A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  Although far fewer people lived nearby, the 1964 Alaska quake could have been proportionately just as terrible, had it not been a bank holiday in the state. The event occurred at 5:36 P.M., and, as the pilot in California recalled with more accuracy than most, it did indeed last a very long time: Almost four minutes of continuous and highly destructive shaking occurred.

  The ultimate cause of Alaskan earthquakes generally is, once again, the northward movement of the Pacific Plate—the same plate whose same northward movement in California, where it rubs up against the North American Plate, triggers the notorious events that occur along the San Andreas Fault. There is, however, a difference. Up in Alaska the curves of the plates and the topographical setting are such that the northward movement of the plate does not necessarily cause it to slide along beside the North American Plate when it encounters it. Instead it dives underneath it, dragging trillions of tons of material down as it does so and causing the North American Plate to bulge up and wrinkle.

  That is the ultimate cause. The proximate cause of the event was that the northbound Pacific Plate had for some reason become stuck beneath its neighbor in one place; and, because it had been stuck like that for several centuries, enormous stresses built up around it. Suddenly on this particular black Good Friday, whatever had been holding it back suddenly released. The Pacific Plate dived down and northward, the North American Plate jumped up and southward—and a vast shaking occurred and a huge amount of damage was done in consequence.

  A barely imaginable 100,000 square miles of territory was deformed by the event, all of it centered around the earthquake’s focus in Prince William Sound. In some places whole tracts of landscape were thrust upward by more than thirty feet, by far the greatest vertical displacement of any modern American earthquake. Much of central Anchorage was ruined: Huge cracks opened up in the ground, scores of houses sank without trace into liquefied earth, and throughout the region tsunamis—one in particular topped with blazing oil from a Texaco tank farm it had destroyed en route—came roaring up narrow creeks, flattened villages, and carried boats and flotsam far inland. Some 135 people were killed, and damage said to be worth $300 million was done. Waves killed and injured people in Washington and Oregon and caused mayhem in Northern California. Power stations, docks, bridges, roads, and railway lines were damaged all around the central part of Alaska—a cruel blow to a state only five years old and barely much beyond the pioneer stage of its young history.

  The second earthquake, which occurred on November 3, 2002, some seventy miles north of Anchorage, was by contrast a true strike-slip event, much like the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Moreover it took place on a fault—the Denali Fault—which looks, from a cursory glance at any good tectonic map, to be a northern extension of the San Andreas. It killed no one and did precious little damage, but it was enormous. It caused sideslips of as much as eighteen feet, having struck with a magnitude of 7.9—almost the same as the 1906 event. It was of particular concern because for 200 miles it tore along a fault trace that crosses the state’s most vulnerable asset—the huge four-foot-diameter pipeline that brings crude oil down from the drilling sites beside the Arctic Ocean to the docks on the Pacific, where tankers can load it to take it to fuel the world.

  ONE OF THE MAIN reasons for my taking this trip to Alaska was to see how the pipeline had fared, curiosity tourism aside. But not only that: The journey up to the Arctic would also take me along the natural northern extension of the Californian fault systems, and it would allow me to see, for one final time, the great Pacific Plate in all its northern manifestations.

  And so, one by one, I would pass by—and on occasion stop beside—the monumental pieces of scenery that owe their existence to the relentless movement of this plate. Mount Shasta, an enormous snow-covered volcano in Northern California; Crater Lake in southern Oregon; St. Helens and Rainier and Olympus and the peaks of British Columbia—all were active and spectacular pieces of evidence of the movement of the confused mélange of plates that jostle for space to the north of the Mendocino Triple Junction.

  DECIDUOUS TREES began to fade into the forests full of evergreens a couple of hundred miles north of San Francisco, and there was still thick snow on the rim of Crater Lake. I stopped in a comfortably eccentric country inn a few miles south of the old volcano—eccentric because the owners, great dog enthusiasts, were in the middle of organizing a boot camp for husky mushers. Dog teams, most of them preparing for that most Olympian of dogsled races, the Iditarod, were practicing their skills in the meadows around the hotel. The huskies, friendly and with ever-searching tongues, were everywhere; they rose at 5:00 A.M. with a chorus of happy howls, and so I rose, too, and pushed on northward, past other mountains, past other breathtaking manifestations of raw North American geology.

