1993, ANCHORAGE

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The show with the otters was February ’93 in Anchorage. While we were up there, we got the Foundry’s bridge crane in. I said, “Let’s go for moose!” About 300 moose are killed a year on the road between Wasilla and Anchorage. And a similar number on the Alaska Railroad. 

 

I took five sculptors, a writer from the New Yorker and a ton of supplies to Alaska. We were on the great Alaska moose hunt looking for a moose hit by a train. 

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I'd been contacting the Alaska railroad officials looking for a moose killed on the RR tracks. The Alaska railroad officials wouldn’t admit to any moose getting hit by trains. I finally got a tip from a RR worker who said we might want to look around Mile Marker 101. 

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At the same time, my crew was enjoying spending time in the various drinking establishments around Anchorage. They had made friends with a John Downing, who owned snowmobiles and Downing agreed to help us on our dead moose search. So, with this one clue, off we went searching around Willow, a town past Wasilla, thinking that must be where the moose had gone down. 

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Sure enough, bald eagles, ravens and crows started taking off as we walked up and over the RR tracks. We found a whole moose lying in the snow that had obviously been hit by a train. Bingo!

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We started making lists of what to do next. Downing took a day off work to get little trailers to attach to his snowmobiles. Then, at the site, as we start doing the  moose molds, it starts to snow - we're brushing the snow off everything. A train goes by. We wave, they wave. It’s starting to get dark. One guy is hacking birch trees to build a tarp over what we’re doing. We’ve got propane and heater tanks to heat the water to make the plaster set and to keep the water in the plaster molds we've already made from freezing. We have to make sure not to singe the parts of the moose we haven’t already molded. And, it’s getting darker.

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Meanwhile, on the tracks, one of those giant pickups with RR wheels shows up and it’s these two guys from Arkansas who work for the railroad – they look like Darryl and Darryl from the Bob Newhart show. “What’cha fellas doin’?... Well, you can’t do that," they said. And, I said, “Well, we are almost done.” So, they agreed to stand by and they sat in their truck and shined their lights so we could finish our work. They offered to haul the plaster molds in their truck--the moose legs, torso, head and jaw pieces. They took great care not to bust them up. So, we took the snowmobiles back to the  “Rent a Wreck” Suburban. By 9 o’clock that night, we were loaded up and ready to head back to Anchorage. Everyone was cold and tired and hungry. I said, “Hey! Dinner's on me – I’ve got credit cards!”

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I drove the U-Haul to make sure the molds didn’t get tossed around. Halfway up the road there’s all these patrol lights. The Suburban is over there in the field on its side. Uh oh. It looks like our crew.

They had slipped on the black ice and flipped it. We almost killed the writer from the New Yorker. His head broke the window. We pulled the Suburban back on its wheels and got it fired up. By the time we got back to Anchorage, the restaurant was closed. We went to bed still tired and hungry, but at least nobody was hurt.

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The next day, I want back to Jeff Patrick’s studio in Anchorage to build the crates to ship the molds. I came out to get some lunch and the Suburban was gone. I noticed the car across the street on the rental lot. The Rent-a-Wreck folks had nabbed it when they heard their Suburban had been rolled. So, I walked over with one of my guys and found two Fish and Game guys in uniforms sitting there because of this moose hide that they found in the back of the Suburban.

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We explained where we’d gotten the hide, and the Fish and Wildlife guys took it with them. We tried to convince the rental company, “Well, you guys are called Rent a Wreck. Can’t we have the thing back until we get our job done?” Eventually, they said, "Yes."  Then, we spent the next three to four days building wooden crates to air freight the moose molds back to Seattle. When we finally drove the 

U-Haul truck up to the Alaska Airlines dock, the forklift scale showed our crates weighed in at  1,100 pounds! The moose molds are still in crates at the Foundry and Phil Munger’ is working on the music, “Moose Meets Train.”