Travel Guide Trapper Creek

North of Talkeetna, we enter the Alaskan bush . Where forests, lakes, rivers, bears, moose and salmon still rule the land. Trapper Creek, a small town of a few hundred inhabitants, is a window on the western bush at the gateway to Denali National Park. It would have no history or future without the history of the roads that run through it. The older road, Petersville Road, opened in 1917. The newer Parks Highway opened to traffic in the late 1960s. Together, these roads formed the Trapper Creek we know today. Prior to 1917, the land across the Susitna River at the mouths of the Chulitna and Talkeetna rivers knew only the traces of the indigenous Dena'ina, hunters and fishermen for centuries in the area. The first semi-permanent colonial inhabitants seem to be the trapper brothers Oliver and Noah Rabidoux. Sometime after 1909, Oliver built a cabin on the headwaters of the creek, finding land rich in furs. The ruins of the Rabidoux cabin are now a monument to the pioneers. It was finally gold, discovered in 1905 in the Cache Creek mining district, and the construction of a wagon road, that brought more people through the Trapper Creek area. On the shore of Schneider Lake, west of Trapper Creek, the cabin of the man who gave his name to the lake still stands wobbly