Where We Take Our Time Getting To Denali National Park, But Finally Actually Do Get There
And As Is Tradition – A Bathroom Situation
Our local guide, Jade, has mentioned several times that there are only two seasons in Alaska: Winter and Construction.
With that in mind, we left a little earlier than the day before to allow for random construction traffic. And indeed, we were stuck in construction traffic a couple of times.
The scenery was very dramatic along the way:
We had one stop before arriving in Denali – in Nenana, AK.
If you are new to my blog, there is always at least one incident during any given adventure when the bathroom break becomes an issue. And so….
It was only going to be for 10 minutes and then we’d have our promised bathroom break, but it turned out to be a whole presentation on the Nenana Ice Classic. Mind you, we had been on the road for a good couple of hours up until this point.
The Nenana Ice Classic is apparently something that Alaskans do in late winter to entertain themselves. This event has been an annual event for 100 years. Each year people from all over Alaska buy (basically) raffle tickets for a pool to guess when the ice will break completely and the river flows freely in the spring. Proceeds from this event go to assorted charities for the disadvantaged in Alaska.
Everything about this event is “old school” – printed raffle tickets, manual tracking of all the purchased tickets, manual notification to the winner, etc. – including using a 30 year old computer system.
The “tripod” (which is not a tripod, because it has 5 legs, but whatever) is secured into the river ice sometime in March. The tripod is connected (via rope? wire? string?) to two clocks (the primary and the backup).
As the ice thaws and the tripod begins drift, it tugs on the string. When the tripod pulls so hard on the string that the string breaks – the clock stops documenting the exact time the river is flowing freely. The winner is determined as to who had the closest time (on either side). The earliest recorded date was April 19 and the latest was May 30. The most common dates were the middle two weeks of May.
We bought two tickets for $3.00 each. I picked 05/05/2026 at 5:00 a.m.
Now it was well past the promised 10 minutes. There was an exodus towards the old train depo for the bathrooms. By the time I got there, the line for the ladie’s room was very long. Since each bathroom was single occupancy, and the men had long since cycled through their turn, at some point the women took over the men’s room to speed things up.
We continued on to lunch, and then on to Denali National Park.
We stopped at the visitor center (I still call them ranger stations), where we got our national park passports stamped, and we watched two movies. The first one was just music showing pretty scenes of the park. What a good nap.
The second one was about the National Park dog teams – that was much more interesting. We managed to stay awake for the whole thing.
We were dropped off at our room at the Denali Bluffs lodge, just long enough to drop off stuff and get back on the bus to go to dinner, which was at a dinner theater called The Alaska Cabin Nite Dinner Theater. It was a lot of fun!
Tomorrow: Our 5 1/2 hour drive through Denali National Park.
Maryland Meshugas 