Portage: The Town the Earth Swallowed

At Mile Marker 79 on the Seward Highway, a skeletal "ghost forest" stands frozen in the tidal mudflats. These white, salt-drowned trees are the only remaining headstones for Portage, Alaska—a town that quite literally sank into the earth.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox uncovers the story of a roadside junction where travelers once drank bourbon chilled with 1,000-year-old glacier ice. That all changed on Good Friday, 1964, when the second-largest earthquake in recorded history struck. In just four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the ground beneath Portage liquefied, dropping the entire town eight to ten feet and handing it over to the relentless tides of Turnagain Arm.

We explore the terrifying geology of liquefaction, the irony of a town built on a recurring disaster site, and the quiet erasure of a place that infrastructure created and nature reclaimed.

If you enjoyed this deep dive into Alaska’s sunken history, please follow the show on Spotify to catch every stop on our journey through America's disappeared places.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: Special thanks to Chloe Jones for providing the atmospheric score. Discover more of her music at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Dyea, Alaska: The Town That Lost a Race and Died of It

There is a cemetery in Southeast Alaska where almost every headstone shares the same date: April 3, 1898.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us to a flat river delta near Skagway that was once home to 8,000 people. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, Dyea was the gateway to the brutal Chilkoot Pass—the "Golden Stairs" to wealth or ruin.

We explore the "Palm Sunday Avalanche," a disaster that buried dozens of stampeders under walls of white, and the subsequent rise of the railroad that ultimately rendered the town obsolete. It wasn't the mountain that killed Dyea; it was a surveyor’s decision ten miles away.

If you enjoyed this journey into Alaska’s "ghost" geography, please follow the show on Spotify to catch every stop on our map.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: A special thanks to Chloe Jones for the hauntingly beautiful score. Explore more of her work at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Drive Thru Towns — Season 2 Trailer: Alaska

Welcome to Drive Thru Towns.

Season 2 is here — and we're heading somewhere bigger, wilder, and colder than anywhere we've been before.

Alaska.

This season, we leave the moss-draped back roads of Florida behind and drive north — all the way to the edge of the continent, and sometimes beyond it. We're talking about a town the earth swallowed whole in under five minutes. A road built in eight months by soldiers whose names were literally erased from the photographs. A village everyone abandoned — and nobody can fully explain why. A bunker city carved into a mountain by a Cold War military that needed a secret. And the very top of the world, where America simply runs out of road.

Alaska has always been the place where history went to disappear. This season, we're going to find it.

This season covers:

• The earthquake ghost town of Portage — swallowed by the tides of Turnagain Arm in 1964
• Dyea — the gold rush boomtown that lost a race to its neighbor and vanished inside a single season
• Whittier — the secret WWII bunker city where most of the town still lives under one roof
• Ninilchik — a Russian colonial settlement where an Imperial-era dialect of Russian is still spoken today
• The ALCAN — the highway that connected a continent, built on a history it spent 75 years trying to erase
• Utqiagvik (Barrow) — 1,500 years of continuous habitation at the top of the world, where America ends and the dark begins
• And much more

Season 2 of Drive Thru Towns drops soon. Follow now so you don't miss the first episode.

Connect with the ShowHost: Andrew WilcoxFollow for more episodes: [Click Follow on Spotify]Instagram: @50statefamilyLinkedIn: Andrew WilcoxEmail: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

CreditsSpecial thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk