"First One to the Lake"

Early morning mist beyond Don Culver's dock on Longmere Lake, 1947. (All photos courtesy of the Culver family)

FIRST ONE TO THE LAKE

March 2011

Around Longmere Lake today, 102 individual parcels of land make contact with the waterline. The largest of these parcels is 27.06 acres. The smallest is a triangular sliver of only 0.07 acres.

In the spring of 1947, however, there was only a single private parcel of land—a 167.29-acre homestead along the northwest shoreline.

The lake today features an air taxi service, several bed-and-breakfast establishments and a lodge, in addition to the homes of dozens of families and individuals. As such, Longmere is a busy place, frenetic with activity. In the summer, as swimmers and canoeists ply the waters, the lake is abuzz with floatplanes and jet-skis; in the winter, ice-fishermen bore holes into the lake to jig for trout as snowmachines roar up and down its frozen length.

In the early summer of 1947, common loons were the most frequent breakers of the natural quiet, and a single white canvas tent was the only sign of civilization along the 1.5-mile stretch of fresh water that runs diagonally from northeast to southwest on a topographic map.

In 1947, the Alaska Road Commission had cleared a pioneer trail suitable for Caterpillars and other road-building equipment; this trail would one day be a permanent road (the Sterling Highway) from Cooper Landing to Kenai and Homer, with a junction near the mouth of Soldotna Creek, where homesteading land was just becoming available. The new road was slated to pass less than 500 feet from the lake’s northernmost tip.

The single man in the white canvas tent liked this situation. And even a nearly disastrous turn of events later that summer could not dissuade him.

*****

Don Culver may have been just 20 years old when he landed for the first time on Longmere Lake, but already his was a life rich with experience. His step-father had taught him to fly when Don was only 14 or 15. In February 1945, a month before his 18^th birthday, he had enlisted in the U.S. Navy to assist the American effort in World War II. Because the war ended before that year was out, Culver found himself released from military duty in July 1946, when he was only 19. Back home in Palo Alto, California, he decided to head north to visit his biological father, Ben Culver, in Anchorage.

Ben, who had traveled to Alaska during the war as a field officer with the American Red Cross, was an Anchorage realtor with political leanings and plenty of connections. Ben had been to Alaska at an even earlier time to visit his brother, Walter Culver, who had been hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to come to Alaska in 1915 with his wife, Mildred, and teach Eskimo and Aleut children at Port Moller.

By the time Don arrived in Anchorage and found employment, Uncle Walter had already been through town—acting as a deputy game warden, a chief special agent for the Alaska Railroad, a U.S. deputy marshal, and the Anchorage chief of police—and had moved on, mining and prospecting in the Goodnews Bay area for a decade before retiring in California in 1943.

Ben, on the other hand, was fully immersed in the Anchorage scene. One day, when Don was visiting his father, he met an influential man whose information changed the course of his life. “(Dad) was having dinner with a friend of his who was named Hawley Sterling,” Don said. “He was the engineer for the section of road from Cooper’s Landing through to Homer, and at that time it had been engineered and had a Cat trail roughed out at least as far as Soldotna, and then hooking on to the old Kenai road.”

Hawley Sterling was the man for whom this stretch of highway (as well as the community just east of Soldotna) would one day be named. During that particular dinner conversation, however, Culver knew him simply as man with an intriguing document.

“Hawley told my dad that while he was in the process of surveying, he said he had camped on this lake, and that if he wasn’t involved in something else, it was a place he’d love to settle. So that made me think, ‘Oh, man, that’s pretty good,’ and he had a survey map, and he gave us a copy of it. And it showed this lake…. Well, officially the survey had not been published as such, but he had the information and the location, and I had a fresh pilot’s license.”

So in mid-March 1947, Don and Ben Culver paid a visit to Jack Carr’s Flying Service at Merrill Field and rented a single-engine airplane affixed with snow-skis. They flew south and located the lake about five air miles west of the wooden bridge over the Moose River near its confluence with the Kenai River. After viewing from the air the snowy survey lines, they landed on the frozen lake surface and used the survey map to locate corner posts and stake out a homestead claim.

Map in hand, they were able to stake almost exactly 160 acres, despite the curving shoreline of the lake. Then, in the tradition of many claim-stakers before them, they located a section corner and made Don’s claim official. “We did the old miners’ thing of taking a Prince Albert tobacco can and nailing it to a tree. We put my claim in there and made a copy of it and went back to Anchorage to the District Land Office and filed it with the clerk.”

The romanticized name for the lake was Ben Culver’s contribution: “Because of its shape—a long lake—and because he had some old Scottish history—‘mere’ being an Old English word for water or pond or lake—‘Longmere’ came out of that.”

In early May, Don chartered Bill Cuffel’s Waco floatplane to haul himself and his gear down to his homestead, and he established a camp just north of the first point of land protruding into the lake from the western shore. He erected an 8x10-foot white canvas wall tent and constructed a log cache designed to keep his foodstuffs eight feet off the ground and away from hungry bears. Inside his tent, he placed a “little bitty cookstove,” a cot and his tools.

As soon as he had settled in, he selected a cabin site just south of the same point of land and began clearing trees and preparing to build. He had decided to use the materials most readily available, and from a mostly deciduous patch of trees he selected aspen logs for the foundation and walls of his new home. Two of the four corner posts on which his cabin would rest were stumps left behind by his clearing process.

The aspens for the first four or five horizontal courses of the cabin he cut in the spring when the sap was running thick under the bark; as a result, these logs—as can be seen clearly in early photographs of the cabin—darkened substantially more than those he cut later in the summer.

Start of the Culver cabin, constructed mainly of peeled aspen logs.

By the end of June, Culver had laid in about three courses of those early logs, and he had ordered materials he would need as the cabin construction progressed, including framed glass windows, eight-inch shiplap for the cabin floor and roof, aluminum roofing, and a stovepipe. During that dry June, however, a spark kindled near Hidden Lake (almost 20 miles to the east) broke out into a conflagration that threatened Culver’s construction venture and his peaceful new existence.

