Now Online – Exit Glacier/Kenai Fjords National Park Project Jukebox

From the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Kenai Fjords National Park comes word of the Exit Glacier/Kenai Fjords National Park Project Jukebox, now available online at:

http://jukebox.uaf.edu/exitglacier

Visitors to the website can access oral, visual, and map resources that offer a rich understanding of the history of how people have used Exit Glacier and the Resurrection River Valley.

This project highlights conversations with twenty-three long-term residents of Seward about their lives and traditional activities in the area around Exit Glacier from 1950 to 1980. The people interviewed are a diverse group, ranging from skiers, hikers and mountaineers, to snowmachiners, hunters, dogmushers, National Park Service managers, and construction workers on the road to Exit Glacier that now provides easy access to the glacier and park nature center. Other topics discussed in the interviews include: life in Seward and how it has changed, the 1964 Earthquake, construction of the road to Exit Glacier, changes in the glacier and the local animal populations, a snowmachine tour operation on Harding Icefield, hunting, and effects of the establishment of Kenai Fjords National Park in 1980.

During the interviews, people used colored pens to mark the areas they used on USGS maps. These maps are visible on this website as interactive Google maps.

Project Jukebox has helped preserve stories from aspects of Seward’s recent history that may not be well known and have made them accessible to the public. The information discussed in these interviews will be of interest to both local Seward residents wanting to know more about land use activities in their community, as well as to visitors interested in better understanding the community.

This project was supported by funding from the National Park Service.

For more information about this project, please contact: Leslie McCartney, UAF Curator of Oral History (lmccartney@alaska.edu).