DeVere Pieschl first visited the small Alaska community of Ferry in the 1970s, but it wasn't until 1983 that he made it his own personal party town.
Pieschl says he was a happily married man for 15 years, with a wife and three children. His marriage fell apart in 1967, and Pieschl moved to Fairbanks the following year as a bachelor and began hosting house parties.
"I had a house that was very small, and we would get 30 or 40 people in that house and they would be dancing so hard that the floor would literally give an inch to an inch and a half. And I was always afraid the floor was going to collapse someday," he recalled.
After the pipeline boom, Pieschl felt like Fairbanks had changed for the worse and it was time to get out. He landed in Ferry, which he said was established as a stopover for gold miners traveling on the railroad. It first showed up on maps as a railroad station in 1922, according to the Alaska Community Database. The community, located 23 miles north of Healy and about a mile east of the Parks Highway, had a population of 33 as of the 2010 census.
Railroad tracks cut through Ferry and provide the only access to the community, via a rail bridge over the Nenana River. Residents of Ferry can cross the bridge on foot or by four-wheeler, though when the homestead where Pieschl now lives was built around 1910, supplies had to be carried by hand.
?After Pieschl's arrival in Ferry, his love of house parties manifested itself when he turned the community's former post office into a billiards hall and bar. Pieschl also started a tradition of hosting a Fourth of July event where partygoers at his homestead would "moon" the northbound Alaska Railroad train as it passed through the community. For a few years, troopers tried to stop the tradition, but Pieschl and his friends kept at it. Now his granddaughter Erin Dynes and her family, who live on a homestead 2 miles away, help Pieschl carry on the tradition.
Pieschl, who sounds like an Alaskan version of "The Dude" from "The Big Lebowski," has a philosophy on life that's all his own. He believes his homestead has a soul and that the tradition of mooning the train and the joy that it brings people is a positive thing that will live on forever, in the minds of the hundreds of mooners and the mooned.
"It's something that's good, and lives on in people lives," he says.
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