Bodenburg Butte seems out of place hunkered down all by itself in a landscape dominated by in-your-face mountains standing shoulder-to-shoulder around it. Compared to the regal, 6,400-foot Pioneer Peak, this odd lump of bedrock, at roughly 880 feet, looks from a distance as majestic as a mutant russet potato.
But up close, it's a place of cliffs and troughs, twists and turns, rolling hills and dells -- hidden ponds even -- and more than a few bald spots in desperate need of a comb over.
It's a place of fox dens, glacial etch-a-sketchings, wild stories and even wilder ideas -- like Wayne Burkhart's long-lost dream of seeing a tram built up its side with a revolving restaurant on top. And motor home-hater Steve Kroschel's fantasy of watching an RV take a header off one of its cliffs and explode in ball of flames.
Only that one really happened.
Putting aside for the moment a brief geology lesson on igneous intrusives, the simplest definition of a "butte" is a conspicuous hill with sloping sides and a flat top.
This one gets its name from John Bodenburg, who carved out the first farm in the area in 1917, fording the Matanuska River below the present day Palmer bridge with a small herd of cattle.
You could think of the butte that bears his name as the lawn ornament of the community that's grown up around it, a place of pastoral farms and scenic homesteads. And heavy equipment and auto graveyards and guys with nicknames like Boxcar Ron and Earl the Squirrel.
Officially this unincorporated community of around 3,200 is Butte, AK. But somewhere along the line the place got tagged with its definite article: The Butte. Everyone calls it that. Ask locals why, they pause, think a moment, then shrug.
"Yeah, that is kind of quirky, isn't it?" says Sally Weiland, who raised her six children at Bodenburg's feet.
For children who grew up on or near it, Bodenburg was the neighborhood playground. The Weiland kids were up there all the time -- "didn't matter if it was winter or summer," their mother said. In those days, way before cell phones, when she wanted them to come down, she walked out to the mailbox and draped a red coat over it.
"If they weren't home in a half hour, they didn't get to go the next day."
When Monte Goodrich was growing up, he and his buddies would converge on bikes at the now defunct, east-side trail, right off the Old Glenn Highway. They'd push their Schwinn one-speeds all the way to the top, jump on and fly back down at velocities that would have made a mother's heart throw a piston had she known.
Barry Mothershead, whose parents, Bud and Edna, had 40 acres on Bodenburg's north side, found all kinds of things to do up there. He talks of riding up on mini bikes, of some righteous sledding, of dirt-ball fights, of making forts among the rocks.
"If we wanted to visit on the other side, we usually went up and over," he said. "It kept us out of trouble.
"Well, sort of."
The family's 40 acres were subdivided long ago, and Bud and Edna passed away in the early '90s. But they will always part of Bodenburg; their ashes are scattered up there.
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Bodenburg Butte is not just a big rock, it's harder than most. The reason it's there is because it put up more resistance to glacial grinding and erosion than everything around it, as geologist Bill Long explains.
So here's the nutshell version of Bodenburg's formative years, going back, say, 20 million. That's about when the formerly molten, yet-to-be-born butte flowed into a crack in the earth's crust, where it cooled and crystallized slowly far below the surface, according to Long, a "50-year student of the earth" who teaches geomorphology, or landscape, at Mat-Su Community College. Then the bedrock with this extra hard plug in place was uplifted by the powerful forces of plate tectonics.
The scientific term for a butte, not just this one, any butte, is "igneous intrusive." As far as that goes, Bodenburg is a small one.
"A big igneous intrusive would be something like the Talkeetna Mountains," Long said.
Ever since its arrival at the earth's surface, various forces have been shaping Bodenburg as well as the bedrock around it; the stuff that couldn't stand up to the beating was ground to powder and is now fertile farm land and forest.
Fast forward Bodenburg's life story to 30,000 years ago, as the last ice age was in retreat: Visualize the entire Matanuska Valley, Cook Inlet and beyond nearly to Kodiak under several thousand feet of ice. Now time travel again to practically yesterday in geologic time, to 10,000 years ago, when the retreating glacial front was about where the weigh station is on the Glenn Highway south of Eagle River.
