“During these four days, winners of a lottery drawing are given a chance to purchase a single, day-long permit, allowing them to drive as much of the Denali Park Road as weather allows.”
Does that mean that nobody can come in for the other 361 days?
What is the history of the lottery? How did it come about?
Before 1972, the Denali Park Road was open to private vehicles, though bus service was also offered for anyone without a vehicle (or anyone who didn’t want to drive the mountainous road).
In 1972, the NPS limited travel on most of the park road to only buses. At the same time, the park opened its gates in the fall, after bus season ended, to anyone who wanted to drive the road. In those early years, only a few intrepid souls braved the poor roads to get here to drive into the park. As the years went by, the popularity of this opportunity grew.
In the late 80’s the “open to all comers” offer became unmanageable when almost 2000 vehicles per day came into the park. Major traffic jams made for an unpleasant experience, while the sheer numbers made it difficult to avoid problems with pets and wildlife, food storage and sanitation. In 1990, park management decided to implement a lottery system, wherein people could apply for a chance to drive the road after the bus season ended. Initially, the number was capped at 300 vehicles per day; in 1994, it was raised to 400 per day.
Applications to the lottery steadily increased each year. In 2003, nearly 18,000 people applied. This meant entrants only had around 1-in-11 odds of being drawn; and conducting the lottery took an ever-increasing amount of park staff time. In 2004, the park began charging a fee to enter the lottery, to offset the increasing costs and to improve the odds that an entrant would actually be picked.
Today, the road lottery is run using recreation.gov. There is a per person entry fee and an individual may only enter once. The entry fees pay for recreation.gov to operate the lottery. Those chosen in the lottery are notified by email and charged for their permit. The permit fees help pay for the staff and materials needed to run the event in the fall. Since charging an application fee, the lottery typically sees around 10,000 applications each year for the 1,600 permits. Buses continue to run to Teklanika during road lottery, so that visitors who are not lottery winners may still enjoy the park in the fall.
When did Military Appreciation Day begin?
In the late 2000s, a military official in Alaska asked if the park would host a first-ever “Military Appreciation Day” event in the style of the road lottery. It occurred the day after the main lottery ended, all fees were waived and road passes were given out by the military to 400 Alaska-based active duty personnel. In 2014, Superintendent Don Striker made this an annual event. In 2015, the park decided that it made more sense to offer Military Appreciation Day on the weekend of Road Lottery, rather than on a Tuesday, and rearranged the dates of the public lottery to accommodate this change.