- [Narrator] Alaska is big.
It's a fifth the size of the entire contiguous U.S.,
three times the size of Texas,
but with only about a fraction of the people.
Generations of artisans, builders, and scientists alike
have found inspiration in Alaska's wild, open spaces,
leaving their mark on destinations across the state.
Atlas Obscura has collected thousands of curious
and fascinating places across the globe,
each one with its own incredible history-
each one, a new story to be told.
These are four of those stories.
Goose Creek Tower looks like
it was dragged straight out of a fairy tale.
Created by a poet/lawyer
who found an almost religious inspiration
in the Alaskan wilderness,
construction on the rambling stronghold
began over 20 years ago.
The tower has grown without a specific plan or purpose
and it might not be done just yet.
- [Phillip Weidner] My name is Phillip Paul Weidner.
I live in Alaska.
I'm the owner and the builder of Goose Creek Tower.
I actually also built my own home.
It was a little bit of an inspiration
for Goose Creek Tower.
The other inspiration was the Gaudi Cathedral
in Barcelona, Spain.
They're still working on that
and they've worked on it for about 125 years,
and in fact, my children and my grandchildren
may have to actually finish it,
but the way I've designed it and built it,
barring some catastrophe,
and I hate to even talk about a catastrophe,
it should stand for at least a thousand
or maybe a couple thousand years.
I'm a little bit of a frustrated architect.
I mean, I studied engineering.
I'm also from a family of builders-that is, farmers
building barns and things of that nature-
so even though I went to MIT and studied engineering
and used some of my education in building the tower,
I really built it like a farmer would.
We didn't have any plans, we just built it as we went,
and actually it evolved as we went
and at each stage, we'd just draw it out on
cardboard or plywood or even in the dirt
and decide where to go next.
People often ask me why did I do it
and why am I doing it, and the answer is simply
because I wanted to and I can.
But it also gives me a connection to the universe
and I often refer to it as a poem to the sky.
I write poetry.
I crossed mi-bee-in Rubicon when I first tasted light.
At borning kiss of la vie don
and out the welcome night.
They say each day brings thought, beat, breath,
along the cosmic way,
on ethereal road through
myth of birth, through mirage of death,
la vita dies begins.
As the life, spark, fire,
flame be so lit, so ends.
Flare surges, withers, wanes,
say so, so doth my eye of eye,
with each tick tock of cosmic clock,
be so spawned so, too, doth die.
As Mobius shift shapes of entropy,
carousel cusp of energy,
kaleidoscope visions of to be
on our shifting state of la vie,
so with eternal mystery, so flows, so flies by
with ancient ruin of why, of why.
- [Narrator] Down a tight side street in Juneau, Alaska,
there's an incredible museum dedicated to preserving
the history of Alaska and its people one doll at a time.
The museum holds one of the world's most diverse collections
of indigenous dolls, featuring figures not just from Alaska,
but also from distant regions
such as Scandinavia and Siberia.
Aunt Claudia's Doll Museum is home to hundreds of figures
made by hand and crafted by tradition.
- [Mary Ellen Frank] My name is Mary Ellen Frank,
and I am a doll artist and a curator and director
of Aunt Claudia's Dolls in Juneau, Alaska.
Claudia's -- her doll collection,
it wasn't like one of those doll collections
that kids couldn't touch.
She was always willing to have kids come out.
And she was, like, more than willing to have them touched
and played with and enjoyed.
So, I think she was full of joy and sharing.
And when I finally did connect with Claudia and Bee
through a mutual friend,
they were just a real rich part of my life.
I took a two-week workshop with an Eskimo doll maker
who was doing a solo show and I just loved it.
For one thing, dolls outlast us.
And they communicate beyond us.
What they communicate is an image of what we thought we were
or maybe wanted to be.
I think they are the ones that are telling us something.
They take you through so many different kinds of art
as you make them.
There's just so much information in Alaskan dolls,
but in all kinds of dolls.
The posture, the size, the proportion.
I think that the people who are from the culture
or from the area, everything about the doll
is saying something about what their self-image is.
Yupik or Inuit dolls that were actually made
by Yupik or Inuit people
and see the differences in them
and see what they're trying to convey.
And to see that over time is fascinating
and it does communicate something,
like a snapshot.
