In a world where you can gamble on almost anything, some like to bet on when the river ice will break up in a tiny town in Interior Alaska.
The game's clock stopped on Monday at 6:58 p.m., when a tripod set up on the frozen river fell over as the ice started to move downstream. If your guess was close, you might've won some money — but the game's organizers are still tabulating the winners.
The Nenana Ice Classic sells a few hundred thousand tickets annually, to people across Alaska and beyond — like 83-year-old Joe Dinkins, who claims to be the oldest barber in Fairbanks.
Every year, Dinkins buys over a thousand tickets at about three bucks a pop. He said he's even won a few times. About a week before the tripod fell, he said he thought his odds were pretty good.
"Fifty percent chance I'll win," he said. "Because I'm in the area where it usually happens — that's from the 26th of April to the 5th of May. I just keep it the same."
Dinkins' small shop is covered in Ice Classic posters. As he trimmed a customer's hair on a Sunday afternoon, he thought out loud about what he'll do if he wins this year.
"I'm gonna spend it on a girl," he said with a wink. "Nah, I just laugh and talk about it, that's all. I don't do nothing extra, I just put the money in my retirement."
But the prize isn't the only reason people pay attention to the Ice Classic. Scientists use it as a consistent dataset to study climate change.
Martin Stuefer, who directs the Alaska Climate Research Center, said that's because the guessing game has logged breakup dates in one location for over a century.
"It's very seldom that you have a homogeneous, continuous, long-term climate series — especially in Alaska," he said. "We can see a tendency to earlier breakups."
But not this year. The Interior just saw its coldest winter in half a century. National Weather Service hydrologist Heather Best said that probably pushed spring breakup back a bit.
"We had an interesting winter, because it was extremely cold, but we also had quite a bit of snow — which is a really odd combination," she said. "Usually if you have a cold winter, you have less snow. So, we didn't get as much ice formation as we would have."
Best said the game helps the National Weather Service plan its river watch efforts, which are critical for communities off the road system.
"Breakup is a pivotal time of year, because they have this time when they're a little bit trapped by the situation on the river," Best said. "During the winter, when there's been good ice cover, they're using the river as a highway. And then, as the river ice gets unsafe, they're waiting for that ice to clear out."
Best and her team track the thaw with satellites, aerial observation, and a network of citizen scientists along the riverbanks. But she said even all of that can't help them predict the Nenana Ice Classic breakup time with absolute certainty.
"Otherwise, I would have won multiple times by now," Best said.
Still, she said she gets Facebook messages every spring asking which tickets to buy. Her guess this year was about five days off. Stuefer, the climatologist, was also five days off.
But Joe Dinkins, the barber, might still have a shot. He bought tickets for the right day, May 5 — which marks the long-term average date for the tripod to fall.
Copyright 2026 KUAC
