On the 14th of March, the temperature at the Talkeetna Ranger Station was minus eleven Fahrenheit at sunrise and twenty-seven by mid-afternoon, and the Susitna River was still solid ice from bank to bank.
Talkeetna sits at the end of a fourteen-mile spur off the Parks Highway, ninety-five miles north of Anchorage. Its year-round population is 1,148. In May, June and early July it triples with climbers staging for Denali, the highest peak in North America at 20,310 ft, fifty air miles to the north.
March is the last quiet month before that begins.
The Talkeetna Roadhouse, which has been continuously operated since 1917 and is one of the oldest commercial buildings in the Susitna valley, is open daily through March. On the 15th, a Sunday, the dining room had perhaps a dozen customers at breakfast — half of them locals, half of them snow-machine tourists from Anchorage.
Trisha DeLong, who has been the morning cook at the Roadhouse since 2003, said March is her favourite month. The salmon-skin crowd has not arrived. The expedition outfitters are not yet checking pickup orders. I get to cook breakfast for people I know, she said.
The four bush-flight services that fly climbers onto the Kahiltna Glacier — Talkeetna Air Taxi, K2 Aviation, Sheldon Air Service and Fly Denali — are in March largely doing winter charters. Scenic flights, snow-machine drops, occasional photographer hires.
TAT's chief pilot, Carl Brennan, has been flying out of the Talkeetna State Airport since 1991. On the 16th of March he was running pre-season inspections on the company's three de Havilland Beavers. He said the first Denali expedition flights of the year are usually scheduled for the 28th of April. The mountain doesn't change its calendar, he said. We just plan around it.
The Talkeetna Ranger Station, run by the National Park Service, is officially closed to climbing registrations from mid-October to the 1st of March. It reopens for the season on the 1st with reduced hours.
On the 13th of March the station's logbook recorded the first Denali climbing-permit registrations of the year — two parties, a four-person team from British Columbia and a solo aspirant from Slovenia.
Ranger Daria Iverson, who has worked the registration desk at the station for seven seasons, said the early registrations tend to be the most experienced climbers. The people who register in March know exactly what they are doing, she said. The first-timers tend to register in late April.
The Fairview Inn, the second-oldest commercial building in town, keeps its bar open all winter. In March it is occupied largely by Iditarod-watching parties on the weekends — the race finishes in Nome in early March, but its second checkpoint at Skwentna is a regular weekend destination for snow-machine parties out of Talkeetna.
The 13th of March was a Friday. The Fairview's bar had perhaps thirty patrons by 8 p.m., most of them in snow-machine gear, several of them watching the Iditarod tracker on the bar's single television.
The Talkeetna spur road, which is plowed by the Department of Transportation, is reliably open all winter. The roads off the spur — Comsat, Yoder, Christianson — are plowed inconsistently and are often the practical limit of where a regular vehicle can go between November and April.
On the 15th of March, the local snow base at town elevation was eighteen inches; on the lower slopes of the Alaska Range, thirty miles north, it was over twelve feet.
The climbing year on Denali begins formally on the 1st of May, when the Kahiltna Base Camp is established at 7,200 ft. Lisa Roderick, who has managed the base camp for the Park Service since 2018, flies in around the 25th of April to set up the camp's communication tent, mess tent, and weather station.
Roderick was in Talkeetna on the 15th of March, doing pre-season equipment checks at the TAT hangar. She said the season ahead looked, from her vantage, similar to recent years: roughly twelve hundred registered climbers expected, perhaps four hundred on the mountain at any time during the May peak, the usual ratio of summits to attempts.
Most years, between forty and sixty percent of registered climbers summit. Twenty-five years ago it was closer to fifty percent. The numbers move with weather more than with skill.
The Talkeetna Denali Visitor Center, which is run by the Alaska Geographic Association in partnership with the Park Service, is closed in March and opens for the season on the 1st of May.
Henrik Solberg, who has worked as a snow scientist in the Norwegian Arctic and visited Talkeetna in March of 2024, called the town the inverse of an alpine village in the Oberland: not built around the mountain but oriented toward it, with all of its commercial life keyed to a single climbing season ninety days long.
By the second week of April the bush-flight companies will be running daily, the Roadhouse will be busier at breakfast, and the ranger station will be processing twenty climbing registrations a day rather than two.
March is the held breath before that. The snow is good. The river is still ice. The mountain, fifty miles away, is invisible in cloud most days, but on a clear morning the south face of Denali rises above the spruce line like a wall.
Talkeetna does not advertise March. The people who come in March come for the snow machines, the dog teams, or the quiet. The climbers will come later.
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