Alluring Alaska

James A. Fitzpatrick ordered the Technicolor cameras up to the environs of Fairbanks, Skagway and Mount McKinlay so that he could take pictures of wildflowers and dairy farms. This may seem an odd choice of subjects to the modern traveler, but in the previous century, people used to come to San Francisco, and when they asked the locals what there was to see, were directed to the Emperor Norton. Because of that, these choices don't strike me as odd. One of the cows on display seems bored by the operation.

That, of course, may be projection on my part, as Fitzpatrick tries to impress the audience with a Latinate vocabulary and ornate sentence structure. Still, the picture quality of the copy of this travelogue on Turner Classic Movies is excellent, as are the wildflowers, and Denali.

There are only 60k people in the state at the time. Traveltalks visits Spencer Glacier, a flowering valley, a farm, Fairbanks, University of Alaska, a gold mine, some lovely gold, some re-enactors, Mount McKinley which has been renamed to the local native name Denali, and a herd of caribou.

This is mostly fine. Alaska doesn't have many people. I would have liked more colors from the flowering fields. The native costumes have great colors. The most impressive is probably the gold bars. None of the buildings are going to impress anybody but some of the other stuff are interesting.