Monday, May 21, 2012

Conflagration in Copper Center

This is how I remember the Copper Center Lodge from my last visit there a few weeks ago. I was just finishing up another "most excellent" work trip, and, heading out of the area, I stopped in for a goodbye-breakfast. I had sourdough pancakes. They were wunnerful!  It was my birthday.


Quoted from Anchorage Daily News, "The lodge has played a central role in the Copper River Valley community for decades, (owner)Huddleston said.
The original roadhouse on the site was built in 1896 and served gold miners. It was rebuilt after a 1928 fire.
Huddleston's family has operated the lodge, which used to be known as the Copper Center Roadhouse, since 1948. In 2007, Huddleston's mother, Jean Ashby Huddleston, recounted her early days at the lodge to the Daily News: the scent of animal pelts (back then, roadhouse owners traded groceries for furs) competing with her mother's freshly-baked bread and Gold Rush old-timers with colorful biographies playing cribbage and spitting tobacco into the stove.
The roadhouse only closed for one year, after a freak ice jam and the Good Friday earthquake caused the Klutina River to flood into the lodge, according to Ashby Huddleston."

'It was absolutely one of the last of its kind,' he said. 'They called it the jewel of the roadhouses'." This is what happened to it yesterday:

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/05/20/2472644/fire-destroys-historic-copper.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/05/20/2472644/fire-destroys-historic-copper.html#storylink=cpy



Most likely faulty wiring.
A sourdough starter used to make locally-beloved pancakes was destroyed, but neighbors had some to spare. The pancakes will be back.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/05/20/2472644/fire-destroys-historic-copper.html#storylink=cpy