George Parks Highway

This road carries the name of a man, not a national park, though almost everyone gets that wrong. When the Anchorage to Fairbanks Highway finally opened in nineteen seventy-one, it gave Alaska its first direct paved link between its two largest cities. Four years later, in nineteen seventy-five, the state renamed it for George Alexander Parks.

Parks was a mining engineer who spent most of his career in the territory, and in nineteen twenty-five President Calvin Coolidge made him Alaska's first resident governor. He served two full four-year terms, the first chief executive to do so, and the first to tour the vast territory by airplane rather than by boat and dog team.

Because the highway runs near Denali, people assume the name honors the parks. It does not. It honors the governor who governed Alaska from the air.