Dateline: May 31, 2024. Last update: October 7, 2024.
In May 2024, we got an email from Dave Barrett that began "I have around 700 slides from a 1966 Alaska Highway trip taken by my father in law with his family and another family they were friends with." Dave had digitized the collection using a Wolverine F2D Titan, and wanted know if we had any interest in using some of the photos on ExploreNorth. The answer, of course, was "Yes!", and the pages that follow are the result.
The father-in-law was Carl Irwin "Skip" Larsen, and joining him on this 6-week trip were his wife Gloria and their two daughters, and friends Malcolm Soine, his wife Donna and their 5 kids. They traveled in two pickups with Chinook campers. Skip drove a 1962 Chevy C20, and Malcom a 1963 or '64 Dodge D200 crew-cab.
Skip was a public school teacher, and Malcolm was a shoe store owner. Skip was an avid photographer, to the point that a new home they built in 1968 included a dedicated darkroom. He had a great eye for photography, and also a good sense of the scenes that were worth recording - he shot with both Kodachrome and Ektachrome film.
The trip began on about June 5, 1966, in Parkland, Washington, a suburb of Tacoma. They drove straight north to Dawson Creek, then up the Alaska Highway all the way to Fairbanks (at that time Fairbanks was successfully claiming to be the end of the Alaska Highway), south to the Denali Highway and west on it to McKinley National Park, where they camped at Wonder Lake for a few days. They then continued south to Anchorage, then headed north to Dawson City where they knew a man who worked on a gold dredge, and they stayed a few days. The next leg took them south to Whitehorse, where they boarded the White Pass & Yukon Route railway (with their trucks on a flatcar) which took them to Carcross and Skagway, where they boarded an Alaska state ferry. They got off the ferry at Juneau and Sitka, finally disembarking at Prince Rupert, from where they drove home, routing through the Okanagan Valley.
There are 12 pages for individual sections of the trip, with a total of 290 photos:
