Bus 142, Revisited

#Community#Bus142

Nov 7

By Timothy Ott

Bus 142, or the Magic Bus, sits in an undisclosed location, guarded and tended by its caretakers, waiting for its permanent home to be ready, waiting to be displayed and to be gazed on by the audience eagerly awaiting its unveiling after the thoughtful and methodical restoration undertaken here at UAF. The bus had a long journey to get here, but it is also true to state that, on its airlift to Fairbanks, it was finally coming home.

While most of us associate this bus with the cover of Into the Wild by John Krakauer, and know it as the place where Chris McCandless took shelter for the last 113 days of his life, the bus itself has a history going back forty-six years before McCandless set eyes on it. The bus, an International Harvester K5, was built in 1946. It probably was brought to Alaska on the Alaska Highway, opened in 1948. The paint coloring on the bus provides the best evidence of the uses it was originally put to. As the first layer of paint is military green, it originally served as a military vehicle. The next layer of paint, black and yellow, indicates that it served as a school bus, although it is unknown where exactly. The top layer, white and green, shows that it was used in the Fairbanks City Transit System. Those who currently use the Fairbanks city bus system will no doubt find special significance in being able to set foot in the old workhorse of the city which has now returned home after gaining so much notoriety. In 1946, the year Bus 142 was built, Alaska was still thirteen years from being admitted to the Union as the forty-ninth state, and Fairbanks had a population of less than 5,000. Nonetheless, there was public transportation.

In 1960, the Yutan Construction Company was contracted to build a road near the northern border of Denali National Park on what is known as the Stampede Trail. This trail goes to the Stampede Mine, which is at an elevation of approximately 2100-2400 ft and was originally established as a gold mine. It first went into production in 1937, and after a short period of limited gold production, prospectors soon turned their attention to the mineral antimony, which was much more abundant at the site. While not as lucrative or infamous as gold, antimony does have a variety of commercial uses. In its pure state it is a gray metal. It is used as a fire-resistant coating for anything from children’s toys and clothes to automobile seat covers, is mixed in an alloy with lead to produce lead-acid batteries, and is used in semiconductors. Antimony is often alloyed with tin as it tends to harden alloys into which it is mixed. Unlike other metals, it actually expands when it cools, which makes it useful in precision casting, preventing gaps from forming within a mold. It is also toxic, which can impact water quality in streams flowing downstream from mining activity.

The mine at the end of the Stampede Trail ended up producing much more antimony than gold. To this day, the Stampede has produced more antimony than anywhere else in Alaska, and in the 1940s through to the 1950s, half of Alaska’s antimony production was coming out of the Kantishna Hills Mining District, which includes the Stampede Mine.

In 1961, during this time of antimony production and road construction, Yutan Construction Company employee Jess Mariner purchased Bus 142 and another bus to house himself and his family on the Stampede Trail. Yutan Construction purchased two other buses as well. Mariner and his family lived in the bus during the summer and fall of 1961.

At that point, Bus 142’s days of moving under its own power were at an end. The engine was removed, beds and a stove were installed, and caterpillars, bulldozers, and drill trucks towed it a few miles at a time along the twenty-six plus miles of the Stampede Trail to wherever road work was being done.

In the early winter of 1961, the road upgrade project was called off. The other three buses were removed from the trail, although it is not recorded exactly how, when, or by whom. Bus 142 had one mechanical issue that prevented it from being removed: the mounting of the front driver’s side wheel was damaged, so the wheel could not move. The bus was abandoned, but not forgotten. It was well known to and frequently used as shelter by hunters, trappers, mushers, and anyone else who used that area of land, but it was not yet of note to outsiders.

Then, in 1992, thirty-one years after Bus 142 was abandoned on the side of the Stampede Trail, Christopher Johnson McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp, hiked through the woods and set eyes on the bus. He was about to make it famous.

Sources:

https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10000507/

https://www.mindat.org/loc-200135.html

https://www.nps.gov/articles/denali-stampede-creek-mining.htm

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GORO/gold-resource/profit-margins#:~:text=Profit%20margin%20can%20be%20defined,30%2C%202022%20is%208.02%25.