Park visitors arrived by train in 1938 and 72 years later in 2010. This photo pair features the Alaska Railroad Depot and surrounding area. The forest growth in and around this area is astounding. It is likely that much of the clearing you see in the earlier photo occurred through human use - whether it be through use of timber, staging of building materials, or former home sites and gardens. We do not know for sure what this area looked like, but we do know that those early activities shaped the composition of the forest as it stands today. Disturbance in boreal forest often favors light-loving deciduous trees, of which there are many in the Denali front country, where much of this human activity took place.