  Once across the Canadian frontier, there are three possible routes north, each around 500 miles long, between Vancouver and the southern end of the Alaska Highway. I chose the most westerly, through Squamish and Whistler, up to the small town of Lillooet, where the scenery became more rugged and the feel of the country suddenly more remote. I met a farmer who grew ginseng, and a forester who worked in a place called Bella Coola, as pleasing a name as I had heard for many months.

  And indeed, the names of places began now to have a pioneering sound to them: 93 Mile House, 150 Mile House, Soda Creek, Moose Heights, Summit Lake. Others were simply peculiar: Cinema, Hydraulic, Horsefly, Stoner. In even the smallest towns there were Chinese restaurants, their owners all new immigrants: I spoke more Cantonese there in the heart of the Rockies than I did when I lived in Hong Kong. And between the towns, the rivers began to rage more wildly, the mountains were needle sharp, and up on the passes there were still drifts of late-spring snow.

  And there were bears. Big black bears, lumbering along the now all-but-deserted roadway, looking up briefly as I passed, hoping for something more interesting than the grubs for which they were foraging. But the highway code in these parts discourages feeding: In a bear’s brain, it is a mere step from the idea that roads mean pantry to child means lunch.

  I reached the Alaska Highway after a day and a half of driving: I turned onto a side road to go down the Peace River Valley and joined the highway itself a few miles up from where it officially begins, at Dawson Creek—I had a deep desire not to take a photograph of my Land Rover beside the sign marking Mile Zero, as every other driver with a bull bar and a jerrican of fuel likes to do. So, after turning left at Chetwynd (with chain-saw sculptors plying their unamusing trade on all sides), I joined it at Fort St. John, beside Milepost 47. To reach the official northern end, next to where the American government is putting up a new antimissile site at Delta Junction, Alaska, would be a further 1,343 miles. Three days’ hard driving.

  The Alaska Highway, work on which was started by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at President Roosevelt’s order in the spring of 1942, took 10,000 soldiers just eight months to build. It had two avowed purposes: to connect a set of airfields that allowed aircraft to be ferried from Great Falls, Montana, up to Fairbanks and from there to Russia, as part of the Lend Lease program; and to allow troops to be sent quickly to Alaska in the event the Japanese tried to invade. (They did, however, by seizing a scattering of islands along several hundred miles of Alaska’s Aleutian chain; but the logistical threat posed by the newly built Alaska Highway prevented their pressing any farther east.)

  The route that the engineers took followed old Indian trails, logging routes, and rivers, and the unpaved gravel Alcan Highway, as it was first known, was formally opened to military traffic in September 1942, a scant five months after the Japanese had taken Attu and Kiska Islands. The two teams that had been constructing it from either end met at Contact Creek, beside the present-day Milepost 568. Which is close to where I spent my second and only bad night on the road.

  The first night had been spent in an inn at Fort St. John; the second was at Milepost 613—and the only respite from a thirteen-hour day of driving those 5
66 intervening miles was (aside from my first caribou, moose, Stone sheep, mountain goat, and baby buffalo sightings) a boiling water pool at Liard Hot Springs, a park in northern British Columbia that supports small gray fish that seem to thrive in scalding water, and any number of passersby who imagine they will be refreshed by the sulfurous waters that, courtesy of the Pacific Plate’s activity, are bubbling up out of the ground. There were six supersized San Diegans in the waters, disobligingly stripped to their underwear. I kept my clothes on, and drove ever northward.

  I passed Contact Creek at 10:00 P.M.—it was still brilliantly light outside, the sun setting so late this far north—and found myself eventually foodless and uncomfortable in one of the world’s nastiest towns, Watson Lake, BC. The Milepost guide tries to be kind: “an important service stop,” “a staging post.” But the truth is that the place is a complete dump, and even the presence of a “forest” of left-behind place-name boards and license plates (51,842 of them, from every imaginable place in creation) at the north end of town cannot mitigate its awfulness. Watson Lake is a place to avoid. What do the locals do? I asked the grim-faced innkeeper where I eventually found a room. “They drink and fight,” she said. “Nothing else to do.” Quite so.

