Today we drove down to Anchorage for a weekend of fun with friends, and I’ll be staying there next week for work while Matt heads home with the girls. On the way down we stopped briefly in Nenana, a small town about 56 miles south of Fairbanks.
What is this thing in the picture, you ask? It’s a tripod, and it sits on the Tanana River from February through the duration of breakup, which usually occurs by mid May. This is all part of the Nenana Ice Classic, which began in 1917 when a handful of Alaska railroad workers bet on when the river ice would break up. At that time the jackpot was $800. Nowadays, the gamblers are legion, and last year the jackpot was almost $280,000.
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