The Weather Notebook: Winning the Nenana Ice Classic

Winning the Nenana Ice Classic
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for the Mount Washington Observatory and this is the Weather Notebook. About this time of year, Alaskans are waiting anxiously for a log tripod on the Tanana River to break free and float 100 feet downstream. You see they've placed bets on the instant that the ice breaks. It's the Nenana Ice Classic and its got thousands of people hoping for a payout. Weather Notebook correspondent Amy Mayer explains:

1998 Breakup: April 20th. The official clock shows that breakup time was 7 seconds into the 54th minute; reflected in the window is watchman Percy Duyck rolling up the yellow ropes connecting the tripod to the clock mechanism. Julie Coghill Photo
AM: The premise is simple: everyone pays two dollars per guess to name the date, hour and minute the river will thaw enough to float the tripod downstream. The winners share about 51-percent of the pot -- as much as 300-thousand dollars --- and of the difference, anything not needed to run the contest is donated to local non-profit groups. But guessers take the task very seriously. Ice Classic manager Cherrie Forness says some try science:

Cherrie: "I know there was a group of people at the University of Alaska that tried doing the temperature and the dew point and all this other scientific stuff and it hasn't helped them. So I mean, mother nature is the one who's going to do it here, not anything else."

AM: Last year watchman Percy Duyck was on duty when the magic moment occurred.

Percy: "It's exciting, everyone in town comes down there, they have a siren there and they turn it on and everybody hears that comes running down there."

AM: On april 29, 1999 at 9:47pm Pat Petersdorff wasn't even in Alaska when she found out she'd won.

Pat: "While I was in Arizona my husband called and in a very deadpan way said, 'oh, just thought you wanted to know, the tripod went out'. And I says, 'oh, really', and in the same deadpan voice he says, 'you won'. And I says, 'what?!'.

AM: As the ice starts to loosen this year, close to 300-thousand people will be checking their tickets against the tripod clock."

DT: You can check the ice and the tripod at weathernotebook.org. Thanks to correspondent Amy Mayer of Fairbanks, AK, and to Subaru.