Will Rogers-Wiley Post Memorial is at Walakpa Bay, a coastal inlet that extends 6 miles (10 km) east from the Chukchi Sea and is fed by a watershed of 56,487 acres (22,860 ha), about 76 miles (123 km) northeast of Wainwright and 11 miles (18 km) southwest of Utqiaġvik, Alaska. The memorial marks the location of a plane crash that killed humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post on August 15, 1935, during an aerial tour of Alaska. The name of the bay refers ‘big village’ and was an Iñupiat settlement for thousands of years. The surrounding landscape represents a treeless tundra permafrost covering rocks representing the Gubik Formation that comprises the entire Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska and consists of alluvium, glacial moraine, and outwash gravel deposited during the Quaternary. These unconsolidated sediments mantle layers of sandstone and shale from the Cretaceous. At Walakpa, the Gubik Formation comprises only two layers: the lower is the Skull Cliff unit and the upper is the Barrow unit. The upper portion of the Barrow unit consists of aeolian sand, which is where evidence of the first human occupation was found.
The Walakpa site represents one of the most complete archaeological records of human occupation on the North American continent, at least seasonally, for an estimated 3,600 years. In 1968, the site was discovered to contain over 20 levels of human occupation showing the incremental development from the Birnirk culture to the Thule people, possibly caused by the over-utilization of seals as the primary food resource and a change to a warmer climatic regime that further depleted the already weak seal resource, resulting in an increased use of whales for food and an eastward expansion of hunting territories. In 1826, William Smyth, who was the official artist of Captain Frederick W. Beechey‘s expedition to explore the Bering Strait, reported that a village of nine homes was located 0.5 miles (0.8 km) from the mouth of the inlet. Beechey named the estuary ‘Refuge Inlet’ after the barge sent to explore the coast was trapped there by ice for three days. In 1853, Commander Rochfort Maguire of the British Royal Navy recorded the Iñupiat name of the coastal village as ‘Walakpan’, which today is written as ‘Ualiqpaa’.
Wiley Post was a famed American aviator in the 1930s during the interwar period, and the first pilot to fly solo around the world. In 1935, he became interested in surveying a mail-and-passenger air route from the West Coast of the United States to Russia. Short on cash, he built a hybrid plane using parts salvaged from two different aircraft: the fuselage of an airworthy Lockheed Orion and the wings of a wrecked experimental Lockheed Explorer. Will Rogers visited Post often at the airport in Burbank, California, while Pacific Airmotive Ltd. was modifying the aircraft. Rogers asked Post to fly him through Alaska in search of new material for his newspaper column. On August 15, the pair were flying from Fairbanks to Point Barrow when they encountered fog and low visibility. They became uncertain of their position and landed in Walakpa Bay to ask for directions from a group of Iñupiat camped there. On takeoff, the engine failed at low altitude, and the aircraft, uncontrollably nose-heavy at low speed, plunged into the lagoon killing both men. A memorial was built at the crash site that is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Read more here and here. Explore more of Will Rogers-Wiley Post Memorial and Walakpa Bay here:
