Cordova, AK Summary

Far quieter than Valdez, and only accessible by sea or air, CORDOVA is an unpretentious fishing community set in forests and mountains on the southeastern edge of the Sound. In 1906, the Irish engineer Michael J. Heney chose Cordova as the port from which to ship the copper mined in Kennicott, a hundred miles northeast, and gambled on cutting a path between two active glaciers for his proposed Copper River and Northwestern Railroad – the CR&NW – ridiculed at the time as the “Can’t Run & Never Will.” Nonetheless, in 1911 he spanned the Copper River with the elaborate ” Million Dollar Bridge” and the railroad was completed. Despite the effort, the mines were exhausted just 27 years later and Cordova shifted its depen-dency to fishing, which itself was dealt a potentially fatal blow in 1989 with the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. For the next two seasons, the community reeled from the effects of the oil spill; since then fortunes have improved.