The damage wrought to the park’s road by melting permafrost is creating a new reality affecting visitors, park staff, local businesses and potentially wildlife.
Denny Capps, park geologist for Denali National Park and Preserve, speaks with congressional delegates at the Pretty Rocks landslide during a climate change tour on Thursday, July 6, 2023.
For the second consecutive year, the iconic Denali Park Road, constructed long before Alaska became a state,roughly at its halfway point. Options available to park visitors are considerably different: rather than a 13-hour bus ride on the 92-mile road, park shuttles operate only until an East Fork River turnaround a few miles before Pretty Rocks, for a five-hour excursion.
“I mean, yeah, I’m sorry we couldn’t see it all. But you know what? There was plenty to see. It was just disappointing I didn’t see a bear,” she said.Visitors look at a three-dimensional map of the Alaska Range and surrounding Denali National Park and Preserve while visiting the Denali Visitor Center on Friday, July 7, 2023.
Park staff began to recognize a problem at Pretty Rocks in the 1960s — a small slump in a particularly steep part of the road that was noticeable after the annual winter closure. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Illinois, looks at a site used to measure ground and permafrost stability at the Pretty Rocks landslide as Denny Capps, park geologist for Denali National Park and Preserve, explains the road construction plan during a climate change tour in the park on Thursday, July 6, 2023. Dave Schirokauer, chief of resources for the park, is behind.
Twenty-three thermosyphons — the same technology used to keep the ground frozen along the trans-Alaska oil pipeline — will be placed along the base of the bridge to keep permafrost from melting. The goal is to cool it to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. “The problem is, it’s going to fail again. And so that’s why we’re going to this longer-term fix,” said Capps. “If you’ve got a bull charging at you, you don’t really square up your shoulders. You step aside, have your little red cape, and let it go by. And so that’s what our intent here is.”
A woman with the McKinley Chalet Resort helps people find their buses into Denali National Park and Preserve on Saturday, July 8, 2023. Vanessa Jusczak, director of the Denali Chamber of Commerce, said local businesses are thriving despite the road closure. On a sunny Thursday, groups could be seen venturing along the river, and rugged mountain bikers emerged from the riverbed, covered in what looked like several days’ worth of dirt.
Until 2021, Camp Denali, a 70-year-old backcountry lodge in Kantishna, was one of a few accessible by road. Now guests must arrive by plane or helicopter. Camp Denali happened to complete a solar array project in 2020 that produces enough electricity to meet its needs, while other lodges have to fly in generator fuel at steep costs.
Merrell said “there’s no reason to believe” that the reopening of the full road will be delayed beyond 2026, but Hamm says he wonders about the timeline amid construction holdups. Park biologists wonder: Will Denali’s wildlife change their behaviors around a road that now has virtually no traffic? They recently collared several bears in the western half of the park to track their movements in the coming years, part of an effort to study how the road closure is impacting the nonhuman creatures of the park.‘Real and hard conversations’
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