- [Narrator] Not every story is one
of success and achievement.
The moldering dome once known as Igloo City
is a testament to the mad ambitions
that Alaska's unforgiving wilderness can inspire.
Still unfinished, its remains tease a second life
that will probably never come.
The Igloo City project was the dream
of World War II vet Leon Smith,
who began work on the site in the 1970s.
Smith imagined Igloo City as a hotel and highway attraction
with its own general store and gas station.
Roughly halfway between the cities
of Anchorage and Fairbanks on the edge of Denali State Park,
you can still find the imposing shell
of Smith's doomed novelty igloo.
Inside, small rooms would have linked to a center atrium,
creating a feeling of warmth and coziness
against the wilderness outside.
But the grand opening never came,
and only the local wildlife have ever had the chance
to take refuge there.
Igloo City was plagued
with construction and structural issues.
It failed to meet building codes,
and Smith was never able to acquire the capital necessary
to get his project back on track.
He eventually managed to sell the property,
and his unfinished folly, just before his death in 1999.
The new owner tried to operate
a small gas station and some cabins on the site,
but these endeavors didn't fare any better than Smith's.
And they closed down in the early 2000s.
Today, the owners don't have the funds or the will
to continue working on it.
And while the iconic exterior has been standing
for over 40 years,
the inside has deteriorated
from decades of freezing and thaw.
The structural flaws that supposedly led
to problems with the building's approval
have only multiplied.
It's unlikely that Igloo City will ever see guests,
but when you visit the site
it's hard to ignore what could have been.
But in case, like Smith, you can't resist the call,
it's for sale for just $300,000.
The call of the Alaskan wild doesn't only sing to artists.
Fairbanks, Alaska's Permafrost Research Tunnel
was created in the 1960s to test
whether the perpetually ice-bound soil could even be broken.
But the tunnel continues to prove itself to be
far more fascinating than they could have imagined.
- [Gary Larson] My name's Gary Larson.
I'm the facility manager
for the U.S. Army Core of Engineers Cold Regions Research
Engineering Laboratory Permafrost Tunnel.
When I came to work for CRREL,
the reason they hired me was
because they needed a bureaucrat
because all of the big brain researchers
aren't very good at budget and contracting.
And so, they decided to hire someone
to take care of those things and help them be successful.
I'm trying to interpret what we see inside the tunnel,
and relate that to issues and concepts
that are familiar to the general public.
When you first step into the tunnel,
I think most people are expecting to see an ice tunnel.
Ice covering the walls.
And that's not exactly what you see.
When you first walk in,
what you notice is that you're seeing mostly frozen silt
blown in off the glaciers off of the Alaska range
somewhere between about 45,000 years ago
and about 10,000 years ago.
It contains roots, it contains a lot of gravel layers.
It contains, also, prehistoric bones.
The bones are from the Late Pleistocene,
the animals that lived here in Fairbanks area
probably 10 to 15,000 years ago.
They're not old enough to have fossilized,
and so they're still considered all to be bones.
The tunnel is actually an excavation
that's about 100 meters.
It was created in 1963 to demonstrate that you could dig
in permafrost soils as a way of storing material
and protecting military stuff.
Quickly thereafter, as soon as they completed the experiment
they realized that it is a wonderful laboratory,
a wonderful research facility,
and so my organization,
Cold Region Research Engineering Laboratory,
quickly took over management
and have been managing it as a research facility ever since.
NASA, like many other organizations,
have done research in the tunnel many times.
The tunnel is a wonderful example
of what long term frozen ice features look like.
And so, NASA felt that the tunnel was a wonderful analog
for what they were seeing on Mars.
NASA was taking samples from ice wedges within the tunnel
and when they took the samples back to the lab,
they were amazed to find out
that bacteria that had been frozen in the permafrost
for 25,000 years reanimate.
If the climate continues to warm here in interior Alaska
and most of the permafrost were to thaw,
it's very possible that the tunnel might be
the very last remaining bit of permafrost
because we artificially refrigerate it.
These are just some of the wonders
that can be found down Alaska's back roads,
tucked away in its hidden corners.
Every state, every place, has so much to explore.
And wherever you are,
there are stories just waiting to be discovered.
To find more curious stories and hidden wonders,
click the button to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Tell us in the comments what state you think
we should look at next.