In Alaska, These Pants Save Lives. Do You Own a Pair?
For years, an annual ball in tiny Talkeetna celebrated the immeasurable role of Carhartt clothing. We sent a writer to cover the event, where devotees regaled stories of heroic trousers and death-defying coveralls.
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If you are the Carhartt sales representative in Alaska, you hear so many stories about how your durable, mud-brown workwear has saved people’s flabby backsides from wolf fangs and grizzly-bear bites that, after a while, you stop recalling the individual anecdotes. Except during the annual Carhartt Ball in Talkeetna, a winter festival at which fans gather to celebrate another year of survival on the Last Frontier.
“One time,” says Doug Tweedie, Carhartt’s man in Alaska for the past 25 years, “there was this walrus attacked a guy tying his boat up to a dock somewhere in the Aleutian chain who said what saved him were the black extreme-heavy-duty Carhartts the walrus’s chompers couldn’t bite through.” Tweedie tells me this as he busily checks the microphone onstage at the Denali Fairview Inn during a lull in the festivities. “Another time there was this couple pulled over by the side of the Alcan Highway. A grizzly bear mauled the husband, who had gotten out of the car, but our coveralls deflected the claws and saved his hide.”
The Carhartt Ball is not your traditional black-tie-and-strapless-gown gala with a sit-down four-course dinner. It started in 1996 after Talkeetna’s garbage-removal and snowplow magnate, Bill Stearns, came up with the idea of a Carhartt shindig as an antidote to cabin fever. Although Carhartt rarely advertises, Tweedie agreed to drive up from Anchorage to sponsor the first ball and hand out prizes in the storytelling competition, where winners take home the eponymous outerwear. Six years later, the annual event has become an occasion for area hunters, fishermen, carpenters, trappers, mountaineers, whitewater rafters, and back-to-the-land curmudgeons to don their multicolored patched chore coats, kneeless pants, and worn overalls reduced to strings, and snowmobile into the two-block-long town in the foothills of Mount McKinley to entertain one another with accounts of death-defying animal attacks and engine failures.
On December 29, festivities start early at the local VFW hall (a 60-by-80-foot log cabin), where a catwalk is set up and Talkeetnans make like Gisele Bündchen and strut down it, modeling Carhartt’s upcoming spring line. Then the party moves to the Fairview Inn, where everyone crowds around the horseshoe bar wearing spanking-new carpenter pants saved just for the occasion, as well as cruddy “roadkill Carhartts”—articles of clothing that have blown off the backs of pickup trucks, gotten run over, and been rescued by passersby. With the perfectly groomed hair of a national newscaster, 51-year-old Tweedie stands out among the guests in a bespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels. He is, after all, the master of ceremonies. So that I will blend in, Tweedie has lent me a purple jacket (brighter hues were recently introduced in the Carhartt line, to appeal to rap stars and women) festooned with battery-operated blinking lights and a gigantic hieroglyph on the back that spells out CARHARTT in sequins and glitter.
Alaskans buy an estimated four times more Carhartt work duds per capita than their compatriots in the lower 48, and their loyalty is not due to just the harsh weather. Up here, hair-curling adventures featuring these sturdy $40 pants and $70 jackets are what distinguish weather-beaten sourdoughs from virgin flatlanders. The company was founded in Michigan in 1889 by traveling salesman Hamilton Carhartt, who started the trend by fashioning railroad uniforms out of surplus army tent material. Today, his great-grandson Mark Valade presides over the family-owned, Dearborn-based business, which reportedly grossed $324 million in 2000. Still, what is it about this brand that has made the Carhartt survival story a phenomenon so peculiar to Alaska, a kind of currency swapped in bars late at night, over breakfast in diners, and at the state fair? As the epicenter of what could be called the Rescue-Pants Epic, Talkeetna’s Carhartt Ball seems a good occasion to investigate why this extra-thick, water-repellent, 100 percent ring-spun duck cloth has become the stuff of frontier fable.
“In Alaska, you’re always getting into extreme situations where everything fails but your Carhartts,” Tweedie theorizes. “Then, when you get out of the situation, you tell everyone about it.” And they tell everyone else. All around us at the Fairview Inn, drinking from beer steins at wooden tables, standing by the house-rules sign warning “All firearms must be checked with the bartender,” villagers are one-upping each other with Carhartt war stories.
“People call every week with animal stories, chainsaw stories, accident stories—stranded off the road in 70 below zero, skidding hundreds of feet on icy roads on tipped-over motorcycles. I’ve stopped writing them down,” Tweedie says. Then he perks up at the thought of a humdinger. “Do you know the one about the Fairbanks policeman who was saved when an assailant’s bullet ricocheted off the brass zipper of his Carhartt jacket?”
