Here's some recent news about Denali National Park that we wanted to share. You may remember that we visited the park twice during our time in Alaska, in the beginning of July, and then again toward the end of August. Both times we took bus trips on the 92-mile-long Denali Park Road, the only way to get into the interior of the park.
Due to problems caused by climate warming (described below), the National Park Service decided to close the western half of the road for at least a year.
The date we traveled the road on our second visit to Denali NP: August 23, 2021
The date they closed the road: August 24, 2021
WHEW! We'd made it just in time (although we had no idea the road was going to be closed down the next day).
So, here's the background - about halfway along the road you reach the Polychrome Pass viewing area. The road to the pass is narrow, running along the sides of cliffs. Shortly before Polychrome Pass you pass through an area called Pretty Rocks (highlighted in the picture below).
For the past decade or more, global warming has been melting the permafrost underneath the road at Pretty Rocks, and the side of the hill supporting the road has been slipping downhill. While this slippage was small for a while (2-3 inches per year), in the past three years it had sped up considerably. By July 2021, the landslide rate had reached 6+ feet daily! The National Park Service dumped gravel on the roadbed to allow buses to continue to use the road, and had reached a point where it was dumping 100 full truckloads each week! Here's a picture we took out of the front of our bus crossing through Pretty Rocks in July. You can definitely see the sag in the road.
On August 24 the Park Service decided that, for safety reasons, they would have to close the road completely beyond Pretty Rocks and they evacuated all staff and visitors from the interior Park lodges, the Eielson Visitor Center, and campgrounds beyond Pretty Rocks.
The Park Service is weighing their options for future access into the park. One of the leading candidates is building a bridge across the slump. At any rate, the road is not likely to reopen until at least 2023. Although 40 miles of the Park Road are still open, and there are still lots of opportunity to see animals, the landscape, and even Denali (from a distance), the road closure will have a major impact on visitor experience. We're glad we got there before it happened!
Click below to see a timelapse of the road collapse during the summer of 2021 (you may want to zoom to full screen to experience the full effect).
To read more about the Pretty Rocks Landslide, click this link.
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