By late July, the 1947 Kenai Burn had blackened nearly 300,000 acres of the central peninsula lowlands. The forest fire moved relentlessly westward, and during this month Culver found it necessary to take action.

“The Army sent a team of people down to supposedly protect stuff and try to see what they could do if the fire headed toward Kenai,” Culver said. “They came through and invited me to join them. They sort of considered me as a local scout , so I took all my camp and buried the stuff—made a pit and covered it over so it wouldn’t burn, and I put foodstuffs and other things up on the cache—and then I went and joined them for about 10 days.”

During those 10 days, the massive fire at last began to die. When Culver returned to his homestead, he discovered that that he had been lucky: The blaze had barely encroached on the eastern edge of his property before dissipating.

Culver quickly settled back into a work routine. He began laying new horizontal courses of aspen logs, while preparing to set the shorter vertical logs that would form the stockade-style upper half of each wall. By hand, he felled each tree, cut it into lengths and then stripped it of its bark; he fitted logs together, notching where necessary, planning carefully.

The back wall, which faced east toward the lake, would feature two framed windows that he had ordered from Anchorage. He planned to install a third window next to the door in the front of the cabin, and a fourth in the south wall, facing down the lake.

As Culver worked, he was blithely unaware that he was about to have company for the very first time.

Don enjoys a roaring campfire at the lake in 1947.

*****

Two hardy individuals, both natives of Chicago, were trudging westward out of the mountains and across the flats—as unaware of Culver’s existence as he was of theirs. They were on their way toward Soldotna Creek, where they planned to stake a homestead of their own.

Frank and Marge Mullen had flown in 1945 from Chicago to Anchorage in Frank’s three-place, single-engine Stinson 105. In Anchorage, they had worked and lived until homestead land became available on the peninsula, at which point they had flown over the available areas and picked out the spot they liked.

In August 1947, the two city slickers rode the train out of Anchorage to Moose Pass, hitched a ride along a jeep trail to a point just west of Tern Lake, and then donned their heavy, uncomfortable backpacks and began to walk the Cat trail.

After leaving behind Henton’s Lodge in Cooper Landing, they saw no one until they reached the Alaska Road Commission camp at Hidden Lake. In camp, ARC boss Ralph Soberg was a congenial host and asked them what their intentions were. “We told him we were going down there to be farmers,” Marge Mullen recalled. “’Oh, no,’ he says. ‘Go down there and build a roadhouse—have a bar. That’s the way you make money.’ I didn’t show any reaction to him, I hope. I had two little babies at that time. I wasn’t going to be a barmaid.”

Marge shrugged back into her Trapper Nelson, and the couple moved on. After spending the night in their mosquito tent at Skilak Lake, where “it rained like Billy Be Damned,” they wrung out their sopping sleeping bags and continued on down the road. They traveled through a smoldering landscape and had no human encounter until just before the wooden bridge across Moose River, where they visited the new homesteads of Aletha and John McFarland and Lucy and Edgar Law.

The Mullens crossed the bridge and camped along the west bank of the river. Then the next day, five miles further west, they approached Longmere Lake.

“Somehow Frank saw this really small notice on a tree—not any more than a piece of paper, a paper that gave a physical description of the land, and it was signed ‘Don Culver’ and said, ‘Come in and see me,’” Mullen said. “So then we found his little foot trail and went down there. It was a really sunny, beautiful night, and we just stayed the one night with him and talked a lot about what he was doing and what we planned to do.”

Culver treated his new acquaintances to a meal—“probably beans,” he said, although Mullen suspected it may have been Army rations—and he offered them what little accommodations he had.

The Mullens spent the night in Culver’s tent, and in the morning trundled back out to the Cat trail to walk the remaining five miles to Soldotna Creek and the junction of the main highway corridor with its spur road to Kenai. Despite the brevity of their first time together, Culver and the Mullens became close friends and remained as such.

When Culver later came into Soldotna for supplies or just human companionship—sometimes as often as once a week—he stayed with the Mullens. And when he married Dolores “Dee” Mulqueen in Anchorage in 1950, the Mullens were in attendance.

The newlywed Culvers and their friends, the Mullens, 1950.

While Marge has continued to live in the same spot for more than 60 years, Culver’s later career with Alaska Airlines—seven years as a mechanic, then 30 more as a pilot—moved him frequently away from the lake and then finally away from the state entirely. Still, Culver and Mullen have never lost touch; in fact, Culver, now 84, flew up last summer for Mullen’s 90^th birthday party.

After the Mullens departed, Culver resumed his labor. As autumn approached, he completed the walls of his cabin—working solo except on the rare occasions that his father and step-mother flew in for a visit. Atop the vertical aspen logs, he switched to peeled spruce, which he used to create the ridgepole, rafters and purlins that framed the roof. The ends of each gable he also fashioned from spruce that he laid in horizontally.

With winter approaching, Culver needed to bring in from Kenai the flooring and roofing materials that he had ordered. Unfortunately, due the primitive road conditions, the Kenai building supply company could bring the materials no farther than Soldotna, so Culver borrowed a tractor, skidded the items out to his foot trail, and then hand-carried them the rest of the way to his cabin site.

*****

At some point that fall, his construction project was interrupted by the sound of a small airplane circling briefly and then landing with floats on the lake. Inside the plane were four men: the pilot Bill Cuffel and three friends planning to homestead on the lake—Lyle Edgington, Bob Murray, and Carl Weber.

According to Edgington, each of the friends staked out a section of land, visited briefly with Culver and helped him install his roof, and then flew back to Anchorage to file their claims. They said they planned to return the following spring to build cabins on the lake.

Culver was about to have neighbors.

By the time the snow began to fly, he had completely enclosed his cabin but had done none of the chinking necessary to keep the place warm; consequently, he moved his canvas tent indoors and set up camp there, out of the weather, while he did some finish work.

On Nov. 1, Edgington, Murray and Weber—along with a German short-haired pointer that had been given to them by a Yellow Cab driver in Anchorage—showed up at the lake again. They announced that they had changed their plans, deciding to build right away so that they would be free to work throughout the summer. They pitched a canvas tent in the snow over on Edgington’s homestead, built rough beds out of spruce logs and boughs, installed a small wood-burning cookstove inside, and then began cutting and processing logs for a cabin of their own.

Just before Thanksgiving, Culver—needing a paying job in order to keep himself in groceries and finance the continuation of his homesteading project—returned to Anchorage on a plane sent by his father.

He left the trio of friends to their own devices.

*****

In 2011, the drive from the eastern edge of Cooper Landing to Longmere Lake is somewhat less than 45 miles on a firm bed of two-lane, lined blacktop. Despite the reduced-speed areas through Cooper Landing and Sterling, it is not uncommon for a driver to make this journey in an hour or less.

Consequently, it may be difficult for modern drivers to comprehend how it managed to take 21-year-old Don Culver five days to drive that distance in the spring of 1948.

“I went down as soon as the road was clear,” Culver said. “I had bought a (military) surplus truck and barged it across from Anchorage over to the little town of Hope and then down the old forest road from there to Henton’s Lodge. I could get as far as Cooper’s Landing on the forest road, and that’s where the new road was to start. It was just a Cat trail then, but I had a 4x4 weapons carrier and all my gear for the year, a couple, three drums of fuel, and things like that.”

Don's truck parked on Sterling Highway.

And thus loaded down in breakup conditions, the truck sank easily in the soft, exposed soil.

“I required two or three assists from Road Commission tractors that were working in the neighborhood to get me out of mudholes, or (had to do it) myself by digging and then corduroying through and around swamps and things,” he said. “I would go and get stuck and have to dig out, and cut wood to fill the holes and make a little corduroy patch to get on to the next place with the four-wheel drive. It did not have a winch, but it was a pretty good rig to drive around.”

Virtually every bog or mudhole required either assistance or hours of toil and sweat, and the bogs and mudholes were plentiful. Eventually, however, Culver arrived at the lake. When he had begun his building project, he had been the first and the only owner of private property on the lake. Now he was one of three.

*****

Edgington, Murray and Weber had built a rough cabin with logs cut from trees on the property and made the floor and roof with lumber trucked overland from Seward. It had been cold enough during the construction process that they kept a fire burning nearby throughout the day, and their dog had sat constantly by the fire while the men worked. At night in the tent, they had wrapped the animal in a big Army overcoat to keep it warm.

They hadn’t been working long, however, when Weber decided to give up on homesteading and headed to Seward to become a longshoreman.

“Weber, he couldn’t get along with Bob Murray,” Edgington said. “I could see his point, too. He (Murray) was a screwball son of a bitch as far as I was concerned. I had to keep them apart most of the time. They were always arguing and quarreling.”

By early January 1948, Edgington and Murray had constructed a livable structure with a small woodstove, and they struggled against the elements as the coldest part of winter set in. Shortly after Culver returned that spring, both men went to work for the summer—Murray at the Libby McNeil & Libby cannery on the lower Kenai River, and Edgington back to Anchorage to see what he could find. Both returned to their homesteads whenever they were able.

Meanwhile, Culver continued to work on his land. He cleared and sowed about two acres to meet homesteading standards. He finished chinking his cabin walls and made the place livable. He cut and split and stacked cords of firewood. He built a dock down at the lake.

Finished cabin at Longmere Lake, 1948.

He also walked or drove his truck into Soldotna nearly every week, visiting and staying with the Mullens. Often, he said, he would fish for salmon in the Soldotna area, but occasionally he would walk the length of Longmere Lake and travel through the woods south to the middle river to wet his line. On one such excursion, he returned to his cabin to discover that a well-known boozer from Kenai had stopped by his place, consumed some of his food and divested Culver of his small supply of alcohol.

“He left me a note that he’d had supper and drank my brandy—I had a small bottle there to have on hand and wasn’t drinking it at all—but he drank that all up and left a note saying he’d come back one day and replace it, and of course he never did.”

Generally, however, life on the lake was sedate and seldom interrupted. When winter arrived, Culver packed up and returned to Anchorage once more, working at Merrill Field sometimes, and other times for the ARC. That same year, Culver began his relationship with “Dee” Mulqueen, and in 1950 they married in the Catholic church in downtown Anchorage.

Around this same time, Culver began a new job as a mechanic for Alaska Airlines, and his subsequent transfer to Bethel for the next two years took him away from Longmere and his peninsula friends for most of each year.

Dee and Don Culver and two of their
kids at the lake cabin, 1952.

In 1953, Culver began doing his mechanical work out of Anchorage International Airport, and he was building steadily toward a commercial pilot’s license. Often, particularly in the summer months, Dee and their children would stay in the Longmere cabin, and Don would join them on the weekends. The kids—the Culvers would eventually have one son and four daughters—loved the time on the homestead, fishing, boating, swimming, playing, gathering water, listening to the loons, and watching what their father called “sea smoke” form over the water.

At times, Culver, who still sings every Sunday in his church choir in Seattle, would fill the cabin with music. “I can remember as a little kid at the cabin, he’d play the harmonica and just kind of quietly sing along,” said Terri Culver, the eldest daughter. Even now, she said, hearing him sing transports her back across the years. “It makes you a little kid again, definitely just makes you sit back and remember home.”

In 1956, Culver achieved his dream job as a commercial pilot, flying DC-3’s for Alaska Airlines out of Anchorage, but by the end of 1957 he was faced with a difficult choice: transfer to Seattle and remain a pilot, or stay in Alaska and look for another job. In 1958, the Culvers moved to Washington, where Don would conclude a 37-year career with the airlines with his retirement in 1987.

Of the Culver children, only the oldest, Marc, still lives in Alaska. The daughters live in Washington and California. Dee passed away in 2005, and Don lives on a sailboat and spends most of his spare time restoring old aircraft.

The Culvers had surveyed their lake property into sections and sold the first piece in about 1980, holding onto the final piece until 1998. Even all the way from Washington, Culver said, he felt some pain in letting go.