The backpaddling Knik Glacier, dragging rocks along as carving tools, worked everything over, including our favorite butte. Then erosion -- wind, water, ice and gravity -- had its way with it. As it does to this day.
The Knik also supplied the soil, or more specifically, loess, which is soil deposited by wind. The wind is constantly picking up glacial dust from its outwash plain and dumping it all over the valley, including atop the butte.
Along with its 360-degree, multi-million-year view, Bodenburg tells part of its own story, etched in the bald spots on its summit.
"There are spectacular glacial grooves up there. Striations," Long says. "Just a really nice display of them on top.
"They point right toward the Knik Glacier."
STANDING APART
The Dena'ina had their own story of Bodenburg's origins. With the help of "Shem Pete's Alaska," archeologist Fran Seager-Boss tells it this way:
Bodenburg was part of a family -- an old man, an old lady and a son that got separated traveling down the Knik River. The old man butte is in the Jim Creek area, and the old lady is just south of the Palmer Hay Flats. Bodenburg is the son.
"K'unast'in Gga," they called it, "the little one that stands apart."
A scattering of stone tools left behind suggests that Bodenburg was a lookout for prehistoric hunters in search of large game traveling through the lowlands, according to Seager-Boss, cultural resource specialist for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.
These days people climb it not only to look out, but to picnic, to party, to offer prayers, to celebrate summer solstice, to ring in the new year. To do asanas now that Palmer's Blue Mountains Wellness Studio is offering yoga classes every other Saturday up there.
There are two trails to the top, the newer one with a turnoff that used to be part of the Mothershead family driveway. The old trail on the south side starts on Randy and Patti Sandvik's land. There's a hand-lettered sign at the trail head telling a little of the family's colonist history, and how the Sandviks have raised sheep, cattle and children on the butte.
Hundreds of people a year hoof it up these trails to take in the butte's panoramic view, from the emerald farm fields below to remnants of the last ice age off in the distance. Some walk, some run. In the steepest spots, some get down on all fours.
"It's short but it gets your heart in the attic fast," as hiker Patty Sullivan puts it.
Members of the Butte volunteer fire department have hiked it a few times, though not for kicks. Bodenburg has caught fire on several occasions over the years, most recently last spring when a backyard burn went astray and blackened 15 acres.
It's not like you can drive a fire engine up there.
Fighting fires on the butte means hoisting hand-pumped, five-gallon water packs on firefighters' backs and "trucking up there," as Chief Charles Von Gunten puts it.
Which brings us back to the exploding motor home.
In 1994, for a scene in his independently produced movie, "Out of the Wilderness," filmmaker Steve Kroschel arranged with Tom and Gene Williams, who run the reindeer farm at the base of the butte, to have an old RV hauled up their private road to the cliffs overlooking their barn. The plan was to push it off and blow it up.
"I hate RVs," Kroschel said at the time. "A snow-capped mountain and a glacier as a backdrop, an RV on fire, falling three or four hundred feet down a cliff. I think that says it all, don't you?"
The day of the stunt, in the pasture below, about 100 friends, neighbors and tourists gathered to watch, some with their lawn chairs.
The KABOOM knocked them backward. The crowd burst into cheers and applause.
This one the Butte firefighters were ready for, with trucks and hoses set to go. Still.
"The pyrotechnics didn't work as planned," Chief Von Gunten said. "So we ended up with a much bigger fireball than anticipated."
It took about three and half hours to put out all the grass that ignited as the flaming RV tumbled its way down the side of the butte. And not everyone got the heads up.
As they battled the blaze, the voice of a 911 dispatcher could be heard crackling over the radio -- something about an explosion and a vehicle plunging off the side of Bodenburg Butte.
Find reporter Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.
By DEBRA McKINNEY
dmckinney@adn.com