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TOWNS NORTH OF DENALI PARK

• The Canyon
Mile 238 Parks Highway

When you go to Denali you’ll be spending time near the park entrance in what is known as ‘The Canyon.’ The Canyon has hotels, restaurants, a boardwalk, a gas station, gift shops, cafes, and adventure tours, including several rafting companies. The Canyon is connected to the park by a beautiful new walkway. And, to Alaskans’ amazement, it has two stoplights, so pedestrians can cross safely from one side of the road to the other. This is a hub of commerce in the summer, but Denali’s support network of restaurants, motels, cabins and adventure companies actually runs all the way from Talkeetna to Nenana. Hotels and restaurants in the Canyon have spectacular views of either the Nenana River or views of the mountains from the steep canyon hillside.

The integration of local and National Park life is very important. Many people are employed in local businesses that are here because of the park. The park’s Murie Science Center and the Alaska Natural History Institutes also work with three local schools. There are family field seminars, wildflower seminars, and hiking. And the Denali Education Center offers local scholarships to college bound seniors, and holds a weeklong day camp about Denali.

• Kantishna
90 miles down the Park Road

In 1903, Alaska Judge James Wickersham, on his way to try the first attempt at climbing Mt. McKinley, found some flecks of gold in a creek near Kantishna. Two years later, after some serious paydirt, thousands of prospectors arrived at Kantishna (known then as Eureka) over the ‘Stampede Trail.’ They built several other boom towns on nearby creeks. These days, Kantishna has several private lodges just past Wonder Lake. You get there by bus or by airplane.

• Healy
12 miles north of Denali Park

The area around Denali Park is rich in metals – including copper, lead, silver, zinc and antimony. But Healy is a coal mining town. Its life is centered around the Usibelli Coal Mine – and the local school. There are 95 employees at the mine. About a third of them are second or third generation Usibelli employees. Their average age is around 45 years old, and their average number of years with the company is 15. The subituminous coal that comes from the mine is used for power generation. In 2006, Usibelli mined 1.4 million tons of coal. It’s used in 6 power plants in Interior Alaska, and exported through the coastal port of Seward to destinations in South Korea and South America.

The Usibelli Coal Mine prides itself in its reclamation program. Reclamation starts with stock-piling topsoil from the area that was mined. After mining, the area is regraded with bulldozers and equipment, and the topsoil is brought back in. Airplanes aerially reseed the area twice during the summer. Eventually plant saplings, grown from seeds gathered by Healy area schoolchildren and started in a nursery, are planted by local college students. Many people who work at the park live in Healy.

• Stampede Road
13.5 miles north of Denali Park

The first 9 miles of the Stampede Road is blacktopped. It is just north of Healy, and wends it way through beautiful country into high, rolling hills. There are a number of local businesses operating off the Stampede Road. Further on is the Stampede Trail. It was originally a gold mining trail. An attempt was made In the 1960’s to turn the trail into a road to get to an antimony mine. To house road construction crews, three buses were brought in as makeshift portable bunkhouses. One bus was left out along the trail – a former Fairbanks city bus – and that bus was where Chris McCandless, an idealistic and inexperienced young man, wound up starving to death in 1992. His story, “Into the Wild,” by Jon Krakauer, was a best seller. Last summer, a movie based on the book was filmed near Cantwell by Sean Penn. The Stampede Trail has already attracted several hundred admirers of McCandless, who have hiked out to the bus site and left memorials to him. For Alaskans, however, his death is most often considered regrettable and unnecessary. Either way, the ‘Stampede Trail’ will be much better known after the movie is released.

• Anderson/Clear
46 miles north of Denali Park

The town of Anderson is located near Clear Air Force Station, a ballistic early warning site built in 1961 during the Cold War. Until 1971, when the Parks Highway was built, people in Anderson had to drive north, catch the ferry at the Nenana River (the bridge was built in 1968), and head on into Fairbanks. Anderson was named after Arthur Anderson, who homesteaded that region in the 1950’s. In 1959, foreseeing a need for housing lots for the nearby military complex, he subdivided his 80 acres into 1/4 acre lots, many of which were bought by civilians working at the site.

• Nenana
67 miles north of Denali Park

The Nenana River, which follows the Parks Highway north from the Denali Park area empties into the Tanana River at the historic town of Nenana. The town was once a major transportation hub. The railroad brought goods here from Anchorage and Fairbanks, to be shipped by barge to towns along the Tanana and Yukon Rivers in rural Alaska. A lot of fuel and household goods are still carried to Alaskan river towns from Nenana. The city runs a boarding school and it has an important Native cultural center.

During the gold rush of 1902, a trading post was built here. The log Episcopal church that’s still in Nenana was built in 1905, along with a school, which drew Native children from the villages along the river. In 1915, Nenana was a railroad-building town, and by 1923, the 700-foot steel railroad bridge was built across the Tanana River. President Warren G. Harding came to Nenana and drove a ‘golden spike’ on the hillside celebrating the joining of the railroad tracks linking Fairbanks to the port of Seward, which was then the most important town in southcentral Alaska.

Two years later, Nenana captured the imagination of the world when hardy dog mushers who had worked for the postal service braved bad weather to deliver emergency diptheria antitoxin to desperately ill children in far-away Nome. The mushers passed the serum from town to town in relays, and were hailed as heroes. Their efforts are now celebrated by the annual Iditarod Sled Dog Race.

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