“It’s just circumstances and family needs and choices that took me right from it,” Culver said. “I wish I had it still. I just have great, fond memories of it. That’s where I enjoyed visiting. And having a bit of Alaska reminded me of where my adult life started.”

Before Culver sold the cabin property, the cabin itself was used periodically by squatters and sometimes, by arrangement, by Boy Scouts or campers from the Catholic church. Over the course of time, it began to become run-down and ramshackle. Today, a new house sits where the cabin once stood. After he sold homesite, the new owners bulldozed the old cabin and started fresh.

When he visited Longmere about 10 years ago, he said he felt “amazement” at the growth he saw. “People had built nice houses and roads, and I had my name on one of them, and I felt a little bit of pride in having started that and having been one of the early folks in the country. But also there was the realization that I wished I hadn’t sold it all. So that combined a little sadness with not being a part of it anymore.

“But having achieved several years in my life, well, you’ve got to be philosophical about some stuff, and you make choices and you live with them.”

The loons still visit Longmere Lake each summer, but they’ve got a lot more company these days.

Culver visits the lake in 2000 and is amazed at the progress.

"An Unusual Send-off"

George Coe Dudley, 1950-51.

AN UNUSUAL SEND-OFF

November 2010

One of the highlights of Rusty Lancashire’s retelling of George Dudley’s 1967 muddy, drunken mess of a funeral involved the moment that one of the attendees fell into the open grave.

In fact, Lancashire, who lived in the Ridgeway area for more than 50 years, took such delight in the story that she told it repeatedly, and many long-time residents across the central Kenai Peninsula still remember hearing the tale.

One of those listeners was Peggy Arness, who still chuckles at the memory of Lancashire’s narration. “Rusty’s rendition of it was hysterical,” said Arness, who, along with her husband Jim, once employed Dudley as a longshoreman at their Nikiski dock.

Another person who heard Lancashire tell the story was Soldotna’s Al Hershberger, who first met Dudley in about 1950 and remembers much of Dudley’s early history. “Ah yes, George Dudley, an unforgettable character,” said Hershberger. “Dudley was an easy-going, laid-back sort of guy, always laughing and joking, as well as hard drinking.”

But one of the only people still living who actually witnessed the funeral is Hedley “Hank” Parsons, who was a laborer on the central peninsula for more than 30 years before moving back to his home state of New Hampshire in 1984.

“I was working for Morrison-Knudsen at the time on the White Alice project,” Parsons recalled. “We’d take a trip or two into Kenai about every day for something, and I guess the funeral was kind of news, and so I swung in and visited.”

Parsons’ remembrance of the scene on that May 5 afternoon matches in most respects the story told by Rusty Lancashire, and it also matches a recently discovered, unsigned letter that colorfully describes the funeral in great detail. The letter was found in a cardboard board box of unrelated materials recently donated to the Anthropology Lab at Kenai Peninsula College.

Addressed “Dear Hugh,” the letter begins with a lament for “the passing of Kenai from the scene as a community completely unique,” and then offers up the Dudley funeral story as proof that the “old special flavor of Kenai” has not altogether vanished.

Because the letter refers to Hugh having “dealings with George over right of way,” several long-time residents have concluded that the recipient of the letter must have been Hugh Malone, who was a surveyor at the time and went on to serve first on the Kenai City Council and later in the State Legislature.

The identity of the letter writer, however, remains murky, although almost certainly a man. At one point, the writer appears to identify his occupation: “I don’t like funerals. I think they are barbaric and years ago swore that the next funeral I attended would be my own, and if I could manage, I’d skip that one, too, but somehow, after a few drinks, and swapping lies with a couple of other divers at Larry’s (Club) it seemed the thing to do.”

Divers were being employed at the time during the construction and erection of oil-drilling platforms in Cook Inlet, and several long-time area residents were unable to recall a single female diver working at that time.

And despite the writer’s reluctance to attend funerals, he seemed delighted that he made the effort to go to Dudley’s: “I’m glad I went. It was a funeral to end all funerals, and it and the wake that followed could happen only in Kenai, believe me.”

*****

On the morning of the funeral—a Friday—a death notice appeared on page 13in The Cheechako News, featuring this headline: “North Kenai Man Found Dead In His Home.” The four-paragraph article identified 58-year-old George Coe Dudley as the deceased, and said that he had been found on Sunday by Robert Murray, a long-time friend who had been staying with Dudley for a number of years.

Dudley, said the article, was a commercial fisherman who had been born in California on Feb. 23, 1909, had worked for the Alaska Railroad, had once operated a hotel in Anchorage, and who had spent the last 33 years of his life in Alaska.

The article set the time of Dudley’s passing as 4 a.m. and attributed the death to “natural causes.”

However, neither this small collection of facts nor the simple wooden cross bearing a small brass name plate in the Kenai Cemetery adequately describes the man George Coe Dudley was or explains why his funeral became such a wild affair.

To understand these things, one must look further back in time:

A 25-year-old George Dudley made his way to Anchorage probably in 1934. For much of the next 14 years, he experienced great success—but also some toppling failures. For instance, Hershberger remembers Dudley telling him that at one time the beloved Alaska painter Sydney Laurence gave him one of his paintings—one of the many symbols of his financial good fortune that eventually disappeared.

“Dudley was a con artist when it came to getting a drink, as most alcoholics are, but he was not a person given to making up stories about things he had done,” Hershberger said.

Although the timeline of Dudley’s life events is not well known, he did at some point work for the Alaska Railroad. He also built and was an owner of the Lind-Dudley Hotel in the Spenard area, and he was married to the daughter of prominent Anchorage attorney and president of the Anchorage Bar Association, George Grigsby.

“How he ever met Grigsby—how he ever got in with that family—I really don’t know,” said Parsons. “He might’ve been from kind of halfway civilized family before he came to Alaska.”

After the marriage ended in divorce, according to Hershberger, “the ex-wife was blamed (by Dudley) for the demise of his fortunes. This may or may not have been the case.”

Single again and down on his luck, Dudley made his way to Portage and a road construction job. It was in Portage in 1948 that he met Parsons, who also was doing road work. Parsons liked Dudley personally but called him a “derelict,” recalling that Dudley spent most of his spare time in Portage’s two or three shack-like bars, which were powered by individual light plants and had sprung up to support and to leach the paychecks of road workers.

