Talkeetna: River of Plenty at the Foot of Denali
Near Talkeetna, Alaska
Welcome to Talkeetna, a small town at the end of a fourteen mile spur road off the Parks Highway, tucked where three rivers meet, the Susitna, the Chulitna, and the Talkeetna. For thousands of years this was Dena'ina Athabascan country, and the Dena'ina name, roughly K'dalkitnu, is usually translated as the river where food is stored. Early explorers rendered it more loosely as river of plenty, and whether that came from a precise translation or a hopeful misunderstanding, it fit.
The gray glacial water carried salmon, the flats held moose, and the confluence made a natural gathering place. The modern town, though, was born of steel. In nineteen sixteen the Alaska Engineering Commission chose this riverside bench as a district headquarters for the federal railroad being pushed from the port of Seward toward Fairbanks.
Almost overnight a tent city of railroad workers and miners sprang up, and within a year a sizable camp of people lived here. When the railroad was finished the crews moved on, but Talkeetna stayed, settling into a quiet life of trapping, mining, and river work. Then came the mountain.
Rising to the north, about sixty air miles away, stands the highest peak in North America, known for generations as Denali, the high one, and officially named Mount McKinley in nineteen seventeen. Its federal name has swung back and forth in modern times, but most Alaskans have only ever called it Denali. In the nineteen fifties bush pilots learned to land ski planes on its glaciers, and Talkeetna became the base camp town for climbers from all over the world.
Every spring, hundreds of mountaineers fly out from the little airstrip here to begin their attempt. Today Talkeetna wears all of this at once. You will find log cabins from the railroad era, a roadhouse serving sourdough hotcakes, flightseeing planes buzzing overhead, and a main street barely three blocks long.
It is a base camp, a river town, a historic district, and, as you will soon hear, a place that once made a cat its mayor. Slow down. This is where the road ends and the mountain begins.
