenai River, about eight miles upstream from the mouth.

Phillips and his wife, Lois, had never actually been to the property, but they had checked it out just prior to filing on it in the fall of 1955. Grant had heard about a man named Henry Knackstedt, who lived on the lower river just outside of the village of Kenai, and they had gone to visit Knackstedt with the idea that he might take them upriver in his boat for a look-see at the land.

“We came down with a map,” recalled Phillips, “and I beat on Henry’s cabin door, and he threw the door open. And here stood a guy with a patch over one eye and hair standing on end, with dirty clothes. ‘Yeah, whaddaya want, kid?’ Scared me to death.”

The patch was the result of injuries sustained in a brown bear attack, and the rough, wild display, according to Phillips, was purely an act. He called Knackstedt “the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet,” and, after coffee, the three of them motored upstream to inspect the prospective homestead.

Grant Phillips in a boat on the Kenai River, 1956.

They approached a high bank on a wide meander, and Knackstedt pointed out the Ciechanski property. Judging by the map, they knew that the wooded section, above the muddy river cut and adjacent to Ciechanski’s place, was the spot they were looking for. Without bothering to climb the bank and investigate further, Grant and Lois determined to file on the land.

In October 1955, while they lived and worked in Anchorage, they learned that their application had been successful, and they immediately began making plans to become homesteaders.

Homesteading had long been a dream for Grant Phillips. With his older brother, Don, he had come to Alaska seeking land in 1947—two bachelors, both former Marines in World War II, traveling aboard the steamship Baranof out of Seattle from their native Washington state.

They docked in Seward in December and traveled by rail to Anchorage, arriving with only $50 between them. Grant, then 22, split the money with Don, and they went looking for work. Don soon found himself with a railroad job in Healy, while Grant got work as a longshoreman at the port of Whittier, where he helped unload seven million railroad ties bound for a railway upgrade project between Seward and Fairbanks.

As he worked a variety of jobs over the succeeding months, Grant began to pine for Lois, a woman he’d been sweet on back home. In 1948, he wrote to her and encouraged her to come north and see Alaska.

“She and her girlfriend had two weeks off,” said Phillips. “They decided to either go out to the Oregon coast or come to Alaska, and they flipped a coin, and Alaska come up, so they come up.” Neither woman ever moved home. Lois’s friend met an Anchorage man whom she married, and Lois and Grant tied the knot in 1949.

Eventually, Phillips was hired by the Anchorage Water Department, where he worked until he decided to homestead. When it came time to move, the Phillipses already had two young children and a house of their own. They sold their home before packing up and leaving for Soldotna on April 12, 1956.

In her diary on that date, Lois wrote: “Up at 5:30. Skies gray. Off to Kenai!”

In Soldotna, Marvin Smith and Ira Little had adjoining homesteads just north of the Soldotna bridge and had built their homes along their shared property line. The Phillipses had met both Smith and Little while living in Anchorage, and the two men had encouraged them to become homesteaders. When they arrived in Soldotna, Grant and Lois and the kids moved in temporarily with Little and began planning the road they would soon build out to their new home.

A few days later, Phillips and Smith snowshoed out colored toilet paper to flag trees along the route they wanted Cat skinner Morris Coursen to follow with his D-7. However, in laying out the route that would one day become the first few miles of Kalifornsky Beach Road, the two men did not exactly create the arrow-straight sections of road known today. Instead, they followed the path of least resistance.

“We didn’t really know where we was going,” said Phillips, “so we was just tramping through the brush and snow, and leaving toilet paper in the trees. And when we’d come to a big patch of trees or something, we’d go around them.” As a result, their road route meandered like a lazy stream. It had what Phillips called “lots of wiggles.”

At Slikok Creek—because of the unnaturally long and snowy winter—break-up was behind schedule, and the water was only a trickle beneath a layer of sturdy ice. Phillips and Smith dropped into the drainage in the same location that the road crosses the creek today, and they traipsed across the ice and clambered up the other side to continue their journey.

Eventually, they reached a point along the river from which they could see the Libby’s cannery, and they knew they had gone too far and needed to turn back upriver.

“We stopped down there to have a sandwich,” Phillips said. “We were tenderfoots, you know. And we wasn’t used to snowshoeing. Then we started backtracking up close to the river, and we saw where somebody had cut some trees.” Smith figured aloud that they must have been cut by Ed Ciechanski.

