Despite (and maybe because of) the fact that I lived in Alaska for about 16 years, I’ve never been a big fan of the weather. Most people would take that to mean the winters are cold and miserable — which they can be. But I’ve never thought much of the summer weather, either. The best I could say for summer in most parts of Alaska is that sunshine and warmth are more likely than in winter. That’s not saying much.
This summer has been an unusually nice one in much of the state. But again, that’s relative, and there’s still plenty of bad weather, as well.
We got lucky with weather on our trip out into Denali National Park. Our warm, sunny week was sandwiched between two storms that dumped unusual levels of rain in the interior of Alaska, where Denali is located.
Floods slam Interior a 2nd time
Anchorage Daily News
Road crews struggled Monday to keep parts of the Parks Highway open while cabin owners near Denali National Park and Preserve tied steel cables to their structures to keep them from floating away after a storm dumped more than five inches of rain on parts of the Interior over the weekend.
The storm caused flooding along several creeks from Cantwell to north of Fairbanks, the National Weather Service said.
The photo on the left in the collage above shows an evening last week when we dined on the patio of the Creekside Cafe, near where my mother lives outside of Denali. The photo on the right is from a few days ago, after rains swelled nearby Carlo Creek and flooded the area.
Alaska has some amazing things going for it — weather is not one of them.