Celebrate the Centennial of the Alaska Railroad with an evening of instrumental music, songs, and stories. The program draws inspiration from this year’s Official Alaska Railroad Print: Art Chase’s Alaska Railroad:100 Years Strong and will integrate stories of the nine evolving railroad engines with live music performance, archival recordings, and projected images.

Anchorage in 1964 was a small town with snow and a young, active population but no dedicated city ski trails, no biathlon range, no ski jumps, and not many winter recreational opportunities. That year the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage (NSAA) got its start. 

Fifty-two years ago, Anchorage’s Chugach State Park was formally established in 1970 after Alaska Governor Keith Miller signed the legislation creating the park into law. With a half million acres, it is the third largest state park in the United States. Join the Cook Inlet Historical Society for a panel discussion on Chugach State Park’s past, present and future legacy.

Hear and see some of the fascinating history of cycling behind Jessica Cherry and Frank Soos’ new anthology, Wheels on Ice: Stories of Cycling in Alaska.

This talk looks at the intertwined, co-dependent lives of people, dogs, and salmon along the nineteenth century Yukon for examples of how to tell more capacious, polyvocal narratives—and the stakes of doing so for and about Alaska, a place where the politics of who speaks the past has bearing on present conflicts over land, meaning, and the possibilities of the future.

Join audio engineer and preservationist Kurt Riemann for a discussion about Alaska’s rich music history and the need to conserve and make available irreplaceable historical and cultural audio resources. Learn about the mechanics of preservation, sample audio from incredible performances, and hear a few wild stories lifted from the recordings and the accompanying program material.