“We kept going, and we walked right into Ed Ciechanski’s yard. And just luckily he was home.”

Ciechanski, who was a bachelor at the time, brought them in and helped them with their map. Then he strapped on his own snowshoes and escorted the men out to a spot where he knew that a surveying hub was located. Digging in the snow with their snowshoes, the men uncovered the hub, precisely where Ciechanski had said it would be. From there, they determined the approximate boundaries of the Phillips parcel.

Ciechanski’s small cabin, which he had built himself, had sunk somewhat into the ground since its construction, but this circumstance did not hinder his hospitality to his new acquaintances. Since it was growing dark outside, he invited them in and offered them his own cot for the night.

From a trap door in his floor, he extracted a jug of homemade wine, which he shared as he prepared dinner. After dinner, Smith washed the dishes while Phillips dried. Then Ciechanski slept on the floor while Phillips and Smith squeezed onto the cot between two moose hides to keep them warm.

In the morning, after a hearty breakfast of brown bear steak and eggs, Phillips and Smith strapped on their snowshoes again and began the slow trudge, past all their colored flags, back to Soldotna to tell Coursen they were ready.

Phillips did not know it at the time, but the hard part of homesteading was yet to come.

“I told you guys you couldn’t get in there!”

On moving day, Thursday, April 26, 1956, Lawrence “Mac” McGuire was among the Soldotna residents eager to tag along and watch the action—mostly because he felt that Grant Phillips and his family were going to fail.

The "Doubting Thomas," Lawrence "Mac" McGuire.

“The old-timers down there said it couldn’t be done,” Phillips remembered. “They said, ‘Kid, you can’t make a road back there.’” So, just to be sure they were right, a few of the old-timers, McGuire chief among them, rode along, atop Marvin Smith’s old Army surplus 6x6 truck.

Just three days earlier, Cat skinner Coursen had followed Phillips and Smith’s winding trail as far west as Slikok Creek, which, despite the lateness of the season, was yet to flow steadily with spring run-off.

At the creek, Coursen had tapered and smoothed the high banks by using his D-7 to grind through the frost. When he was finished, he had a suitable ramp down into and up out of the creek bed. From Slikok, then, they had then “walked” the Cat back to town for refueling.



The following day, they had returned to Slikok, and, noting that the water was beginning to rise, had dropped some spruces trees into the creek bed to allow the 6x6 and Phillips’s Jeep to more easily cross. Next, they began following trail markers toward the Phillips homestead. As they neared the property, they turned to see the truck and Jeep rolling slowly over the swath Coursen had cut through the woods.

Smith was driving his 6x6, while Ira Little manned the Jeep, and both machines were loaded heavily with supplies. At the property, the men unloaded the vehicles, and Coursen parked his Cat where he intended to do some of the requisite homestead clearing for Phillips after his family and the other supplies were brought in the next day.

Afterward, as they drove slowly all the way back to town, Phillips said that he planned for the big move the next morning. But it was not to be.



That Wednesday, when he drove over to Kenai to pick up the remainder of his lumber order, he learned that it hadn’t yet arrived from Seward. By the time it came in, it was already afternoon, and Phillips was concerned that the warming weather would make the route too soft for the heavy loads.

Excerpts from Lois’s diary show how the move got under way on Thursday: “Up at 3 a.m. Marv cooked breakfast and we ate with him. Cross the bridge at 4:15 a.m. Left Mac’s place about 4:30 a.m. (Slikok) Creek had broken loose and washed out most of the tree/dirt bridge Morris had made Tuesday, so Morris had to hop across on remaining trees in creek and go after his Cat at our homestead.”



Grant Phillips (holding fish) in front of Marvin Smith's old Army
surplus 6x6 truck, 1956.

Spring break-up was suddenly in full force, according to Grant: “When we pulled up to Slikok Creek, it was running bank to bank, full of water.”



In her diary, Lois said that Coursen returned with his Cat by 8:20 a.m. Grant filled in the details: “Luckily, right there—where Gaswell and Junky Jackson’s is now—there was a big stand of spruce trees. And he went in there and started knocking these trees down, and he’d get the butt end of it and push it out into the creek.

