The grizzly ambled down the road toward us, a quarter-mile distant, getting closer with every footfall. We watched warily, still shoveling the snowdrift that engulfed the sole interior road within Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. He drew nearer, unhurried, head high. “If he gets to that blind curve, we’ll pack it in,” said Robina Moyer, program manager at Camp Denali, a private lodge on an inholding within the park. A few minutes later, the bear reached the bend, and we retreated to our van. The bruin, not the humans, owned the road.
Such scenes have become increasingly common along the western half of Denali’s road, which has been closed to virtually all traffic since a landslide severed it from the front country in 2021. Contractors are currently building a bridge over the slide. Meanwhile, the National Park Service has largely ceased maintaining the road beyond it — which is why I found myself with a half-dozen Camp Denali guides, shoveling late-spring snow under ursine eyes.
The bruin, not the humans, owned the road.
Two days earlier, I’d squeezed into a Cessna 206 and flown the hundred-odd miles to a gravel air strip — currently the only motorized way to visit the road’s western end — to participate in guide training at Camp Denali, which remains open despite the disruption.I went largely to discuss the ways of the beaver, my favorite creature, whose lodges have blossomed along the road since the closure. But I wasn’t there merely to appreciate enterprising rodents; I also hoped to observe the experiment the landslide had inadvertently triggered. I wondered how animals had responded when vehicles abandoned one of the West’s most iconic protected areas — and how they’ll react when traffic does return.
2017. A landslide shut down a section of the road in 2021, and scientists are studying how the unexpected
closure has affected the local ecosystem. Credit: Emily Mesner
ALMOST SINCE construction began in 1923, Denali’s 92-mile road has been a place where divergent management visions compete. Like so many park roads, it was built along precarious slopes and ridgelines to display sublime vistas to motorists. Unlike Yosemite and Yellowstone, however, Denali didn’t succumb to auto-mania.Over the decades, the park elected to leave its single main road unpaved, replaced most private cars with public buses and capped annual vehicle trips. Today, it manages traffic to maintain gaps for migrating Dall sheep. In a world obsessed with access, few places have done more to control transportation.
Denali’s latest travel restriction, though, wasn’t planned. In 2014, a slow-motion landslide at a spot called Pretty Rocks, around 45 miles down the road, began to accelerate. It was likely exacerbated by climate change, which thawed Pretty Rocks’ underlying permafrost and left the hillside slumping like melting ice cream. Although the Park Service spent years repairing the buckling track, by August 2021, it surrendered — closing the road and blocking traffic from nearly 50 miles west of the slide. The next phase in the park’s tumultuous history had begun.
In May, I spent a couple of days touring this vacant expanse of gravel with Camp Denali’s staff, whose vans are among the only vehicles still cruising the western road. The tundra rolled on forever, a quilt of purple and green, and silver rivers twisted through glacial valleys. The snowclad crown of Denali, the High One, played peekaboo with clouds. We skirted boulders that had tumbled onto the road and occasionally stopped to shove them into ravines.When we got out to wander the tundra, we heard only the laughter of whimbrels.
What the road lacked in people, it made up for in other critters. For centuries, humans have converted animal paths into roads, but in Denali, the opposite was happening: a road was reverting to a trail, scored with grizzly tracks and lumpy with wolf scat. We saw grazing caribou, swimming beavers, and, most often, bears: wandering ridgelines, scrambling up draws, napping amid snowdrifts.
Subtler transformations were also at work: Without roadkill, scavenging magpies and foxes were gone. Vehicles, like natural predators, had induced a trophic cascade; when they disappeared, the ecosystem changed.
But it was presence, not absence, that caught my eye. One morning, we parked near Wonder Lake, the glittering mirror at the road’s western terminus, to admire a chaos of waterfowl and wading birds: shovelers, swans, yellowlegs, scoters, countless feathered bodies drifting and flying and squawking. For Jenna Hamm, Camp Denali’s owner, the road closure was initially frustrating, but as we beheld this avian riot, it felt like a gift.
“Such an abundance and diversity of waterfowl right along the causeway might have just been coincidental,” Hamm said later. “But traffic dust and noise and people certainly would have affected that.”
REGARDLESS, IT WON’T last. The bridge over the landslide — a 475-foot-long span slated to cost more than $200 million — is scheduled to open to the public in 2027. In the meantime, Park Service scientists are taking advantage of the unintentional experiment. One day, we spotted a young male grizzly wearing a satellite collar, among the dozen or so bears that the park is tracking along the road’s western end. The Park Service has also collared bears on the eastern side and will compare the two groups’ movements and behavior in the years to come — an unprecedented opportunity to isolate traffic’s effects on wildlife.The public might deem the road closure a “natural disaster,” Dave Schirokauer, the park’s science and resources team leader, told me, “but it’s definitely a benefit to science.”
How will the agency use the information it gathers? According to Schirokauer, data from road-closure studies may someday inform the park’s speed limits, the number of annual vehicles it permits or the spacing of its buses. Maybe it will even nudge Denali’s peers, like Yellowstone, to more thoughtfully regulate their own traffic rates. “I would hope that what we do here can inspire some sort of capacity cap in other national parks if it’s needed,” Schirokauer said.
Denali’s dilemma reminded me of the last time major roads were quiet: the spring of 2020. COVID-19 confined humans to their homes and liberated wildlife, a period that scientists dubbed the “Anthropause.” Roadkill plummeted, mammals wandered longer distances, and white-crowned sparrows trilled lovelier songs. But once traffic resumed, roadkill exploded, perhaps due to what researchers termed “behavioral lags”: Animals that had grown accustomed to roaming empty streets were slow to adjust to cars’ return. How will Denali’s bears and caribou cope when humans come roaring back?
“I would hope that what we do here can inspire some sort of capacity cap in other national parks if it’s needed.”
The answer is likely to be complicated. Rounding a bend one day, our van practically nudged the rumps of a mother grizzly and her yearling cub, their tufty fur glowing in the sub-Arctic sunlight. This was hardly unusual in Denali, where female grizzlies use the road as a “human shield” that protects their cubs from aggressive males; in the past, I’d watched sows and their offspring lumbering nonchalantly alongside tour buses.But this pair scampered away from the van in alarm, disappearing into the willows. And it occurred to me that the yearling, born after the road closure, had perhaps never before laid eyes on a vehicle.
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This article appeared in the September 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Road interrupted.”
