Outlying areas of Alaska usually had radios. So several radio stations in Anchorage set up message systems. There are various names for them. One was "mukluk telegraph". And when the pipeline was built, one radio station came up with a name something like "bush pipeline".

Here's the way it worked. Anyone could write a letter and send it to the radio station. The radio station read it on the air. The residents of remote villages who had radios listened to the broadcast messages for themselves and their neighbors. It's definitely a unique system of communication in this modern age.

We would often listen to this program and hear messages such as: "Dear Sam and Edna, Agnes went in the hospital last week and had a baby boy. He was 6 lbs 3 oz and came early in the morning on the 5th of August. Haven't picked out a name yet. Hope you and Bess are doing well. Love, Jim."

The major reason there are no roads to it, is because the southeastern panhandle of Alaska is made up of a strip of steep coastline mountains. There isn't much flat ground or valleys to build roads on or through.

There are only two roads accessing that area. They both start on the Alcan Highway in Canada and one goes to the port of Haines, while the other goes to the port of Skagway. From there, you can take a flight or the Alaska Ferry to any of the other major southeastern port cities. And those two roads have only become usable year around, in recent years.

There may be some private roads and some bulldozed dirt roads that go west from there. And eventually those will probably be built into highways. But right now the western half of Alaska is road-less except for roads within the individual villages. Sometimes there's even a road between one or two outlying villages. But generally outlying villages can only be reached by boat, plane, dog sleds, snowmobiles, or other road-less vehicles.

The local Alaskan cell phone companies, such as ACS, do have good coverage though. There are also some local cell phone carriers in less populous areas, such as around Tok or Copper Center.

I remember when we had carrots in our garden that were 2 inches or more in diameter at the top. And there are pictures of cabbages that have grown to several feet in diameter. And this is when you plant the seeds at the beginning of June (or rarely the last week of May) and harvest in September. Summer temperatures are usually no higher than the low 70s and will cool down to the 50s at night and sometimes lower in these areas around Anchorage and the Matanuska Valley.

When I purchased land in Wasilla, the ground had never been dug up. It still had birch trees, alders, spruce, wild berry and rose bushes that have been growing there forever. I bought sugar maple saplings to see if they would grow there.

When I cleared a small area of brush and started digging (at the beginning of June), I was only able to dig about 4 or 6 inches when I hit solid, frozen ground. I waited a few weeks for the sun to warm it up. When I checked again, I could only dig another inch or two.

I actually had to use an ax to get through that layer of frozen ground, or it wouldn't have melted fast enough for me to plant the trees in time. And I'm not even sure that I dug all the way through, I just threw some dirt in the hole and planted the tree. I planted the rest without trying to dig through it, and they were still alive when I sold the property a few years later.