By Marc Donadieu
Glacier City Gazette
Norman Starkey (L) and Tom Yeager (R) work on the timber frame for the hand tram.
The rebar gets set up in anticipation of cement to form the hand tram’s base.
Crossing Glacier Creek on the hand tram in Girdwood is an invigorating and mildly exhausting experience.
While many people have enjoyed the journey over Glacier Creek in the hand tram, few of them are aware of the history behind it and how it came to be. It’s a story of determination, perseverance, and countless hours put in by many volunteers. The five-year process of getting funding, creating a design and constructing the popular conveyance is also the history of the Girdwood Trails Committee, a subcommittee of the Girdwood Board of Supervisors.
Construction began in 1996, and the site finally dedicated in 2001. There were four volunteers in particular who were actively involved throughout the whole process, and they are known as the “Core Four” for their many contributions. They are Tom Yeager, Dave Wilson, Robbie Frankovich and Norman Starkey.
The Gazette interviewed each man separately an overview of the ambitious project and why it succeeded. Yeager was interviewed while hiking from Crow Creek Road to the Winner Creek Trail hand tram. Wilson was interviewed via phone from Vail, Col. Frankovich was interviewed in his Girdwood home, and Starkey was interviewed at Girdwood coffeehouse The Grind. The interviews are the foundation for this article series.
The original idea was to build a bridge over Glacier Creek to connect trails in Girdwood Valley so hikers could go through a loop instead of an out and back. Many years ago, and below the hand tram location, miners built a bridge that no longer stands. Building a new bridge was given serious consideration until the remnants of 1995’s Typhoon Oscar quashed any thought of it.
“The genesis of this idea was Typhoon Oscar back in 1995,” Yeager said. “It had been an intention and a dream for a lot of years to reconstruct the old bridge that the miners would take across Glacier Creek, which was wiped out. I remember back in the mid-70s when you could still see remnants of the abutments on both sides of the creek where the miner’s bridge was. My original intent was just to rebuild or replicate that old bridge, which is actually down in the canyon.”
Remnants from massive Eastern Pacific storm Typhoon Oscar had left heavy rainfall. Yeager had visited the potential bridge site to see what was happening.
He was in awe of what he saw in a close up view.
“As typhoon Oscar was winding down, I came back here with a climbing harness and carabineer and went out on the old cable that spans the creek. This was really cool. The hydraulic force coming through that narrow canyon was just phenomenal, so I hung there, first above the boiling maelstrom for like half an hour, just taking it all in.
“It was incredible. It was loud and violent. A couple times a minute large boulders were being washed down. The water was murky. You couldn’t see anything. Every time one of these large boulders hit the creek bed, it sounded like a cannon going off.”
The storm’s runoff had taken away what remained of the old mining bridge. Yeager quickly realized that a bridge crossing was not the way to go.
“So I’m hanging there thinking, ‘You know what Yeager, there’s no way a bridge can survive down there. That bridge is a really dumb idea.’”
Another reason for not building a bridge across the top of the canyon above Glacier Creek is due to the great size of the snow load it must be able to carry. After contemplation of what could not be done, somebody suggested what could, and the old hand tram in McCarthy was given as an example of what was possible.
“I was always a fan of the old hand tram that got you into McCarthy,” Yeager said. “It was built by the locals; nothing fancy. They used tire rims as shivs, and slack rope, but it was really neat.”
After a Trails Committee meeting decided a bridge across Glacier Creek at that location would be futile, the idea of building a hand tram across the top was raised as an alternative to connect trails throughout Girdwood Valley. In 1995, Yeager was given permission to write a grant for Gov. Tony Knowles’ program called Track, a grant program for trails projects. It was Yeager’s first time writing a grant, and it was rejected.
Yeager researched grant writing, and his second attempt was successful. The Trails Committee received an initial $50,000 from the state, which allowed the hand tram project to proceed. Now the Trails Committee and its many volunteers had to follow through and deliver.
“In retrospect,” Yeager said, “I think one of our best assets was our naiveté. We didn’t know what we were getting into. We didn’t fully appreciate the scope of the project. We had no idea what the challenges were going to be. We just went blindly forward. Had we had a better idea of what was in front of us, we probably would have said no way in hell.”