“And probably the first four or five he pushed out there, the creek was going about a hundred miles an hour, and whoosh, the tree would be going down the creek. And he’d push in another one, and they’d be going down the creek. Finally he got one to hang up in there, and then he started to push down more and push them across. They were just like Pick-Up Sticks.”

Coursen used his Cat blade to flatten out the stump ends of the trees, and Phillips said that the men cut a few limbs but mostly left the trees as they lay.

By 9:05, according to the diary, the makeshift bridge was ready to accommodate traffic.  And McGuire, according to Phillips, was still playing the Doubting Thomas: “I told you guys you couldn’t get in there!”

From the back of the D-7, Phillips unspooled a half-inch-thick steel cable that he hooked to the front of his Jeep—just in case, he said, for he was afraid that Coursen would rip off his bumper if he pulled too hard. Phillips drove, while everyone else stayed ashore and watched.

When he was about halfway across, the right rear tire slipped off a log, and the front left end of the Jeep cantilevered upward. In her diary, Lois called it “an agonizing moment,” but the two tires still in contact with the logs gathered enough traction to level the vehicle again, and by 9:15 the Jeep stood on the other side.

The 6x6, with its large load of lumber, was much heavier, so Coursen did some quick repair work to the bridge. Then, with the cable attached to the front of his truck, Smith started across.

“I couldn’t bear to look,” wrote Lois in her diary. “In the middle of the bridge, where the water kept washing it out, the 6x6’s engine died and wouldn’t start, and Morris couldn’t pull it out for fear of yanking the whole undercarriage of the truck out. Without too much loss of time, Marv got the engine started and they got across, but don’t care to go through that terrible suspense again. Could (imagine) all the lumber and truck tipping over. The truck re-starting so quickly on such short notice was nothing short of a miracle, as it usually takes at least 10-15 minutes.”

After Grant carried the children over the logs, the entire moving crew was safely on the west side of Slikok by 9:30 a.m.

Grant Phillips constructs an arctic entryway for his family's homestead cabin, 1956.

Less than two hours later, they arrived at the homestead, where they ate lunch and unloaded the supplies.

Then Coursen drove his Cat back to the creek with the men in the vehicles to make sure that everyone made it safely back to the east side of Slikok.

Later, while Coursen began clearing fields on the homestead, Lois started digging a bare patch in the snow near the river bank so they would have a place to erect their wall tent. The tent was up by 5:30 p.m., and after a dinner outdoors, the Phillipses climbed into bed at 9:30 for their first night on the homestead.

*****

The first thing Grant built on the property was an outhouse. Then he erected their 20-by-24-foot prove-up cabin, and he borrowed an Allis Chalmers tractor from Ed Ciechanski to plow their four fields and plant them in red clover and canary grass.

Because the road, even after it dried out during the summer, was slow and unreliable, Grant eventually traded Smith his Jeep for the 6x6 and purchased a 24-foot wooden river boat to motor down to Kenai or upstream to Soldotna.

Some months after they arrived, Grant was working outdoors when he heard a Cat approaching. Since the sound of machinery was unusual, he grew concerned. He grabbed his rifle and headed for the noise.

Coming his way, he saw an operator sitting high in a D-8 Cat. He waved his arms and stopped the machine, then demanded to know what was going on. According to the operator, a road was being built, mainly following Phillips’s original route, and the road crew, which was being directed by surveyor Stan McLane, thought Phillips would appreciate having the road come right by his home.

He found McLane a ways off and set him straight. “I said, ‘I came out of Anchorage—and I had a house behind me and house beside me—and I sure don’t want no road right up next to my cabin.’” He told McLane to back the Cat up off his property and turn the other way—which is why Kalifornsky Beach Road today bends left just past Ciechanski Road.

Ironically, Phillips didn’t quite back up the Cat far enough, and today six acres of his homestead lie on the opposite side of K-Beach Road, which was completed to Chinulna Point in 1958 and in its current loop form in 1961.

After proving up on their property, the Phillipses promptly moved back to Anchorage, where they raised their family and both Lois and Grant took jobs with the school district. Upon retirement in the early 1980s, they returned permanently to the homestead and built the home that Grant has continued to live in since Lois’s death in 1996.

His children and grandchildren own most of the land around him now, and, as he takes in the view across the marsh and tundra of the wide meander on which his home is perched, he can content himself with the knowledge that, despite the struggles, he proved the Doubting Thomases wrong.