Tom Walker, a photographer, long-time Denali Park resident, and historian, has a new book out about the early years of then Mt. McKinley National Park called McKinley Station. He spoke about it last night at the McKinley Park Community Center.
If you’ve ever worked in a National Park, especially a “flagship” (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Denali), you end up hearing a lot of stories, some true, some not. It was interesting to hear Tom talk about his interactions with the park founders’ families and old timers and combing through archives, all to get at the truth in close detail.
Many of the stories he told were inspiring. The one that really hit home: in his book on Kantishna, he talks about a man who lived there that ended up committing suicide. Tom always puts his home address and telephone number in his books, so after publication, the grandson of that man contacted him and told him thank you. His father had spent his whole life trying to figure out what happened to his father, who had gone to Alaska and never returned, and never knew what happened to him until reading the book.
Other highlights were photos taken by Charles Sheldon on his first trip to the park and the journals of Henry Karstens and Belmore Brown.
