Red Mountain, Alaska

There's a place in Alaska that looks a lot like the Colorado Plateau. Underneath the ground a wide arc of chromium rich minerals, stretches 200 miles from down near Seldovia all the way up to Sutton, but is largely unexplored except at Red Mountain. In World War II the US Navy set about accumulating a great deal of chrome to keep the hulls of it's ships from corroding. At the Chrome Queen Mine on Red Mountain, chromite mining operations were already in place, and during the war production increased greatly. After the war operations scaled down but ramped up again in the 1950's to satiate America's new appetite for chrome bumpers and automobile trimmings. When Alaska became a state the government concentrated it's efforts on the production of oil. The mine was closed down again and the whole deposit was largely forgotten. You can read more about the interesting history of the mine at the Juneau Empire.

The drivable part of the road ends here at a damaged bridge. Red Mountain looms ahead. There are several mining sites around the bottom of the valley, and it's nice walking along the stream.

Red Mountain is about 17 miles from Seldovia and you can drive to the base of the mountain in just about any vehicle. I was impressed with that. To go exploring you must enter Native lands which require a permit to do so from the office in Seldovia. It's only $5 for a day.

The cool thing about Red Mountain is that it looks completely out of place being bright orange in the center of grey mountain range. Thrust up to the surface from deep down in the mantle, the entire mountain is made of Olivine. Olivine is a green mineral, but when exposed to oxygen it can "rust" and turns orange on the surface. Crack it open and it's still green inside.

The Northeast side of the mountain is very cliffy. Far below you can see the old road in the upper right at the bottom of the big scree slope.

Once the road arrives at the mountain it stops at a partially failed bridge. You can still ride an ATV over the bridge if you don't mind carefully placing each wheel on the bridges exposed support beams and driving perfectly straight. If you do so, you can continue far up the mountain.

My original goal was to ride up the valley on my ATV, then hike the ridge of the mountain next to Red Mountain. There is a pass a few hundred feet above the road that should offer a view of the open ocean to the south. You also might be able to see East Amatuli Island (of The Barren Islands) which Google Earth, in a spectacular error, depicts rising 4,500 feet straight up out of the ocean. That would make it the most awesome island on the planet.

The road goes really far up the mountain, close to 3,500 feet. The top is strangely large and broad with a higher, narrow ridge a few hundred feet higher.

Some of the old buildings have collapsed, but still have that odd hospital blue paint that was popular at the time.

Past the shacks is a clear lake, bounded by this strange long ridge of rock that goes almost to the top of the mountain. It has what looks like a beaver hut made of stone. Must be Chrome Beavers!

The water was crystal clear and didn't appear to have anything living in it.

Unfortunately this trip happened before i knew what was wrong with my machine. I rode up from the ocean and crossed the bridge, and after only a few hundred feet of steep ascent the thing overheated and i had to shut it down. I didn't realize yet that the guy who sold it to me had done so much mud riding that the entire radiator was encased in a mud brick, rendering it useless.

The olivine that makes up the mountain fractures in cool geometric shapes. According to google earth, there might be some more interesting terrain and lakes if you hike over and take a right just before that green peak on the far right. There's a low pass to another hanging valley over there.

I continued on foot, which ate up a lot of time and calories. By the time i got below the pass i decided i could only do one thing that day, so i continued on to the mine.  Eventually the road is purposely destroyed, and for good reason, because just a little farther and it's naturally destroyed in a place that would be impossible to turn around. From there it's easy walking to the mine. You'll be impressed when you get to the hidden plateau of rock almost at the top of the mountain, where the mine shaft is located. All around the orange rock is fractured into cool geometric shapes interspersed with melted looking veins of black glittering chromite. You can see where the workers were scouring the surface and made piles of ore here and there. So i took some with me.

I thought the entrance might be here because it looked like there was a passage behind that iron plate. Eventually i realized the entrance was buried behind the snowfield.

Here's what the entrance looked like. It was just enough of an opening to peer down inside on your knees.

You had to deal with obstacles like this if you wanted to go in.

Here's a look as far as i could see inside. I think the snow likely ended where the blackness begins. Winter was hiding inside and blowing out furiously. I wasn't in the mood for anything like that. The fading sun was warm.

Ah lunch. I'll never understand why i exert so much effort just to end up eating lunch in places that look like a Nigerian computer scrapyard.

This picture shows how the "red" area of the mountains ends abruptly in the upper left.

As is often the case, the forecast was wrong and by the time i got back to the bridge at the perfect time of day to take some really nice pictures i was getting rained on. Despite the rain it was still warm, and i found myself sweating in a storm for only the second time ever in Alaska.  I didn't get the pictures i wanted but i had a good time.

The clouds were getting thick, it was time to go back. From here i actually had good cell phone reception (probably because you could see Homer), so i made some calls.

Getting back in the green. This road has been abandoned for decades. Looked great.

Here's what they were mining. The black chromite often had the appearance of having been melted and mixed into the rock with a knife, like caramel cut into brownie mix. Yum.

Part II: Chrome

The next day i tried to make it to the ghost town of Chrome, on the other side of the mountains. USGS maps show a road continuing through the valley from the mine all the way through to the ocean on the other side 11 miles away. It then ends near a townsite called Port Chatham, which in turn sits across a small bay from the abandoned mining site of Chrome.

Here you can see Red Mountain in the upper center. To the right you can see the road continuing all the way to the ocean and ending near Port Chatham, where it becomes a trail.

The road is indeed there but i didn't get far because the first bridge has been destroyed by a tree carrying flood. It's still walkable though, and so i walked. The road has become so overgrown from disuse that it's pretty much a foot trail now, or a really nice bike trail. I followed the trail for about 2 miles before turning around.

The bridge is rather un-drivable.

The road beyond the bridge looked pretty much like this the whole time, getting slowly narrower the longer i walked it.

On the way back i had a lot of extra time on my hands so i explored the back of this long bay where the ocean looked like a lake and the tide came in silently. A fisherman drove up. He said i was in his secret spot, at the secret time to catch a ton of salmon. He was 72, and had lived in Seldovia since 1991. I asked him about the condition of the road to Port Chatham. He told me the two guys who originally biked the Lost Coast had traveled the whole road a few years ago, and those guys said it was a terrible trip. Eventually the road is completely washed out by every stream coming off the mountain, the stream crossings can be dangerous, the road becomes completely overgrown by thickets of thorny or toxic bushes, and the whole place is crawling with bears. It sounded a lot easier to just sit around and ask questions, which i did for half an hour.

Somehow this whole area is dry, not marshy at all. That lake up there is Jakolof Bay, part of the ocean. It stretches a long way to the right. The only things making noise were salmon.

Later i found out that even if i had braved all the obstacles on the road and made it all the way to Chrome, it's likely i would have died horribly at the townsite. According to old timers the whole area was abandoned en masse due to strange murders and dismemberments by some Bigfoot type of creature. If that's still not enough to convince you, there's the added benefit of a ghostly lady who lives in a cliff face and walks out of the rock at night wearing a very long dress. The whole area is considered haunted and it's advisable not to go there.

Forget about Chrome, near Seldovia is this fantastic long spit creating Kasitsna Bay.

This is Part II in my series of posts on the Kachemak Bay area. You can read about the other interesting places in the area by clicking the links below:

Halibut Cove: A beautiful artists community across the bay.

Seldovia: An attractive fishing town on the South Side of Kachemak Bay

Homer: The traditional End of the Road

Or see what's beyond Homer: Around Kachemak Bay, Thereabouts