Murray, another of the road men there, befriended Dudley at this time. Murray, who would become one of the first homesteaders along the shores of Longmere Lake, brought Dudley with him to the peninsula in either 1949 or 1950 and allowed him to stay for some time at his place. In fact, Murray thought so much of his friend that he named an east-west road off Murray Lane in Murray Lake Subdivision No. 1 “Dudley Avenue.”

Dudley eventually settled on a homestead of his own in North Kenai. He also acquired a commercial fishing site just south of the Arness Supply Dock, where he worked as a longshoreman during the 1960s.

It was shortly after his move to North Kenai that Dudley became acquainted with Edith “Eadie” Henderson, the renowned proprietor of the Last Frontier Dine & Dance Club—the establishment that was located near the Wildwood Station to attract military clientele as well as Kenai’s large number of fishermen and oil workers, and that was more commonly referred to simply as “Eadie’s.”

“He was a habitué of Eadie’s just for, uh, ‘sociability,’” recalled Parsons. “He had nothing else to do. That was his second home, and probably in his own environment out there at his homestead he didn’t have much of anything. Probably Dudley went to Eadie’s all the time to either keep warm or to socialize and drink—‘cause he had nothing else in life.”

“Dudley was a good guy,” Parsons said. “He was harmless. He was his own worst enemy, really. And of course, Eadie, she plied him with the booze, and she let him flop out on the floor at night instead of finding his way out north to his homestead.

“He was always welcome there because Eadie was due the few bucks he had left, you know, and he probably was a handyman there, doing chores and stuff like that, to keep Eadie going and keep the lights on.”

*****

Peggy Arness remembers George Dudley as “one of the colorful characters down there” at the dock. Despite owning a fishing site, Arness said, “He didn’t do much fishing. There was more drinking than fishing going on, but he was down there.”

Dudley spent much of his spare time with his friend and drinking buddy, Mosey Molander, Arness said. Molander and his wife, Gladys, ran an early 1950s movie house out of a portion of the former territorial school building in Kenai after a new school was constructed.

“We had to have longshoremen loading and unloading all the time,” Arness said. “And George and Mosey both were there. Pretty faithful. They were as good as any of them. They did their work. They knew how to hook and unhook. That’s what they did. But they were always sober when they came down to work. They never came down to do a shift if they were drinking. Jim just didn’t allow that. When (Dudley) was on the job, he was sober.”

During his off-hours, Dudley, who had been single since the 1940s, had occasional girlfriends—some of them, according to both Arness and Parsons, being “Eadie’s gals,” an oblique reference to the night club’s exotic dancers and whispered reputation for prostitution.

When he died in late April, it was difficult to find anyone who was surprised. “I wouldn’t say he ever appeared to be in the best of health,” said Parsons. “And he probably just wore himself out drinking.”

The funeral was held the following Friday, and many of the details have faded over time—except for the letter to “Hugh.” The letter—which Parsons says is remarkably accurate, particularly in its details of the funeral—claims to depict “a firsthand account of his passing and the send-off his friends, enemies and casual drinking acquaintances gave him.” Furthermore, the letter writer avers that Dudley “boozed away everything he owned, drank up his homestead acre by acre, and died intestate with only his shack and few feet of property left.”

Parsons believes that, because of Dudley’s high bar tabs, “Eadie” Henderson ended up with Dudley’s homestead property after his death. And as a result of Dudley’s poverty and insobriety—and in spite of the fact that he, from all accounts, was affable and generally well liked—his estate could not fund a funeral. “So the locals did it their way,” Parsons said.

Hershberger said he heard a rumor that on the night before the funeral, Dudley’s drinking buddies “took the body around to all his hang-outs and propped him up in the corner and poured a few drinks in him.”

Parsons said he never witnessed that particular behavior but wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was true. “There was somebody else they did that with at Kenai Joe’s,” he recalled. He called such actions “common” among certain Kenai crowds of the mid-20^th century.

The funeral was scheduled for 2 p.m. on May 5, and spring break-up was in full bloom at the Kenai Cemetery, which at that time had no surrounding fence or wrought-iron gate, and received little maintenance.

“When it came time to plant George,” said the unsigned letter, “a few of his friends rounded up everybody they could from the bars along the North Road, and we all trooped to the cemetery. Everyone was dressed in their usual spring Kenai Attire—dungarees, oilskins, gum boots, etc., and it’s a good thing.... We all had to slog in from the highway … and by the time we reached the grave, everyone was mud to the knees.”

George, meanwhile, was encased in an unadorned boxlike casket and was transported to the burial site on the same backhoe used to dig the grave.

Among those in attendance was a former Dudley girlfriend named Carmen, whom Arness believes was one of the dancers from Eadie’s. The letter writer painted her and many of the others there with brushstrokes of colorful language:

“Carmen was there, wearing a dungaree jacket over a tight print dress that was split where it stretched the tightest. Her slip bunched out through the hole and waggled back and forth like the flag on a whitetail buck as she waddled through the mud in saddle shoes, no socks.

“The funeral music was furnished by a local lady lush with an accordion…. She couldn’t find the right keys on the instrument, and I think she dropped it in the mud at least twice. Since George wasn’t exactly well known in Christian circles, the eulogy was delivered by the mortician, between hiccups.”

Although Parsons was there, he said that he doesn’t remember every detail contained in the letter, but he recalls enough of them to believe that the letter writer must have been one of the 15-20 mourners on hand and has, with an exception or two, recorded the event quite faithfully.

Besides the characters named or described in the letter, Parsons remembers that Kenai’s Swede Foss was in attendance, and Foss at that time was married to a woman nicknamed Dottie, who was well known in the area as an accordion player for any occasion.

According to the letter, no one at the funeral lamented Dudley’s passing more loudly than did Carmen, who “mourned like a coyote,” despite supposedly hating Dudley for the previous several years because he had once “belted her off a bar stool with a fresh salmon for snitching his drink.”

