Airport Beach Road (South)

Turn right out of the Visitor Center parking lot onto Airport Beach Road. At Mile 1.9, turn right onto Henry Swanson Drive, just before the wooden bridge to Unalaska Island. Pull over immediately to left, near bridge. Park facing south. Hill 400 is now on your immediate right; Agnes Beach and Pyramid Valley are on your left, across Captains Bay. Hill 400 Coastal Defenses, Amaknak Island Two months after the bombing of Fort Mears, Navy Seabees began constructing a defense installation on Hill 400. Also called Bunker Hill and Little South America (for its geographic shape), Hill 400 overlooks Unalaska Bay, Iliuliuk Harbor, and Captains Bay. This trategic location provided an ideal coastal defense site. Panama mounts for 155-mm guns were installed at the top of Hill 400. Small elephant-steel magazines stored ammunition and fuses; larger concrete-and-steel ordnance magazines were cut into the side of the hill. The two-tiered Base End Station on top of Hill 400 is visible from Airport Beach Road. Pyramid Valley, Unalaska Island A concrete power plant is the only structure remaining in the valley where a 50-bed hospital, dental clinic, morgue, warehouses, Quonset huts, and cabanas once stood in 1943. After the war, some cabanas were moved or salvaged for lumber; the rest of the buildings were removed during a 1986 federal environmental cleanup. The most visible reminders of World War II in Pyramid Valley are the Sitka spruce trees planted during the 1940s as part of a military tree-planting program in the Aleutians. The goal of this program, promoted by General Simon Bolivar Buckner, was to “reduce the monotony of the landscape for thousands of soldiers, …curb erosion, … and rectify Nature’s apparent omissions” (D. Bruce and A. Court: Trees for the Aleutians). Despite the severe winter storms of Southwestern Alaska, a number of the trees planted in this valley have survived.