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Let These Photos Take You to Alaska's Abandoned Mining Towns
Oct 1, 2020
McCarthy, Alaska, is a shell of a place. Located in the Valdez-Cordova census area, about 300 miles east of Anchorage, it is a ghost town, with a meager population of 28. Wooden structures, now worn into dilapidated ruins by time and the elements, are backdropped by looming, snow-capped mountain peaks. They remain as testaments to the town’s frontier glory days a century ago.
When Dublin-born photographer Paul Scannell journeyed to Alaska from London in 2016, he didn’t expect to end up in McCarthy and nearby Kennecott. He first traced Christopher McCandless’ footsteps to the abandoned bus made famous by the movie Into the Wild , but ended up prolonging his stay in Alaska. Both settlements were erected in the early 1900s, when the copper and gold mining industries brought frontiersmen and their families up north to seek their fortunes. In their glory days, about 1,000 people resided in the area, and yet the towns are nearly devoid of human life today. Wisps of former residents persist in a scrap of a poster of a woman still staring from the wall, a rusted jam jar left on a table, a discarded boot. After copper prices fell during the Great Depression, the mines depleted and ceased operation in 1938.
Photographer Paul Scannell has spent years hiking to the region's precariously perched mountain-top copper mines and remote gold mining sites with the aim of capturing America's slowly disappearing frontier history.
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