ALASKA’S VISIONS

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 13335, 23 December 1943, Page 3

ALASKA’S VISIONS

NEW POST-WAR ROAD AWAKENING OF IMAGINATION Fairbanks, Alaska. When the airlines organise a travel booster association, Fairbanks wants to be in on it. This “Golden Heart of Alaska” is on the aerial highroad of to-morrow to the Orient, and already numbers among its distinguished flying visitors such men as Joseph E. Davies, Wendell L. Willkie, and military officers of high rank, not to mention pioneers such as Jimmy Mattern, Wiley Post, Howard Hughes, and Will Rogers. The coming of the Alaska highway has caused the awakening of imagination, too. A new Alaska Travel Association is in the formative stage and the territory already “belongs” to the Pacific North-west Trade Association which is organising support from Tijuana, Mexico, to Nome, Alaska, for the “A” or coastal route for a new post-war road to Alaska.

After that, say the pioneers, who have advanced from dog team to airplane, from news by weekly paper mushed in months later, to shortwave radio bulletins from New York, Tokio, and Rome —after that will come the biggest thing of all. They mean, of course, the Alaska-to-Argentina Highway Association. They know there is much more chance of their driving to Patagonia over the Pan-American highway than of motoring down the other shore of the Pacific to Vladivostok and Peiping. There has been talk of ferries across or tunnels beneath the Bering Straits, but that to-day is in approximately the same stage, so far as popular conceptions go, as the Alaska highway was two decades ago.

There is talk of organising a caravan to take off before the war ends from Alaska to Argentina, to break trail as did the pioneers who mushed into Fairbanks in the 18 90’s, and as did several hardy souls who tramped over the route of the new Alaska highway to the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition and other fairs. There’s talk, too, of an Alaska exposition to open the Alaska road and perhaps a new aiVline to Siberia and the Orient. The housing matter is somewhat of a problem, though Alaskans know Secretary Harold L. Ickes’ Interior Department has reserved much of the land adjoining the Alaska highway for development of tourist accommodations. And there are several spots on the way to the north where' temporary military barracks could be converted to lodge purposes if the road were to be thrown open to travel before lodges have been built. As for citizens of Alaska who expect to head back to Detroit to buy new cars and drive them home, they’ll ask for nothing more than a place to unroll their sleeping bags with their heads pointed north and their faces turned to the west.