"Nothing personal, but life at the end of the road just ain't for Captain Vic and Empress Ramona." - Dan Aykroyd, Neighbors

The Boy preparing to take flight on a snowmachine older than Woodrow Wilson’s floss at Chena Hot Springs. I don't know why I used that analogy, but I figure Woodrow Wilson's floss is really old.

Alaska is the end of the road.

There are entire villages where people, if they use a last name use “Smith” or “Jones,” since they are, shall we say, avoiding legal scrutiny. Alaska, especially a cabin back a few hundred miles from any road, is probably a good place to do just that.

It’s the end of the road for stuff, too. Unless it’s very valuable (gold, mass quantities of oil) or someone else is paying for it, you don’t move stuff out of Alaska. At a few bucks a pound, the cost adds up in a hurry. That would explain why there are probably three or four rusty cars or buses here for every Alaska resident – if it’s broken, just leave it here. I would say that we probably tie with Delaware in rusty car hulks.

(I thought I’d start a hate campaign against Delaware because out of the last 6966 visitors (last month’s haul), only two more people came from Delaware than came from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seriously I guess that the computer in Delaware must have been busy.)

Okay, bagging on Delaware aside, this is still the end of the road. The things that are up here boggle the mind, from the Tundra Land Train (protecting us from Soviet Nordic skiers?) to the snowmachine above, to the dohicky below. If people are done with it up here in Alaska, this is probably where it’ll stay until the Sun swells into a big honking thing (probably too much McDonalds) and swallows the Earth, so maybe that’s how the Tundra Land Train will finally get out of here. Drastic solution, if you ask me.


My guess is the giant pictured above was used to haul the 48” diameter pieces of pipe all over Alaska as they built the Alaska Pipeline. As it sits now, I’m thinking that it may qualify as the world’s largest diesel-powered paperweight.

Even given the one-way flow of Big, Heavy Things Made from Steel That Are Later Abandoned, Alaska still sends out more stuff than is abandoned here. A bit less than 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day flow to Valdez though the Alaska Pipeline (that’s almost 80 BILLION pounds of oil per year, which is like 17 kilograms in communist units). All that oil is worth $56,000,000 dollars a day. In some places, people work a whole year and still don’t make $56,000,000!

The Mrs. and I are doing our best to balance this flow of stuff out of Alaska. I figure the beer bottles we’re sending to the landfill will have some impact, but I fear it will not be enough. We need your help to stop Alaska from running out of mass. My suggestion would be to send more beer.

It’s a start, and a way that you can help. If Alaska keeps losing 80,000,000,000 pounds a year, in a million or two years it will only be twice the size of Texas! Act now, before it’s too late!