Sleeping on a Glacier
Set in the middle of a 35-square-mile bowl called the “Don Sheldon Amphitheater,” where more than 5,000 feet of compacted snow and ice conceal a prehistoric hollow that runs deeper than the Grand Canyon, the newly opened Sheldon Chalet is a five-room luxury hotel built, improbably, on a glacier. In 1966, bush pilot Don Sheldon built a small, rustic cabin on this remote spot; the new, stylish lodge that his descendants have added is a feat of ingenuity and the only luxury lodge in Denali. This could be the unlikeliest place for a hotel in the United States. The 40-minute helicopter ride from a tiny airport 113 miles north of Anchorage in Talkeetna, AK (population: 876), to the chalet doubles as a sweeping aerial tour of Denali National Park, and visitors can watch the wilderness morph from rich forested plains to raw, gravely moraine—earth that’s been upturned by the edge of a moving glacier. The ascent into the mountains passes over deserted ice fields hollowed out by circular pools of sapphire blue water.
From “What It’s Like to Sleep on a Glacier” by Alex Schechter for Afar; Photo by Jeff Schultz
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