The abandoned Jerry Myers Fish Hatchery in Skagway, Alaska was a vocational project offering local high school students a chance to work with even smaller fry.

Eureka, Ikura!

A photo dating from 1971 at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game’s digital archives depicts only a single main building named the “Skagway Salmon Hatchery”. Under one name or another, it would appear the endeavor enjoyed an extensive period of successful growth… much like a young salmon, one might say.

Down the Hatchery

The hatchery had always been operated by the City of Skagway school board – run rather well, as in 1989 it was named the Alaska Vocational Education Program of the Year. On the heels of this triumph, the complex was renamed the Jerry Myers Fish Hatchery. The bronze plaque above is dated June of 1990, though it doesn’t appear to have aged all that well. Alaskan weather will do that.

Skagway the Hard Way

Skagway is situated about 100 miles northwest of Juneau in the Alaskan Panhandle. The smallish city (officially a “Municipality and Borough”) was founded in 1897, achieving widespread fame and notoriety as the jumping-off point for prospectors lured north during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Run, Salmon, Run

Those golden glory days have long gone – Skagway only has about 1,000 permanent residents today. That said, the population roughly doubles in the summer when cruise ships dock at the Port of Skagway. Almost a million tourists visit Skagway annually – not exactly a gold rush but respectable (and profitable) nonetheless. Fees and taxes collected from these temporary visitors help fund projects benefiting locals, one of which being this abandoned fish hatchery.

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Caviar Wishes An Abandoned Alaska Salmon Hatchery

The mysterious eight-story stacked cabin house spotted among the trees in a remote area of Alaska is even cooler than previously thought, now that filmmakers have caught up to creator and self-described “frustrated architect” Phillip Weidner. In a two-minute documentary by Great Big Story called ‘We’re Not in Whoville Anymore,’ Weidner calls his Frankenstein creation ‘Goose Creek Tower,’ and reveals his motivation for building it, along with a few of its most notable features.

“I like building. I just designed it out of my head, we didn’t have blueprints. We drew it out on cardboard, plywood, just as we were going. I started to build a 40 by 40 scribed log cabin, and I realized I could put pillars on top and put another house on top of the house. And I just kept going. We got to 185 feet and we stopped because two hundred feet is federal airspace.”

Previously, we got a look at the outside of the structure overlooking Mount McKinley and the Denali National Park via Alaska Aerial Footage, which captured a dizzying video of its full height against the snowy landscape.

The tower remains pretty bare-bones, with all of the framing complete but no windows or finished surfaces. There are even more levels than you can see from the outside, as the interior winds from one split-level platform to the next. Weiner, a former attorney, reveals that a hidden escape tunnel at the basement level leads to a safe room.

“I wanted to be able to see,” says Weidner. “And that’s the reason I went up. You could see for at least three hundred miles. And of course when the northern lights are out, you can really see ‘em. I hope that Goose Creek Tower will inspire other people to do worthwhile things, not just in building but whatever they do with their life. And every time I go up there, it’s a different experience. It kind of gives you a sense of the enormity of the universe.”

One odd slightly off-kilter story after another was added to this once-modest house in Alaska as the trees decimated by a wildfire grew taller and taller, the owner insistent upon maintaining his view of Mount McKinley. Located in the woods of Willow overlooking the Denali National Park, the tower house began as a one-story that wouldn’t look out of place in any Alaskan neighborhood.

The forest recovered and the trees got taller and taller, obscuring the mountain. So, the story goes, the owner tacked on a second story. And then a third. After a while, it apparently just became a fun challenge to see how many tiny rooms could be stacked on top of each other until locals began calling the structure the Dr. Seuss House.

Alaska Aerial Footage swung by the house to capture a dizzying video that really gives you an idea of just how tall and whimsical the house really is. From the footage, it looks as though the upper levels are unfinished, their windows covered in ripped plastic sheeting. The snow-topped roofs and balconies on each level just add to the slightly surreal effect.

High-minded Modernists of the mid-1900s envisioned futuristic all-in-one cities in the sky where we would work, place, live and love, but would have been surprised to learn that their ideal has perhaps been mostly closely realized in the remote village of Whittier, Alaska, where virtually everything happens under one roof.

A fourteen-story structure known as Begich Towers, formerly an army barracks, is host to most of the town’s residents as well as its post office, grocery store, health clinic, laundromat and church. Writer Erin Sheehy and photographer Reed Young visited and photographed this remote village, traveling sixty miles from Anchorage, Alaska and through a 2.5 mile, one-lane tunnel to get to there (shown below).

This is a place of extremes, which helps explain why its occupants are happy to stay indoors as much as possible – average snowfalls of 250 inches (up to 400 inches some years) and glass-shattering winds make using underground tunnels a preferred means of getting to the few other buildings in town, including the local school. The other large structure in the area is the Buckner Building (below), abandoned but favored by youth who need to get out and go somewhere.

Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation comes to mind, a Brutalist village-in-the-sky concept with alternating floors and complex sections designed to accommodate layers of living, working, shopping and recreating throughout. Ultimately its realization devolved into a typical apartment complex, but the external factors simply weren’t there to reinforce it as an internally self-sufficient community.  The concept has also been called an arcology, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology”, used in science fiction and futurology.

More from Young about the town year-round: “In the summertime Whittier is bustling. Seasonal workers come for jobs on fishing boats, charter boats, or in the cannery, and cruise ships bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to the harbor. But thriving harbor industries—freight, fishing, tourism—don’t seem to translate into growth for the city.”

Like a college town times a few thousand, with visitors far outnumbering actual residents – hundreds of thousand visit the area annually but most drop off for just part of a day then get back on their train or cruise ship and leave town again.

It is, in a way, a company town, but it can also be claustrophobic for those used to warmer climates and more private spaces. “The Alaska Railroad Corporation is the majority landowner in Whittier, but it doesn’t pay property taxes, and it employs few residents. A supply barge comes into town once a week, but most of the workers who unload the freight commute from Anchorage. Not everyone who tries to live in Begich Towers can take it—a newcomer from Florida compared it to jail—and there simply isn’t much space on which to build alternate housing” Aside from the four-image montage, additional images for this story by Travis, nate’sgirl, davidd, Frank Kovalchek, Ross Fowler and Brian Digital.

It sounds like science fiction, but is back on the table after nearly a century of talk: a railway to reconnect the Far East with the Far West, theoretically enabling a Londoner to travel by rail all the way to the US of A (though industrial uses are currently the priority over passengers).

The undertaking might cost as much as a hundred billion dollars, but it could also carry a hundred million tons of freight per year, which puts that price tag in perspective. As for relative examples in engineering: consider the fact that the English Channel tunnel is only half the proposed length of this next world wonder.

Representatives from the Kremlin and White House recently met on the matter and have approved this incredible project to link Alaska with Siberia across the Bering Strait, continuing an existing line on both sides that branches deep into both participating countries.

Commonly known as the Bering Strait Crossing, this is a variant on a surprisingly long-lived theme, from visions of Czar Nicholas II to connect these two countries underground, and more recent ideas to use two islands between the closest points of connection as pit stops for long-span “peace bridges”.