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One big earthquake, two Alaska ghost towns

DOME CITY — “I’m really happy to be out here,” Carl Tape says as he stands on a pyramid of dry gravel, 20 feet high. “I’ve been thinking about this earthquake for 10 years.”

Tape, a seismologist at ������’ Geophysical Institute, has driven me to two Alaska ghost towns on this smoky midsummer night. 

Tape and I are now looking down upon the site of Dome City — also called Dome Camp — which boomed and busted more than a century ago. 

The settlement of a few dozen structures is now gone, converted into piles of gravel by ground-eating dredges that followed pick-and-shovel miners, each seeking gold.

We are here at 10 p.m. on the Sunday that concludes July Fourth weekend. Tape wanted to experience this place on the precise anniversary of a large earthquake, 113 years ago.

“DOME MAN KILLED BY FALLING SLAB,” read the headline in the July 7, 1912, Fairbanks Sunday Times.

A reporter went on to describe how a “large slab of muck,” probably shaken loose by an earthquake, smothered a miner named Louis Anderson who was toiling in an underground shaft. 

Tape wanted to visit this place at this time so he could better understand the nature of an earthquake almost lost to time. Knowing the nature of the July 6, 1912, event — a magnitude 7.2 — will help seismologists learn more about the rupture frequency of Alaska fault systems, such as the Denali Fault.

Tonight, Tape squints, imagining a town with schools and saloons amid the thick green willows. Instead of honky-tonk piano, he hears the spiraling whistle of Swainson’s thrushes. The air smells of vaporized spruce trees from wildfires in Alaska’s Interior, a whiff that was also likely in 1912. 

“And we know the sun’s in the same place,” Tape says.

Dome City went lonesome after 20 years of human noisiness that started about 1900. A stray remnant cabin or galvanized washtub may exist here in the green valley beneath a pastel sky. But we won’t find it tonight. 

Tape wanted to find Dome City to get a sense of how far the place is from his home in Fairbanks.

“Being here doesn’t give you a ton of info, but the people were here, the news was here,” he says.

He and other seismologists have written a paper on the 1912 earthquake in which they combine all 31 “felt reports” of the earthquake. People in Nome, Seward and Dawson City were moved enough to write something down.

Before we arrived at Dome City in his Honda SUV by bumping down a tan gravel road, Tape and I one hour ago sloped down a similar path to another ghost town, named Meehan.

There, off Fairbanks Creek Road about 20 miles north of the city of Fairbanks, Tape pointed out the location of a Meehan store in which the earthquake shook cans off the shelf and pulled apart a stovepipe. 

“A store isn’t going to get damaged without significant shaking,” he says. 

In his research, Tape also scoured the bonus notes sometimes typed by weather observers for that 1912 day. He found a few nuggets about the earthquake from writers in Chicken, Rampart and Copper Center.

One of his favorite “primary sources” is a magazine story written by a mountaineer who had just descended from Denali in early July 1912. He and his partners watched in disbelief as part of nearby Mount Brooks crumbled during the earthquake:

“We saw that the whole extent of the wall that formed its buttress was avalanching,” wrote Belmore Browne in 1913. “The avalanche seemed to stretch along the range for a distance of several miles, like a huge wave, and like a huge wave it seemed to poise for an instant before it plunged downward to the ice fields thousands of feet below.”

Those surviving descriptions all give clues to the location of the earthquake, which may have originated on the Denali Fault, which slices a frown through the Alaska Range and maintains that trench through occasional ruptures.

Tape, who grew up the son of a mathematician who came to Fairbanks to study halos in the sky, is not required to visit buggy Alaska ghost towns as part of his job.

“There’s some scientific value in trying to understand why shaking varies due to local geology and local buildings,” he wrote me after the visit. “But mostly it’s an exercise of imagination. The mining camps offer the perfect mix of scientific and societal value (death and damage) with imagination. What kind of physical force of nature can strike a bit of fear and awe in every living person across central Alaska, all at once?”

And, one suspects these expeditions make Tape’s job, and life, more fun. With detective work that has included sharing cups of instant coffee at the tables of agreeable gold miners whose grandfathers sifted the same gravel, he has further colored in the map of his home country.

Since the late 1970s, ������' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the ������ research community. Ned Rozell a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.