Contributed by Richard Estelle, Palmer Museum of History & Art
Many of Alaska’s glacier-fed rivers meander widely across broad floodplains from year to year, their channels shaping the landscape. When those channels flow in the middle of the floodplain, we often give them little notice. But when the fast-moving water flows next to the riverbank, it often causes effects that catch our attention. Sometimes large areas of land are eroded and carried away, along with whatever forest, crops or buildings existed on the land.
The Matanuska River is a fairly typical, geologically young, glacial-fed Alaska river. Where not constrained by adjacent mountains, its waters spread out in many braided channels and from time to time, erode the floodplain banks.
As people have settled in the Matanuska River valley, some of the lands near the river have become highly valuable for growing crops, locating roads and other infrastructure, and for building desirable homes. When the river threatens these valuable lands, we often make attempts to intervene and cause the water to flow elsewhere.
This month’s photo comes from the Museum’s Soil Conservation Service collection showing old car bodies and drift logs cabled together on the Matanuska Riverbed in an attempt to deflect the river’s flow away from land near Bodenberg Butte. Significant bank erosion had been occurring for several years and threatening several homes and farm fields, so the structure shown was hoped to be a solution. Such attempts have often had limited success in thwarting the dynamic hydrological power of rivers in such situations. This effort would appear to be no more successful than most as fields and homes that were once near the riverbank in that location at the time are now gone. Little evidence of this 1957 attempt remains today some 64 years later.