When it came time to settle Dudley into the grave, Parsons said that the job was made more difficult by the inebriated state of the pall bearers, who used ropes to attempt a balanced lowering process.

“As they lowered away,” said the letter, “they became uncoordinated and George got away from them, did a slow roll and landed in the grave upside-down. George hit the lid with a hell of a thump, and one of the pall bearers fell in the grave on top of him, and lost his glasses down alongside the coffin. They fished him out looking like a nearsighted mud statue and retrieved his glasses with a shovel.”

Parsons remembers that last part a little differently: “I know one of them fell in with him, and I think it was a kid that the undertaker had to dig the grave and help out. And it just scared the shit right out of him. He scrambled up out of the grave—or they helped him on out—and he took off.”

With the living extracted, only the dead man remained in the grave —still in an upside-down casket and solidly wedged into the mud. No amount of inebriated efforts were able to right the situation, at which point a woman referred to in the letter as “Old Lady Paige” hollered out something obscene and suggested that Dudley was better off in the position he was in.

After that outburst, according to Parsons, the mourners returned to the bars because the mortician had dismissed them by asserting that he would use the backhoe to turn Dudley right-side up. “We followed his suggestion,” said the letter, “and nobody seems to know today whether George is right-side up or upside-down.”

The letter writer –who said that he awoke the next morning, nearly freezing and with a vicious hangover, inside of his camper parked with both front wheels in the ditch—says that Dudley’s funeral was an event that even Dudley himself would have enjoyed. And he concludes with this remark:

“I’m sure you will be pleased to know that although (old) Kenai may be dying, she hasn’t gasped her last yet. I don’t think it will be too long until she does, but just in case, I’m not signing my name. Mayhem and homicide are still regarded rather lightly around here, and I’m the cowardly type. Anyway, you know who this letter is from, and it is all gospel—so help me!”

To add insult to injury, according to Kenai Cemetery archives, the wooden cross placed initially over Dudley’s grave identified him as “George R. Dudley.” Nearly everything else may have gone wrong, but at least he is now correctly identified on a brass plaque centered on the peeling white-painted cross marking his final resting place.

 



"Skiing on Volcanoes"

Craig Barnard climbs the flank of Mount Iliamna in order to ski back to the borrom.
(All photos courtesy of Barnard, Tyler Johnson & Rory Stark)

 

SKIING ON VOLCANOES

November 2008

It seemed like a good idea at the time, although most of their friends thought they were nuts.

It was a Thursday afternoon after work in May 2006, and the onset of Memorial Day weekend was in the air. Buddies Tyler Johnson, 32, and Rory Stark, 37, had a free Friday and a good weather forecast in front of them, so they decided that this would be a good time to climb and then ski down a volcano.

They targeted 10,016-foot Mount Iliamna across Cook Inlet, and sketched out a rough plan of attack: Drive down to Ninilchik, launch their 16-foot Achilles inflatable from the beach, motor nearly 50 miles across Cook Inlet and far up into Tuxedni Bay, work their way inland on foot until they reached snow, and then start climbing on skis with skins.

Simple enough, they thought, despite the fact that neither of them had been there before. It would be an adventure. And Johnson and Stark, both veterans of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, were accustomed to adventure and to thinking on their feet.

 “Me and Rory, we’re trying to find people in Anchorage (where both men live). We’re like, ‘Hey, we got good weather for three days. We’re gonna take the boat across,’” according to Johnson, a 1995 graduate of Skyview High School. “Nobody wanted to take the boat. Everybody’s like, ‘You’re crazy, man. Nobody’s gonna go across in your 16-foot boat. Come on!’ So when we left town, it was just me and Rory.”

Of course, all of those doubters back in the big city didn’t know about 35-year-old Craig “Chunk” Barnard, an extreme-skiing enthusiast living on the Kenai Peninsula.

“Rory was like, ‘I know this guy, Craig. He’s down in Cooper Landing. He lives in a tent. We’ll stop by and see if he’s there,” Johnson said.

“So we stop in Cooper Landing and we start driving down Craig’s road, and there he is, walking from the liquor store with a six-pack. We’re like, ‘Craig, hey, man, you gotta come.’ And he’s like, ‘All right, all right. Yeah, yeah. Hey, can I call my boss real quick?’

“So he calls his boss and leaves a message and tells him he’s not going to show up to work Friday and Saturday.”

According to Barnard, the “invitation” from Johnson and Stark was more of a command. “We walked into my tent, and they told me what I need and what I don’t need,” said Barnard. “And what I don’t need was ice axes or crampons or ropes. So they just kind of quickly shuffled some gear into a bag for me.” And rapidly the three of them were on the road, heading south.

“That’s how it started, completely off-the-cuff, no planning whatsoever,” said Johnson.

They brought no maps and no GPS. They brought no mountaineering gear—just backpacks, skiing gear, some food and alcohol, and their boat.

“We had four days of food,” Johnson said. “We had some Taco Bell. I think we had, like, one thing of Mountain House, maybe, but we just stopped at the fast food.” They purchased a stack of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s and then took advantage of the “10 burritos for $10” deal at Taco Bell. “And that worked out really well. That was our food for the whole trip.”

They arrived in Ninilchik in the early morning.

“We barreled off across the inlet at 2 a.m., and it was pretty rough going across, and then we had to go up Tuxedni Bay,” Johnson said. “We didn’t quite know where we were going, you know. We just knew we had to get somewhere up into Tuxedni and see how far we could get.”

Actually, Barnard had been on Iliamna before, just the year before, and had a general sense of the best route to take. In 2005, he had been part of a three-week, fly-in trip onto Tuxedni Glacier, and from there he had skied the mountain, eventually reaching the summit.

Based on Barnard’s experience, Johnson and Stark had planned to run their boat as far into Tuxedni Bay as possible to reach the glacier flats, but the upper reaches of the bay eventually became too shallow to continue. They beached their craft and dragged it above the high-tide mark, then hoisted their gear onto their backs and began a slow trudge up the heavily bear-traveled mud flats of Center Creek.