  I crossed the Continental Divide eighty miles on into my third highway day. From this point onward all waters drain into the Yukon River and thence into the Bering Sea and the Pacific; the rivers now behind me drained into the Mackenzie and thence into the Arctic Ocean. Pacific salmon migrate up the Yukon and its tributaries. A subtle set of differences, cultural, geographic, and anthropological, was thus settled on the land that lay to the west and north of this barely marked demarcation line on the road. Walker’s Continental Divide Roadhouse made the point a little less eloquently but memorably: The young woman who made the rhubarb pie I had for breakfast was so beautiful, and her cooking so intoxicatingly good, that I threatened to marry her on the spot.

  By now I was firmly in the Yukon, a vast tract of Canadian real estate that English speakers are told is Canada’s Real North, while Francophones have to suffer its description as Le Nord avec un grand “N.” Compared with the British Columbia now far behind, this was harsher, chillier, and more beautiful by the mile. (Except for Whitehorse, which, with 22,000 inhabitants, must be one of the smaller capital cities around, probably rivaling Pierre, South Dakota. Even though Whitehorse tries hard, with its railroad to Skagway and its wonderful paddle wheel ferry on the Yukon River, it does also have a Wal-Mart, and that, for me, is the kiss of death. The notion that the ghost of Sam Walton and the Brutes of Bentonville have come to linger anywhere at all in the Yukon sets me fretting about the state of the world even more than usual. There is worse, however: Someone suggested taking the road farther north still to Dawson City and being initiated into a drinking club that has as its signature libation a whiskey in which is marinated some unfortunate’s frostbitten toe. It seemed almost as repellent an attraction as Wal-Mart.)

  But then all depression lifted once I reached Haines Junction. If ever there was a pretty subarctic town, it is the small group of houses and businesses that cluster beside Milepost 985, near the great range of ice-covered peaks at the edge of Kluane National Park, one of the Canadian park system’s least-visited and most beautiful possessions. I took a small plane up from here to look down on the ice field and the great glaciers that pour down from the Kluane into the not-too-distant Pacific; and on the way down I saw bull moose drinking from the streams in the low, late-evening sun, and thought I had perhaps never seen anything quite so majestic in my life. The Kluane Fault shakes every so often here; I was researching earthquakes in San Francisco and Anchorage, and the locals knew full well why I had come along their valley. This was a link, they all said. They read about it in their weekly newspapers. The same fault line, essentially.

  There are Swiss and German migrants here, and one couple has for the last five years run a hotel—the Raven—which has food in its restaurant that can match that of any European café in New York or Toronto. There is a bakery, too, run by a Scots family, and there can be few more agreeable moments in northern Canada than having a latte on the terrace of the Village Bakery, a scone fresh from the oven, the Kluane peaks glistening in the morning sunshine, the air crisp and cool and full of promise.

  It was after this that I got a speeding ticket, from a Mountie. “Yukon Highway Safety Week!” he informed me with a bright smile, after he had zoomed from out of nowhere with his lights flashing. The road deteriorated rapidly in the miles thereafter, as frost heaves and construction plans and long sections of gravel forced me to slow way, way down and crawl along the lake shores up close to the Alaskan frontier. There was a small plaque at Soldier’s Summit, where the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Alaska Highway was staged in 1942, and its half-century anniversary in 1992.

  The American immigration and customs checkpoint at Port Alcan might once have been perfunctory; these days, given the state of the world, it was fierce, unsmiling, severe. But there were no lines: My car was all but alone, and, apart from the occasional truck swishing south into Canada, and the mewing of the whirling eagles high above, this was the quietest of all frontier crossings, a lonely outpost of American severity. It hadn’t always been American, of course: The frontier itself, spearing its way due north and south along a line kept cleared and marked by stone pillars in the muskeg, had first been negotiated between the British and the Russians, the treaties signed in 1825 in London and St. Petersburg.

