All aboard… Ski Train

SCOTT CHRISTIANSEN-Frontiersman reporter

CURRY -- Last Saturday about 500 skiers climbed off the Alaska Railroad Ski Train Special and strapped on their skis to kick and glide into the wooded hills around Curry. Throughout the day, ski parties would stop to take photographs of each other posing underneath a 10-foot-tall sign that says simply "Curry" in black letters on a small white board. In 2003, that sign is just about all there is to distinguish Curry from nowhere.

But it hasn't always been this way. Curry used to be somewhere and some of last week's ski train passengers had stories about Curry and no plans to ski.

"I have a little Super Cub and some property up north," 76-year-old Ben Miebs of Anchorage said. "In the summers, I'd always fly down the Susitna River and over Curry to see my old home. I'd be on floats and so I could never land in Curry."

Miebs was a telegraph and telephone lineman on a crew based in Curry from 1952 to 1954. Curry sits about 20 miles north of Talkeetna and just east of Curry Ridge on a flat plane where the Susitna River cuts between two hills that climb about 2,000 feet above the river. It can get cold between those hills. Miebs and his first wife moved away at her urging.

"Most of the women didn't like it that well," Miebs said. "… During winter, the days would be short and dark, and down in that gully they were that much darker."

Between 1917 and 1959 Curry served initially as a railroad worker's village and then as a destination resort. At its peak there was a hotel, a water tower, homes for railroad and telecommunications lineman, a school and an industrial laundry facility that cleaned linens for the railroad hospitals in Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Amenities for the hotel included a rope tow, gas-powered rail cars for summer fishing excursions and tennis courts. There was also a "men's bar" in the basement recreation room and after 1945 a cocktail lounge for both genders adjacent to the first floor lobby.

Curry also had a suspension foot bridge across the Susitna River that led to a trail up Curry Ridge. At the top of the ridge there was a warming hut dubbed "Camp Regalvista" for its view of Mount McKinley, which is just 25 miles away.

There is one more ski train scheduled this year, but skiers won't be climbing Curry Ridge. Open water prevents skiing across the Susitna, and the suspension bridge only exists in old photos on the train. The hut is still there, according to Kenneth Marsh, who was also onboard the train. Marsh was selling copies of his self-published book on Curry called "Lavish Silence, A pictorial chronicle of vanished Curry Alaska."

In his book, Marsh describes Curry as "… a true enigma. It started from nothing in the middle of no-where. It grew into something superb for its location and time of being. Then Curry was gone completely as a populated, physical place."

The fact that there is no ghost town is part of the enigma. The historic photos Marsh and other railroad historians publish are pretty much all that remains of the resort. That and memories from Alaskans like Miebs. He remembers playing poker and a dice game called "four, five, six" in the men's bar. People who played checkers in the main lobby would often keep score, Miebs said, but no money changed hands in public.

"[Gambling] wasn't advertised. You didn't do it in the hotel lobby," Miebs said. "But downstairs, where the working men ate, there would be money on the table."

Marsh's book chronicles Curry's story from its conception in inter-office memos inside the U.S. Interior department's railroad bureaucracy in the 1920s, up until its death when the hotel burned down in 1957 and the railroad's linemen were relocated to Talkeetna in 1959. Curry's buildings were either moved -- some originally came from other railbelt towns such as Chickaloon -- or destroyed to prevent squatters from moving in.

"Curry went from nowhere, to somewhere and back to nowhere really fast," Marsh said.

Last weekend's ski train conductor, Rod Frank, lived in Curry when it was somewhere, but he was too young then to conjure memories of it now. Frank, 48, is a third-generation ARR employee. His older brother Duane, an ARR locomotive engineer, has stories about being a kid in Curry.

Frank has likely rode past the white sign marking Curry as many times as anyone. For him Curry is somewhere, even if it is currently vacant.

"For the last 10 years or so, I've thought it would be kind of neat to rebuild a small Curry," Frank said, then hedged that thought with an observation on working for a government-owned corporation.

"Where do you spend the money and where do you recoup the money if you only go there twice a year?" -- Frank cuts the interview short to attend to his conductor's chores. He talks briefly with another ski train crew member over an intercom as the train approaches Wasilla. After 20 seconds or so of technical chatter, he takes another moment to talk about Curry and a slight smile takes over his face.

"But if I was retired, and I had nothing better to do than be stuck in between two mountains …"