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Mon 3 Mar 2008 10:18
by Kevin McGehee
61° and partly cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
[Alaska]
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The waiting to find out who won the Nenana Ice Classic is underway.
The Ice Classic is a Nenana tradition that, according to organizers, started in 1917 when a group of engineers placed bets on when the warming spring air would cause ice on the river to melt and break into pieces. So they built a tripod from spruce logs, placed in on the frozen river, placed their bets and waited.
The first Ice Classic generated a jackpot equivalent to about $13,000 in today�s dollars. Last year’s led to a pot worth more than $300,000.
So as contestants inside the civic center were scarfing bananas, volunteer Dennis Argall was on the river, nailing a red wind sock onto the peak of the tripod, which would be raised in a couple of hours.
The uniqueness of the Ice Classic has drawn occasional interest from out-of-state media outlets. Argall remembered an incident about 15 years ago when a reporter from a national newspaper traveled to Nenana and, while walking out to see the tripod, fell into a hidden hole at the edge of the otherwise frozen water.
“Oh, they just pulled him out,“ Argall said. “But he got wet.“ » Classic Oddities
I bought tickets in the Classic a couple of times—the first time I was just less than 24 hours off the winning time, but that was close as I ever got. Chris never participated, not wanting to provoke grumbles of a conflict of interest because of her job at the National Weather Service.
I have some pictures I took in Nenana in my online photo gallery, here, here and here. This was before we had a digital camera or a decent scanner, so the picture quality isn’t real great—and the visit in question was before that year’s Tripod Weekend.
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