P-W Highway: From dirt track to high density

May 12, 2006

By JOEL DAVIDSON

Frontiersman

MAT-SU - Right, left, right, left. Robert Vroman burned seven minutes craning his neck back and forth the other day as he attempted to find an opening in the stream of traffic on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

It wasn't always that way.

Now silver-haired and inching into his golden years, Vroman remembers days when he'd go three or four hours at a time without spotting a single car on the road.

In the early 1950s, before statehood, Vroman work for the Alaska Road Commission. He lived in Houston, but traveled the Palmer-Wasilla Highway regularly to work in Anchorage.

This week, he recalled nearly 50 years ago when his car broke down near Hyer Road in 20-below weather.

&#8220I was at the road for three-and-a-half hours before an individual came through, and he went right on by me,” Vroman said. &#8220A few hours later another individual came by and helped me out - it was a narrow escape.”

Up until the mid-1960s, Vroman said the road was a dusty, sparsely traveled dirt washboard in the summertime, and a narrow icy path in winter.

&#8220It was a nightmare,” he said. &#8220It was like driving on a goat trail. You'd go over a hill and swing around a swamp - it was erratic at best.”

A two-lane route but only 18 feet wide, the road was a primitive version of the now busy route that connects the cities of Palmer and Wasilla.

By the mid-1960s, Vroman said, the state began straightening the road, filling in swamps and knocking down hills. The road itself also was widened to 40 feet.

Before the improvements, however, other longtime residents say the old road often was impassable in the wintertime, as snow whipped off farm fields near Four Corners to create massive drifts. In the summer, bone-jarring potholes and soft mud made the 10-mile journey nearly an hour-long affair.

&#8220It wasn't like today,” Erling Nelson explained. &#8220In the early 1950s, my dad ran the first snowplow truck in the Wasilla area. Other than that, there wasn't any maintenance other than a dozer when the roads got real bad.”

But the scenery was pastoral and virtually untouched. Virgin forest lined most of the road except where it passed the occasional farm field. In addition to the landscape, wildlife was more common along the road.

With virtually no shoulder to the road, LeRoi Heaven said he remembers moose feeding right next to passing cars.

Now president of the Wasilla Knik Historical Society, Heaven grew up along Fairview Loop in the 1950s. He said his family headed into Palmer about once a week. Back then, Palmer was the place to be for entertainment and shopping, Heaven recalled.

As a teenager, he remembers heading down the Palmer-Wasilla Highway to watch movies at a Palmer theater, or to hang out at a Palmer bowling alley.

Born in Wasilla in 1942, Nelson said he remembers his dad traveling to Palmer once a month to buy fresh produce and meat at Koslosky's grocery store.

The earliest borough records show a dirt path from Palmer to Wasilla in 1925.

&#8220You could only go about 35 miles an hour then, tops,” he said. &#8220It had a lot more hills and curves in those days.”

Contact Joel Davidson at 352-2266 or joel.davidson@frontiersman.com.