They planned to follow the Center Creek drainage into the high country, eventually crossing over a rocky ridge before dropping down onto the Tuxedni Glacier, which they would follow to the base of the actual mountain.

That Friday evening, about 18 hours after leaving Ninilchik, they stopped at about the 5,000-foot level and established their first camp. None of them had slept since Thursday morning, when they’d awoken to go to their respective jobs: Barnard as a handyman and carpenter, Stark as a pilot for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and Johnson as a civil engineer.

The next morning, they were on the move again: up the glacier to the mountain’s southwest flank, and from there to the sulfur-smelling summit of the volcano.

“We had to pick our routes, and there were some crevasses, but the crevasses weren’t that bad. It was more the avalanche conditions we were a little concerned with,” Johnson said. “We picked our way up (the main mountain) in six hours, and then the ski down was like 30 minutes.”

They had reached the summit early Saturday evening and had soon returned to their Friday campsite for the night. On Sunday morning, they skied off the snow of upper Center Creek, then walked the mud flats back to their boat.

“We got down to our boat, and it didn’t get mauled,” Johnson said. “There’s just circles of bear tracks around our inflatable. We heard that the bears like to take swipes at those boats over there, so we thought for sure something was going to be wrong.

“So we launched it. Nice weather. It was like glass coming back.”

And they arrived in Ninilchik in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend salmon-fishing flurry.

“We beached the boat on Ninilchik beach, and there’s probably a thousand motorhomes all lined up, and these people were there, and they come walking over,” Johnson said. “They were just blown away. They’re like, ‘Where’d you guys come from?’ And we’re unloading our ski gear and stuff. They just couldn’t believe it.”

By Sunday evening, all three men were at home—satisfied, and yet not satisfied.

Johnson said that when they had packed up in Ninilchik and were driving north, they were all thinking the same thing: “Man, that was absolutely, unbelievably the best trip I’ve been on in a long time. And so we’ve gotta do all three now.”

The Redoubt and Spurr volcanoes were waiting.

*****

About five months after the Iliamna adventure, Stark found his body in need of an overhaul.

In 2002 on Mount Hunter, Stark, who grew up in Homer, had been caught in an avalanche that had injured his hip and mangled his ankles, requiring three surgeries to one ankle, fusing the bones so that front-to-back movement was still possible but side-to-side movement was not. The ankle injury altered his stride; however, it didn’t keep him off his skis or out of the woods.

In 2005, for instance, Stark and Johnson joined with a pair of other competitors to participate in the rugged Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. They won by finishing in less than two days, the first competitors ever to do so, much to the chagrin of former record holder, the renowned Roman Dial.

But Stark’s compromised body could endure such punishment for only so long, and eventually one of his hips began to give out.

In October 2006, Stark went in for hip-resurfacing surgery.

Doctors dislocated the hip, and then ground down the head of the femur until they could mount on it a chrome-alloy ball. Into the hip joint, they affixed a metal socket, then set the ball into the socket, and put the hip back together.

Seven months later, in May 2007, Stark was ready to tackle another volcano. The target this time was 10,198-foot Mount Redoubt, standing in its snowy mantle almost directly across from the city of Kenai.

“We realized that (the ease of the Iliamna trek) was complete luck, so we planned this one out a little better,” said Johnson. To start with, they decided to allocate more time than they had the year before. They opted to give themselves four days instead of three.

Although they still carried no climbing gear, they did pack a map, emergency-locator beacons and shovels, and three 4½-pound Alpacka one-man rafts. They also spent some time researching their route. Then, eschewing McDonald’s cheeseburgers this time, they settled on a diet of mainly burritos from Taco Bell and a fifth of whiskey apiece.

An acquaintance of theirs with some experience on Redoubt laughed at their sense of preparedness, Johnson said. He also warned them about the crevasses on the mountain and worried about their decision to ski the untried north face, but his arguments failed to dissuade the trio.

Again leaving Anchorage on a Thursday night after work, Stark and Johnson picked up Barnard in Cooper Landing and headed south. At about 3 a.m. Friday, they launched their inflatable from the Kenai beach near the waste-water treatment plant and motored west across Cook Inlet toward the Drift River.

Entering the river mouth, they followed the stream course until they noticed a road near the river. They pulled into a slough and tied off their craft, realizing that the road likely belonged to Chevron’s Drift River facility, but not realizing that they were being watched.

“We got down the road a little ways, and, man, two or three trucks come barreling down the road toward us,” Johnson said. The trucks belonged to Chevron security officials, who were obviously upset by the adventurers’ appearance.

According to Johnson, a Chevron boss from the West Coast had just landed at the facility, and officials there were already on a heightened terrorism alert because they feared possible threats against a whaling convention in the area. Officials talked of confiscating the boat and all the gear until, as Johnson said, “cooler heads prevailed.”

“We had motored right up a pipeline,” Johnson said, and there was a concern about bombs. Ultimately, though, after a long powwow between officials, they decided to not only forget pressing charges but also—after checking out the inflatable and laughing at all the beer inside it—to escort Barnard, Stark and Johnson in a company truck on up the road and off Chevron property.

In the end, the trio saved five to 10 miles of walking. Still, there was plenty of hiking to be done and, since the Drift River is a braided glacial stream, plenty of cold-water crossings to be had. Fortunately, the bluebird skies continued and the sun remained warm. On Friday night, after stashing their pack rafts along the upper river, they camped at about 2,000 feet.

On Saturday morning they affixed skins to skis and began to ascend through a series of seracs, icefalls and thinly veiled crevasses. Especially nerve-wracking was a notch they recognized as a collapsed crevasse still containing beneath the snow fissures that would parallel the direction of their skis on the descent.

All that day, they covered less than five miles, camping at about 5,000 feet near the base of the main mountain. While Stark and Johnson remained in camp, Barnard scouted the route ahead, noting that the avalanche danger was high while still being able to select a reasonably safe route.

“You always want to ski (down) your ascent line because, if your weather turns to crap, you can kind of follow your tracks for a little bit, and it’s real important to know where you’re going,” Johnson said.

