Alaska · Ghost town
Kennecott
A fourteen storey red mill building standing beside a glacier, at the end of one of the worst roads in Alaska.
Position Copper River Census Area, Alaska · 61.5191, -142.8415
Kennecott was the centre of several copper mines in what is now the Copper River Census Area, northeast of Valdez. It sits beside the Kennicott Glacier inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and it is a National Historic Landmark District administered by the National Park Service.
The concentration mill is the thing people come for: a stepped red timber structure fourteen storeys high, built down a mountainside so that ore moved through it by gravity. Nothing about its scale makes sense until you are standing under it.
The copper here was extraordinarily rich, some of it over seventy per cent pure. The operation ran from the early twentieth century until 1938, when it closed and the last train left, and the buildings were simply abandoned in place.
Getting there is the hard part. The McCarthy Road is sixty miles of unpaved former railbed with a reputation for punctures, and the last stretch to Kennecott is on foot or by shuttle. Plan two days, not one.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Kennecott, Alaska. The words above are ours.