  I had a picnic by a lake, then sped on to Tok—short for Tokyo, as the army camp was once called—and spent a night with a family of ultra-Christian bikers whose visitors’ book read like a testimonial for the evangelizing energies of Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. I decided not to tell them about Azusa Street down in Los Angeles, and about how their particular faith had its roots in a disaster that had been caused by the same geological phenomenon that had created the valley in which they live, and in which Tok is sited.

  It was here, at Milepost 1,314, that I was to turn left for Anchorage, and so formally left the Alaska Highway. (The roadway goes straight on north, bound for Delta Junction and the antimissile base, and eventually reaches Fairbanks. It terminates at Milepost 1,422.)

  And it was at a village called Glenallen that I finally reached my intended goal, the pipeline. Ordinarily you don’t see it from the road—this is one of the few places where it passes underground—but on the map it seemed possible to take a short diversion and get a little closer. And so I found a dirt track, thick with low brush and rutted with icy mud, that seemed to go in the right direction. I bumped down it for two miles or so, tipped over a low berm—and suddenly there, wholly unprotected and without a warning sign or a fragment of barbed wire, and standing high off the ground to allow migrating caribou to pass beneath it, was the gray immensity of the line itself.

  I got out of the car, amazed. So this was it—the 800-mile-long pipeline of four-foot-diameter-steel Mitsubishi-made tube, the source of so much controversy when it was built, the source of so much concern now that terrorism had erupted, the fount of so much of America’s economic prosperity and current need for energy. It carries a million barrels of oil each day down from the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay to the oil port at Valdez—and here I was, standing entirely alone underneath it. I had brief thoughts about plastic explosives, of how easy it would all be.

  The line is supported for almost all of its journey aboveground on a series of twelve-foot-high piers, each one shock-absorbed, thus enabling the line to move up and down if the earth chooses to misbehave. A few miles north of here is the very section where the pipeline crosses the Denali Fault, and where the earth does misbehave often, and spectacularly. The shock-absorbing piers on this half-mile section are ingeniously protected by being set down on enormous horizontal steel beams, with Teflon-coated sliders that allow the line to move from side to side should the fault slip, as it is wont to do. The line has a series of built-in bends here as well, so that it is too flex
ible to snap.

  During the November 2002 earthquake all worked perfectly. The earth moved eighteen feet to the right, the Teflon sliders permitted it to slip beneath the line, the built-in curves absorbed the energy. The line at daybreak had an enormous kink in it—but nothing broke, not a drop of oil was spilled, and not even a flicker appeared on the dials watched by the pipeline engineers, even though one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded was tearing apart the earth directly beneath their precious and vulnerable charge.

  Now I had seen it—now that I had seen what is arguably the single most important item of humankind’s making that is potentially threatened by the conjunction of the two tectonic plates—I could at last turn back. It remained only to get to Anchorage itself, to rest, and refuel the car with decent gas. And so, after humming for another half day down a road known unglamorously as the Tok Cutoff, I reached the city itself—a prosperous, contented-seeming place of low skyscrapers and unexceptional suburban houses with barely anything—aside from a few parks and museums—to show for having been so desperately ruined forty years before.

  That the owners protect their pipeline from earthquakes is understandable; that the city of Anchorage seems more blithely unconcerned, and at this time of year merely basks in the near-endless Arctic sunlight, is a little less easy to comprehend. Like San Francisco, it will be struck again one day; unlike San Francisco, Anchorage—at least in the brief pleasantness of its summertime—seems more content to forget the fate that lies in store.

  But I was now eight days out from San Francisco, the car had come 3,850 miles, and I was weary. So I found a good hotel, got my hands on a cold bottle of champagne (this is a prosperous town—with oil, for one thing, helping to make it so), took a long bath, and had dinner while watching the sun set over the waters of Turnagain Arm at a quarter to midnight. The oysters were from Halibut Bay, the salmon was freshly caught that morning, the wine was crisp and cold, and someone was smoking Gitanes at the bar. It seemed like heaven.