As many of you know, in just a few weeks our team--chief engineer, Rick Stiles, head navigator, Rick Stiles, professional photographer, Rick Stiles, and other crew members (me) will soon be embarking on a bicycling adventure that will begin in Billings, Montana, then meander over to Missoula, and finally after breaking our bikes down, we'll catch a plane and get dumped off at Deadhorse.
For the directionally challenged, if you jumped on a plane and flew to the furthest northern point on the map, you'd land in Deadhorse. But maybe you're afraid of heights so you decide to get in your car and drive there. When the Pan-American road runs out of road--somewhere near the Arctic Ocean--that's Deadhorse.
Interesting Facts About Deadhorse:
- 500 miles north of Fairbanks
- population: 25-50 souls
- town built entirely on gravel pads
- longest day: 63 days (May 20-July 22)
- Shortest day: 45 minutes (November 24)
- average high in June: 46 degrees
- average low in June: 32 degrees
- snowfall in June: 1 foot
Deadhorse is the site that our bike tour will begin in earnest. So I wondered about the town's name. How did they come up with "Deadhorse?" There are several versions about how the town got it's name.
Version One: the literalist view. A gold-miner rode a horse into the area and decided to stay. The lack of fillies and abundance of mosquitoes drove the horse insane. But soon, a cross-eyed caribou caught the horse's fancy and a "meaningful relationship" blossomed. Life is good. Then the brutal winter hit and the poor horse didn't survive and thus it became literally, a "dead-horse." RIP.
Version Two: the dynamic equivancy view. A cheechako (a greenhorn who came to the Alaskan frontier to get rich mining gold) somehow wandered into the Beaufort Sea and finding a caribou skull, mistook it for a horse skull and claimed the town of Deadhorse.
Version Three: the paraphrase rendering. Once upon a time a trucking company was contracted to remove dead horses in the Fairbanks area . . . or a disgruntled father was ticked off that his son made him financially responsible for a bankrupt gravel company and reportedly said to his son, "I hate to put money into feeding a dead horse."
So that's the name-histories of Deadhorse. I almost wonder if the inhabitants aren't painfully sensitive about their dead-animal name, so I certainly don't want to beat a deadhorse on this blog. More positively, what a great place from which to launch a bicycle tour--in a town at the top of the world with the Arctic Ocean as its backyard.
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| The road that runs through Deadhorse, Alaska |
just seeing if the comment section works!
ReplyDeleteUnique names have their advantages. They are a good conversation starters, fodder for a blog post, and rarely confused with another town by the same name...though somehow I doubt this town will ever produce a Kentucky Derby winner.
ReplyDeleteWith all that snow, I wonder if the natives have ever seen a bicycle, let alone a recumbent. They may be almost as rare as horses up there.
ReplyDelete