Denali!!

 Our trip south from Fairbanks felt like a normal highway, hardly any frost heaves, drove normal highway speeds almost all day.

We did stop in Nenana, Alaska to place a bet on the Nenana Ice Classic. The Ice Classic is Alaska's greatest guessing game!  In Nenana during1917 a group of engineers surveying for the Alaska Railroad bet $800 putting in their guesses when the river would break up. This fun little guessing game has turned into an incredible tradition that has now continued for over 106 years.

So, the river freezes over in October & November and just gets thicker every month.  The Ice Classic plants a tripod two feet into the ice on the Tanana River between the highway bridge & the railroad bridge which is just up river from the Nenana River.  The tripod which is 300 feet from shore is connected via a cable to a clock.  Once the cable is connected it is watched 24 hours a day to prevent cheating.  When the ice starts breaking up and the tripod starts floating away the cable breaks & the clock stops.  That’s the winning time.

It’s a  big deal!  The ice usually breaks up in last two weeks of April or first two weeks in May.  The 2022 winning pay out was $202,000.  So all three if us entered!

Pulled into our campground in Denali and immediately headed to 49th Street Brewery.  Great beer & food.  This is the area where the movie “Into the Wild” actually happened & was filmed.  It’s about a young guy who gives up all his possessions and moves into the Alaskan Wilderness, living in an old bus.  We saw the restoration process on the real bus & the brewery has the movie prop set up.

Sara’s house is only 159 miles from here, wonder if she’s home?

We had a dinner show lined up for the next evening, kind of a musical story about early Denali.  It was fun, the waiters were the singers, musicians and actors.  Lots of fun.

Next day it was a bus tour into Denali.  It is a limited access park.  Private cars can only go in about 15 miles.  The official bus tours go in to mile marker 43.  The road after that was damaged by a landslide, so I’m ok stopping there.  We did see a grizzly bear!  It was a little cloudy so the pictures of Denali are iffy, but we could see the north peak through our binoculars.

Did I mention it was a long day!

Mica had some extra excursions, she e-bikes with a bunch of fellow caravaners.

ATV touring with Pamela & Ray, with about four other couples of the caravan. I might have been a little dusty!!

We all went on a white water raft ride, it was on the Nenana River and was class 1,2,3 & 4  rapids. We chose the oar boat, that means the river guide did all the paddling, or oaring, we just had to hold on & relax.  The hardest part was putting on our dry suits.  Since the water just came off the glacier it was a tad chilly, well it was freaking freezing so dry suits for everyone!

I took videos of some of the rapids, I’ll try to figure out a way to update a couple sometime.

Of course the perfect way to round out a great week is find a pizza / brewery!  

Only downside to Denali is it was really WINDY when we were there, couple of times I thought CC was going to roll over.  But it was a beautiful stop!

Onto Anchorage….