The Vision

There are two parts to knowing a landscape: you need to learn it with your feet and you need to learn it with your mind. I hope you enjoy this website as a way to explore Southcentral Alaska with your mind, and I hope that these stories and names are enticing enough that you to go forth and explore it with your feet.

Southcentral Alaska is a place of impossible beauty, and what we now consider empty backcountry has been crisscrossed for centuries by people who looked at the landscape and saw their home, their grocery store, their job, their transportation route, their spiritual refuge, their means of recreation, and so on. The traces of those people are captured in the place names we now use to define and think about the landscape, but the full stories are frequently scattered and buried. The vision of Choss Lore is to collect those names, to unearth the stories behind them, and to stitch together and celebrate the history of how humans have interacted with this tiny part of the world.

Thank You

To those who lived the history

The Alaska Natives
The explorers
The miners
The merchants
The homesteaders

To those who recorded the history

The District Recorders (especially the ones who used typewriters…)
The topographers
The photographers
The diarists
The newspaper printers
The Pioneers of Alaska

To those who preserve the records and the land

The DNR (especially the Historic Books Project)
The USGS (especially Beth Drewes-Todd and the Technical Data Unit)
The USC&GS (especially David Grosh)
The NARA (especially Richard Schneider)
The UAA/APU Consortium Library
The Mountaineering Club of Alaska (especially Steve Gruhn)
Jim Kari
Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (especially Steve Miller)

To those who research

The Anchorage Museum
Cook Inlet Historical Society
Resurrection Bay Historical Society
Colleen Mielke (Alaska Family Roots)

To Alaskans and all those drawn to the edge of the world

To the landscape, which will watch all of this come and go