I had decided to go to Alaska, and then the magic bus seemed like a cool place to go. It was kind of like an early midlife crisis. I just wanted to bring my camera and be in the wild. I’m from Dublin, so I was used to that sort of landscape. I love moody Northern places, rainy, misty, foggy places. What was it about Alaska in particular that attracted you to that area? Scannell recently spoke with Smithsonian about his northern expeditions, the bygone era in American history he captures, and his new book, Abandoned Alaska. Since 2016, the haunting beauty of these mines and the towns built around them has kept him returning to them again and again. Scannell, a real estate photographer, merged his eye for photographing residential structures with his passion for shooting natural scenery to capture McCarthy, Kennecott and surrounding mines: Jumbo, Bonanza, Erie, Bremner and Chititu. Photographer Paul Scannell has spent years hiking to the region's precariously perched mountain-top copper mines and remote gold mining sites with the aim of capturing America's slowly disappearing frontier history. After copper prices fell during the Great Depression, the mines depleted and ceased operation in 1938. Wisps of former residents persist in a scrap of a poster of a woman still staring from the wall, a rusted jam jar left on a table, a discarded boot. In their glory days, about 1,000 people resided in the area, and yet the towns are nearly devoid of human life today. Both settlements were erected in the early 1900s, when the copper and gold mining industries brought frontiersmen and their families up north to seek their fortunes. He first traced Christopher McCandless’ footsteps to the abandoned bus made famous by the movie Into the Wild, but ended up prolonging his stay in Alaska. When Dublin-born photographer Paul Scannell journeyed to Alaska from London in 2016, he didn’t expect to end up in McCarthy and nearby Kennecott. They remain as testaments to the town’s frontier glory days a century ago. Wooden structures, now worn into dilapidated ruins by time and the elements, are backdropped by looming, snow-capped mountain peaks. Located in the Valdez-Cordova census area, about 300 miles east of Anchorage, it is a ghost town, with a meager population of 28.
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