“O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” exclaimed the great English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Any Alaskan would have answered him right away, “Of course spring could be far behind!” Coming with a thick blanket of snow and precious little sunshine, winter is a particularly long season in Alaska. In interior Alaska, winter lasts for at least a good 200 to even 300 days.
Break-up is a hot topic of conversation in Alaska during March and April. Not the break-ups of celebrities, mind you, but the break-up of river ice. In Alaska, springtime is often referred to as the break-up season. It is a transitional period of days or weeks in between gorgeous winter wonderland and wondrous midnight sun. Animals come out of hibernation. Birch sap starts running. The snow melts and the ground thaws, leaving the trails knee deep in slush and mud, and generally a treacherous mess—just like any break-up. Yet this rejuvenating and often infuriating liminal period not only brings extended daylight hours, but heralds something better, such as a cash prize.
Every year, thousands of Alaskans enter the Nenana Ice Classic to bet on when the ice on the Tanana River will break up, down to the minute. On the first weekend of March, when the ice is still thick and stable, a wooden tripod is planted 300 feet from the shore and two feet into the Tanana river ice at Nenana. The top of the tripod is connected by wires to a clock in a watchtower onshore. When the ice melts and the tripod is swept 100 feet downriver, the clock will stop, signalling the long-awaited arrival of spring and a substantial windfall to the lucky entrants who have guessed the exact or closest minute. In 2020, five winners who had chosen the exact time shared US$125,000 in prize money, an impressive sum considering that each guess costs only US$2.50. This year the ice went out officially on 30 April at 12:50pm Alaska Standard Time.
The 105-year-old Nenana Ice Classic goes back to 1917 when a group of engineers building the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks came up with an idea to pass the boredom of pre-television winter. They bet against each other on when the ice would give way on the Tanana River. Eight hundred dollars landed in a pot in a roadhouse; rules were determined on how to time the break-up; and the wager was on. What began as a winter diversion has since evolved into an annual state-wide event and become an iconic Nenana tradition.
Nenana is located about 55 miles southwest of Fairbanks, the largest city in interior Alaska. For this isolated town with a current population of 363, the Nenana Ice Classic is more than a guessing game. It offers yearly temporary employment to nearly 100 locals. The proceeds from ticket sales are used to fund scholarships, sporting groups, medical charities, senior centres and other local causes. With people from across the world watching obsessively a lonely tripod on a living-room-sized patch of ice through a live webcam, the Ice Classic is Nenana’s moment in the sun. To the residents of Nenana, the Ice Classic is an intrinsic part of the fabric of the community and they strive to keep everything going in the same way it started. The tripod is always 26 feet tall and constructed of spruce. It is always set up in the same spot. The old Heath Robinson contraption is still in use to determine the winning time. “The Ice Classic is owned by the people in the community,” says Cherrie Forness, who has worked for the Ice Classic for 25 years, in an interview. “It employs people. And they’ve always just wanted to keep it the way it’s been. It’s traditional. This works for us.”
Honouring the tradition and legacy of the community pays off not just for the locals, but also for scientists. The Ice Classic has provided valuable climate data covering over a century for researchers studying global warming because the methodology and definition of ice break-up have been constant from year to year. Even the town’s population has remained more or less the same. “It’s almost as perfect a climate record as you could get,” says Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The earliest break-up date in the history of the Nenana Ice Classic was 14 April 2019, a whole two weeks earlier than the first record. Climatologists suggest that the increasingly early melt reflects a gradual trend towards earlier springtime, which is in line with historical temperature data from Nenana and Fairbanks.
Alaska, fondly described as the Last Frontier, is considered the last pristine and unspoilt wilderness in North America. But now, it has become one of the places most affected by climate change. Temperatures in Alaska have been rising at twice the rate of the global average. Native communities in remote areas such as Nenana, where subsistence activities are critical to livelihoods, will be particularly susceptible to the dire consequences of accelerated warming. A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations states that human-induced warming has already reached about 1°C above pre-industrial levels. Unless humans act urgently and decisively to hold global warming at 1.5°C, the impact will be catastrophic for life on this planet. The ice is disappearing. The clock is ticking. If we don’t act now, can our end be far away?
