Chugach Mountains

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chugach Mountains of southern Alaska hold a record most people have never heard of: more snowfall than anywhere else on earth. An annual average of over 1,500 centimeters falls here, the result of sitting directly along the Gulf of Alaska where moisture-laden Pacific air slams into the range with nowhere else to go. That combination of geography and climate shapes everything about these mountains, from the glaciers that define their eastern boundary to the highways that thread through their valleys. How did a range most Americans couldn't locate on a map come to carry that kind of superlative? And what does it mean to live in the shadow of peaks named after figures as different as a Norse god and a twentieth-century general? Those questions will take us from the Indigenous people who first named these mountains to a five-pointed star studded with light globes on a high ridge above Anchorage.

• 2. Shape of the Range

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  Stretching roughly 250 miles long and 60 miles wide, the Chugach form the northernmost link in the chain of Pacific Coast Ranges that lines the western edge of North America. Their western limits begin at the Knik and Turnagain Arms of Cook Inlet, two narrow tidal waterways that reach toward Anchorage. To the east, the range runs out at Bering Glacier, Tana Glacier, and the Tana River, which together mark a boundary written in ice and meltwater. The Matanuska, Copper, and Chitina rivers trace the northern edge.

  Mount Marcus Baker is the highest point, rising to 13,094 feet. Yet the range's average elevation sits at just 4,006 feet, meaning that most of its summits are, as the terrain record puts it, not especially high. The list of the twelve tallest peaks reads like a hall of mythology and history: Mount Thor at 12,251 feet, Mount Valhalla at 12,135 feet, Mount Einstein at 11,401 feet, and Mount Tom White at 11,155 feet. Farther down the ranking, Mount Billy Mitchell, at 6,968 feet, honors the early aviation advocate of the same name. Flattop Mountain, at 3,245 feet, sits close enough to Anchorage to be one of the most-hiked summits in the state, a low doorstep into a very tall house.

• 3. The People Behind the Name

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  "Chugach" is not an English word or a surveyor's label. It comes from Chugach Sugpiaq Cuungaaciiq, the name of Alaska Natives who inhabited the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound along the south coast of Alaska. The Chugach people are an Alutiiq group, sometimes called Pacific Eskimo, and they speak the Chugach dialect of the Alutiiq language. The mountains took their identity from the people who lived beneath them long before any cartographer arrived.

  In 1898, United States Army Captain William R. Abercrombie recorded the name in writing, spelling it "Chugatch" and attaching it formally to the range. That slight variation in spelling hints at the imprecision of phonetic transcription across languages. The Koniagmiut, the Sugpiat people of the Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula, may have referred to their northern neighbors as "Cuungaaciirmiut" in older times, though whether that usage predates Russian contact or emerged during it remains an open question. The mountains themselves kept the name regardless of how its origins were debated.

• 4. Roads, Tunnels, and Access

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  Four major highways run through the Chugach: the Richardson Highway, the Seward Highway, the Portage Glacier Highway, and the Glenn Highway. Each one represents an engineering compromise with terrain that does not yield easily. The most unusual of these crossings is the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, which carries both railroad and automobile traffic beneath Maynard Mountain on the Portage Glacier Highway. On one side of the mountain lies Portage Lake; on the other, the city of Whittier on Prince William Sound. Without the tunnel, Whittier would be effectively cut off from the road network.

  The proximity of the Chugach to Anchorage makes the range a natural destination for outdoor activities, with Chugach State Park and Chugach National Forest together providing formal protection for the majority of the range. The state park sits close enough to Alaska's largest city that residents can reach trailheads within minutes of leaving downtown, a circumstance that few mountain ranges of this scale can claim anywhere in the world.

• 5. The Star on Mount Gordon Lyon

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  At roughly the 4,000-foot level on Mount Gordon Lyon, a 300-foot five-pointed star faces the city of Anchorage. Around 350 light globes make up the structure, which was established around 1960 when the US Army maintained it, owing to its proximity to Nike missile Site Summit in the mountains. Today, the US Air Force's Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson handles maintenance. The star is lit from Thanksgiving until Christmas Day, making it a landmark on the Anchorage skyline for the holiday season. It is also illuminated on September 11th each year. Few mountain ranges in North America carry a public monument of that scale on their slopes; the fact that it commemorates both a religious holiday and a day of national mourning speaks to the different ways a city can use a mountain as a backdrop for its own calendar.