Imagine an entire American city, its school, its grocery store, its police station, and nearly every resident's home, packed inside a single 14-story building at the end of a glacier basin. Welcome to Whittier, Alaska.

This episode explores how extreme geography, secretive military history, and a catastrophic earthquake forged one of the most uniquely isolated and tight-knit communities on Earth. We trace Whittier from a native portage route to a fog-shielded World War II base, through the largest recorded US earthquake, to its modern life consolidated inside one concrete tower.

• The sub-polar climate dumping over 16 feet of precipitation a year and why the military prized that bad weather
• The colossal Buckner and Hodge buildings, once the largest structures in all of Alaska
• The 1964 Good Friday earthquake and the  ...