Fire claims historic Forks Roadhouse

TRAPPER CREEK — The Forks Roadhouse, a historic bar, restaurant and lodge with decades of history, burned to the ground Wednesday night.

According to Rebecca Charles, who runs the roadhouse’s Facebook page on behalf of its owners, said details of the fire were still kind of sketchy when she spoke Thursday.

“(A caretaker) went in there it was probably yesterday afternoon to start up the generator to keep the freezer running,” Charles said. “Everything was OK yesterday afternoon.”

Which, she said, means the fire probably started that evening.

“Apparently, it’s just a smoldering hole in the ground,” she said.

No one was injured in the fire. There are often dogs on the property, but none were hurt. Alaska State Troopers and state fire marshals were on their way to the scene Thursday.

Petersville Road is located off of Mile 115, Parks Highway. The roadhouse was at Mile 18.7, Petersville Road and was built around 1920 by Belle and Mack McDonald, according to Fran Seager-Boss, the Mat-Su Borough’s Cultural Resource Specialist. It was the stopping point for rooms and supplies for freighters and gold miners, she said. The building was registered as historic on the Alaska Heritage Resources Survey, the statewide inventory of historic and archaeological resources.

Lately, it had become a popular stopover, providing food, fuel and libations for snowmachiners and other people recreating in the area. It was only accessible by snowmachine in the winter and had lately only been open on weekends.

Popular Valley musician Lulu Small was billed to play there this weekend.

“Man, what a way to wake up today,” Small said Thursday. “This is devastating for so many people in so many ways.”

The roadhouse was outside the boundaries of the Mat-Su Borough’s fire service areas. The closest fire department is Talkeetna. In a borough press release, Talkeetna Fire Chief Ken Farina said no one had requested firefighters respond to the roadhouse. Or, at least, he didn’t get a call on his pager.

It’s an open question whether they could have gone if they’d been asked. Borough rules prohibit response outside of fire service areas for fear of lawsuits if something catches fire inside the area while crews are away.

Assemblyman Vern Halter, who represents the area, said in that borough press release that he was sad to see the place go.

“It’s one of the saddest events in Petersville history,” said Halter, who has been there “a million times. It’s a landmark lodge that will be greatly missed.”

Charles said she, too, was saddened to hear the news. Her connections to the roadhouse run deep.

“I lived and worked there for a year, I met my husband there,” she said. When she moved to town, she volunteered to run the roadhouse’s Facebook page, since she now has a stable Internet connection. She still has a cabin in the area and gets back occasionally.

“I’m looking at my daughter right now and my daughter wouldn’t exist because of the Forks Roadhouse,” she said.

Small said she’d only been there maybe seven or eight times, mostly in the past couple of years surrounding her hip surgeries. She shared stories of heading out to Forks on a snowmachine, dressed for the stage in flame-patterned leggings, holding two canes wrapped in leopard-print duct tape and towing a sled full of musical equipment.

She loved her time there, she said, even if one visit did include an unsolicited 5 a.m. wakeup call from a groggy snowmachiner who passed out on top of her searching for a bed when his cabin’s heater wouldn’t work.

“You’re braving the elements to get to the gig, and once you get out there it’s just amazing,” Small said. “Only in Alaska you could find a place like that.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.