By noon on Sunday, following Barnard’s plan, they were on the summit and preparing to head back downhill.

“We hit it just right,” Johnson said of the descent. “Another week and probably it would have uncovered a lot of crevasses, and these (snow) bridges would have been gone.” As it was, noted Stark and Barnard, some of the bridges began to collapse as they traversed them.

Back at the Drift River, they made camp and readied their pack rafts for the trip out. A distance they had labored to cover over much of Friday, they floated in only two hours on Monday morning, but when at last they reached the Achilles they discovered that Monday’s smaller tides had left their boat high and dry in the slough. Consequently, they had to drag the craft over the mud and back out into the current.

“We had to take the outboard off,” Johnson said. “We took out all the stuff. Me, Craig and Rory, we drug that boat. It was probably a little over a quarter-mile. And then we had to go back and get the engine and then we had to go back and get all the stuff. We looked like a bunch of mud turtles out there.”

Eventually, however, they were back in the main channel with their gear packed and ready to go. They reached the Kenai beach on Monday night as the weather began to turn. “It was just blowing up,” Stark said. “It was starting to get just nasty there. We just beat a storm in.”

On the way north, they stopped off at the home of Johnson’s parents in Soldotna and learned that Johnson’s father had tried to “send” them a care package.

According to Barnard, Johnson’s father bought some food at Arby’s and then flew with a friend over Redoubt on summit day, planning to drop a bag of chow to the three men, but the fliers were unable to spot the climbers, and so the delivery never happened.

Less than a month later, they were ready for 11,070-foot Mount Spurr.

*****

At 11,070 feet, Mount Spurr stands about a thousand feet higher than Redoubt and Iliamna, and because reaching it would require traveling a greater distance inland from the coast, Barnard, Stark and Johnson changed their usual modus operandi.

They decided to charter a plane from Merrill Field in Anchorage to Tyonek, to take mountain bikes to roll up the snarl of logging roads leading out of town and up the Chakachatna River drainage toward the volcano, and to give themselves at least five days for the round-trip.

On a Friday morning in early June, they boarded a single-engine Cessna Skywagon piloted by Spernak Air, and after a short flight they were unpacking gear in Tyonek and preparing to maneuver about a 40-mile maze of backcountry roads that would lead them up along the Chakachatna to its confluence with Straight Creek.

“It was crazy,” said Barnard, the least experienced of the three riders. “These guys were flying. It was all I could do to keep up. And I was hot for every break. I was, ‘Oh, a break! Come on! This is supposed to be fun, guys.’”

Near the confluence, they stashed their bikes and began following the creek, crossing and re-crossing its chilly waters to avoid prying their way through thick tangles of alders. Once, Barnard, who said the water sometimes moved so fast he could feel himself starting to float, tumbled into the stream.

“I bit it. I was on all fours,” he said. “Your legs are numb all day long. And then just in time to start feeling your legs and stuff, you plunge into the river again.”

Eventually, after camping for a night on a gravel bar to avoid all the bears in the area, they reached the source of Straight Creek: a swath of ice they called a “dry glacier” because its dense main vein was topped by a thick carpet of rocky debris.

Johnson called the up-and-down, boulder-strewn traverse of the glacier “tedious.” Stark said it was “just like a moonscape.” But, after day of such travel and a night on the glacier, they exited onto a southeastern flank of the mountain, and it was here that their real troubles began.

The clouds moved in. The light flattened out. Warmer air began to deteriorate the snow.

At about 8,000 feet, according to Johnson, they “got up onto the ridge, and, man, it was super steep. But it was the only way we could see to connect our route to the summit. We’re like 3,000 feet from the summit, and the snow at that point was so soft where you could stick your ski pole all the way up to the handle. Like four feet of mush.”

Stark painted an even more severe picture: “There was a cornice on one side of this ridge and then a really steep drop with crevasses running down the other side. This snow, it was just ready to rip. I mean, real sort of unstable snow conditions.

“I pretty much figured if we tried to traverse that ridge, we’d break a slide on it and go into one of the crevasses. And if you stayed high enough to be away from that, then you’d be hanging over the cornice on the other side, which is a cliff. It was pretty untenable.”

They sent Barnard out ahead for a closer look, and even though he said he was “disappointed” by the decision to retreat, he knew it was the right call. “It was such a good decision to turn around,” he said. “Their vibe was totally right.” They descended to 6,000 feet and camped.

On Monday, they worked down the full length of the dry glacier and camped along Straight Creek. On Tuesday, they reached their bicycles and trundled back into Tyonek, where they called Spernak Air. By Tuesday night they were all at home.

Johnson said they were all disappointed by failing to summit, but they decided to take a practical perspective: “The (other two) trips were so perfect that it was kind of nice to throw in three-quarters of a mountain in there. Nobody’s that lucky.”

Johnson added that he had no regrets. “They were the cheapest trips I’ve ever done, and the most rewarding,” he said.

In the months to come, the trio would have many more rewards but also more difficulties.

In October, Johnson, Stark and Stark’s brother Will flew into Katmandu in the Himalayas and climbed then skied down Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak.

Then, just before the end of the year, Stark and Johnson were skiing high on Silvertip Mountain on the Kenai Peninsula when Stark, for the second time in his life, was swept away by an avalanche. “It was horrible,” he said. “I broke my femur in three places, and my tibia was just shattered. For about six inches it was just bone fragments. And there was a piece of bone coming through my leg, and I lost a lot of blood, so I had to have a transfusion.”

Stark was rescued by the 210^th Rescue Squadron of the Air National Guard. In November, he had surgery to remove 20 screws and some metal plates from his leg. Sometime after this Christmas, he said, he hoped to start skiing again.

In March 2008, Johnson and a pair of other Anchorage racers finished second in the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic. And in July, Johnson and Barnard won the summer version of the race.

“It was mainly for the adventure,” said Johnson, speaking chiefly of the volcano trips but also about the men’s shared love of the outdoor experience. “It’s not just the mountains and the skiing. That’s fun, but I think for all three of us it’s just the adventure of going out and doing something different, and rolling the dice. If it works it works. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.”