Two Girls Waffle House. Anchorage, Alaska. Ca. 1900.

Flying over Anchorage, Alaska | JL8 | NRT-BOS | Boeing 787-9

Whittier, Alaska, is a town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in a 14-story former Army barracks built in 1956. The building, called Begich Towers, holds a police station, a health clinic, a church, and a laundromat. Its hallways resemble those of a school . One can often find residents shuffling around in slippers and pajamas.

Because the winters are so ferocious, the town’s only playground is indoors.

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This is some dystopian young adult novel bull.

To be fair pretty much all of Alaska is some dystopian young adult novel bull in one way or another. 

I have only been to the outside of Whittier, that one time I took the ferry from Valdez, and it’s grim-looking as hell.

This also neglects to mention that the only ways to reach Whittier are either the aforementioned ferry, bush plane, or a 2.5 mile-long, approximately 15′x15′ tunnel through a mountain that looks like this inside:

The AKDOT website reassures us that “During the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake (the greatest magnitude earthquake ever recorded in North America) the tunnel suffered no significant structural damage and no cave-ins.”

Also please note that though most of the population now lives in the Begich Towers, the townspeople used to reside in the Buckner Building, which is now abandoned and just. Sitting there. Empty. The building that used to be a whole town. Looking super fucking haunted:

“The constant sound of cascading water echoes throughout the complex. Bears have been reported both wandering the upper floors in the spring and hibernating on the lower floors during winter.” 

that last building isn’t abandoned, it literally says the bears live there now.

This is some Metro 2033 shit. I love it.

Warming up the engines on a P-61 before flight, Ladd Field, Alaska, February 1944