Claiming Land in Alaska, 1970 - Part 1

I worked for the Alaska Fish and Game during the summer of 1970. The State flew me down to the Alaska Peninsula, and I spent 70 days with another worker, George Carnes, counting salmon on the Sapsuk River. When I returned to Anchorage in August Dan Wilson, a fellow biology teacher at West High, stopped by the house. He wanted to know if I was interested in staking some land on the Kenai Peninsula.

He unfolded papers and maps that provided info on the State’s land program known as “Open-to-Entry”. Large tracks had been designated from which lots could be leased. You could stake up to five acres, but there was a catch - you had to describe it’s location accurately enough to convince a state official that you were located in the right place. This is the story of our search for the perfect piece of recreational land, and the realization that happiness is more often found in the search and not always in finding it.
Dan was interested in a tract of land on the Kenai Peninsula. It lay about six miles east of the main highway and the village of Ninilchik. The "Open to Entry" parcel measured roughly three miles east-west by one mile north-south, and Deep Creek river ran through the center. It cut through a deep gorge, and we hoped to stake claim on land near the bench so as to have a panoramic view of the valley below.

We made our first trip in late August, a four hour drive from Anchorage to Ninilchik. There were only a couple roads heading east in that area, and we were not sure which was the best way to access the land. Road maps were of no use - not enough detail, so we used U.S. Geological Survey maps. We tried Deep Creek Road as that seemed logical. Dan drove and I acted as navigator, but it came to a dead end within a couple miles. The only other approach to the tract was off Oil Well Road. But the map had been produced ten years before the road.
The two of us looked into the forest while driving back and forth, trying to figure the best place to enter the brush. Our U.S Geological Survey map (shown above) provided scale, contours of elevation, streams, lakes, swamps, and the main roads, but Oil Well Road was not on it. The map had a square mile grid marking Sections of the Township/Range system. It provided the declination of the compass, and I had drawn in the borders of the tract we wanted to explore; but we didn’t know were the road lay.

I've lost count of the number of times we drove up and down that road. It was more than 15 miles to the end. We retraced a three or four mile stretch, but that part had enough twists and turns to create considerable puzzlement. After several passes, we noticed the telephone poles had sets of metal numbers nailed onto them. We studied those numbers hoping to find a pattern. Gradually it dawned on us that one set of numbers matched the Section numbers of the Township/Range system on our map, and the other set numbered consecutively.

That numbers fit with our map; the first on the pole designated the Section; the second number counted the poles in that Section. If we drove west and then turned northwest the first number changed to 7. That fitted with the map’s designation of Section numbers so we were able to place our location on the map in a fairly accurate way. I traced the road onto the map, and then determined the parcel lay two miles south of Oil Well Road.

We noticed there were several cleared paths into the forest. They were like highways, about 40 feet wide, and so straight you could see way in the distance along them. The clearings were seismic trails which had been made in the early sixties when the oil companies were prospecting. They had detonated charges along those trails and were able to determine the characteristics of the underlying strata by analyzing the timing of the seismic waves that were generated. Later we found the seismic trails crisscrossed the entire area providing us with a convenient means of travel. We got to know them well and traced many onto our map.

GO TO: Part 2