1950 Map of Healy B-1

About this map

The Susitna River carves a massive, braided path through this interior landscape, fed by the slow withdrawal of the Susitna Glacier and the West Fork Glacier. Surveyed in the middle of the twentieth century, the map reveals a wilderness shaped by ice and elevation, where the southern reaches are dominated by the Clearwater Mountains. High-altitude survey markers like VABM 6092 Teddy and VABM 5673 Sitna indicate the painstaking process of mapping this remote terrain within the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The drainage patterns of the East Fork and Boulder Creek illustrate a complex watershed untouched by roads or permanent settlements at the time of the 1949 aerial photography. This sheet documents the raw geography of the Alaska Range's southern slopes before modern infrastructure reached these high valleys.