On the mend

After two weeks of feeling like doing nothing buy lying around, I needed to get out of town. We have a reservist physician doing his two weeks a year with us at the hospital so my friend Julia and I invited him to join us for an evening road trip to Denali National Park. The sun isn't setting until nearly 11:30 pm so we left Fairbanks at 4 in the afternoon and did a little road trip with stops in Nenana and Denali.

Nenana is a river town between Fairbanks and Denali that is mostly filled with people working for Crowley, the barge company which operates when the river isn't frozen to take supplies up and down the river to various villages without road transport available. Each year they erect a "tripod" on the ice for the Nenana Ice Classic. The tripod is put in the center of the river and attached to a clock and an electric eye. Tickets are sold with guesses of when the ice will break up and the tripod heads down the river; guess the winning number and you can win nearly $300,000. Last year's winner won $303,000. This year's pot is not quite as big. But I have 8 guesses in...wish me luck.

From Nenana it was on to Healy and Denali. We had a slight interruption by a State Trooper but he was nice enough to tell me that the speed limit was 55 and not 65 for the 11 miles prior to entering the park. He was kind enough to not give me a ticket. The Park is not officially "open" for season until May 15th so the shuttle buses and the visitor center are not up and running yet. However, that means private vehicles can drive the Parks Highway up to where crews have the road cleared. We were able to drive 30 miles in instead of the usual 15 to Savage River. The wind was blowing pretty good through the mountains and Mt. McKinley was behind a cloud as usual but we did see two snowshoe hares and on the way out one moose. Not a bad day!