A Milepost in backcountry guides

If I woke up tomorrow in Chicken, a town of 37 on the Taylor Highway in eastern Alaska, I’d want to have thermal underwear, energy bars, bear repellent and, above all, a Milepost guide. The need for food and gear is obvious, but many people don’t know about the Milepost, the guidebook for travelers in the North Country since it was first published in 1949.

On a camping tour of central Alaska some years ago, my group’s novice guide read verbatim from the Milepost when he stopped the van to tell us about the sights. I started thinking I could easily replace him because I had a Milepost with me. Given a choice between a real live Alaska guide and the book, I just might choose the Milepost.

A 768-page paperback with copious maps, charts and photos, it covers the 2 million square miles of Alaska, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Alberta. Plentiful information about history and geography makes it useful to travelers who go north by cruise ship or train and to those of us who like to sit at home dreaming of northern climes.

But the Milepost is chiefly a driving guide, sensibly organized not by region but by highways, such as the 1,390-mile Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, southeast of Fairbanks. The guide follows about 12,000 miles of road, including 30 major arteries and 60 lesser routes, and it notes ferry schedules, tourist facilities, showstopper sights and other points of interest.

Every year, six field editors hit the road to update the Milepost and ensure the inclusion of new developments. Editor Kris Graef drives a Volkswagen van and camps. She said it’s hard to lose your way, with the scarcity of roads in Alaska, but that getting stranded is a danger.

Once, on the unpaved McCarthy Road, which parallels the Chitina River east of Anchorage, a tire blew. Another driver came by in about 20 minutes and helped her change it. “In Alaska,” she said, “it’s very bad form to pass someone on the road without stopping to help.”

Graef probably wouldn’t have been as lucky in the early days of the guide, when only about an eighth of Alaska was accessible by road and passersby were as rare as pink flamingos. (Today, the western half of the state still has no highway connection to the eastern half; you can’t get from Anchorage to Kotzebue or Nome by road.)

Back then, William and Helen Wallace, creators of the Milepost, did all the work, from writing and editing to driving, milepost to milepost. Helen, 92, now of Crumpler, N.C., said the book was entirely her husband’s brainchild.

“He was an all-around guy,” she said of William, who sold the business in 1962 and died in 1994. “He could write, draw and do carpentry.”

They met around 1940, married and lived for a few years near New York City, where William worked in advertising. “He sold ads over martini lunches,” Helen said. “But after a while it got old.”

On a summer vacation, canoeing and camping in the Adirondacks of New York, they decided to get out of the rat race by moving to Alaska.

In December 1941, the Wallaces caught a ship from Seattle to the North Country. They had vague plans to settle in Hope, on the northern Kenai Peninsula. But a fellow they met on board told them to head for Homer instead, because it was prettier. Homer, near the south tip of the Kenai, had just two stores and a post office. It was winter when the Wallaces arrived.

“It was nothing but ice, ice, ice -- very inhospitable,” Helen said. “I was homesick, but I wouldn’t let on.”

Later, William did a stint as a fire patrol ranger, which took the couple over dusty gravel roads into the Alaskan outback. Helen remembers camping northeast of Anchorage in a place where she bombarded bears with soda bottles to scare them away. “It was lots of fun,” she said.

Little practical travel information on Alaska was available at the time, which is partly why William started the Milepost. It was a 72-page booklet in 1949 and was founded on his belief that, when it came to the North Country, the “public has innocently absorbed some extremely wild and confused impressions.”

Helen said she went along for the ride, noting mileage and nagging her husband, staying in Quonset hut roadhouses, hardly flinching when their Studebaker station wagon went off the road, quietly dubious about the whole enterprise.

“I thought nobody would ever drive up those gravelly roads,” she said. “Most of them would give Alaska a bad name. Our insurance agent threatened to cancel our policy because we kept having to replace the pitted windshield.”

William kept on. At lonely roadhouses, he assured the owners that tourists would come. With the help of his burgeoning guidebook, they did.

This year, the Milepost celebrated its 55th anniversary by reprinting its first edition. It comes along with the 2003 Milepost, which sells for $25.95 at bookstores and on the Internet (www.themilepost.com).

I have a copy of the Milepost 1949 edition, but I couldn’t find the town of Chicken in it. That’s because the Taylor Highway, on which it lies, wasn’t completed until 1953.

Chicken is in the 2003 Milepost guide. It says the town was named by miners who wanted to call their camp “Ptarmigan” but couldn’t spell it.