Denali's new bridge is finished, and buses still cannot cross it until 2027

Buses will not carry visitors to Eielson Visitor Center, Wonder Lake or Kantishna until the 2027 season, six years after the closure, even though the bridge built to reconnect the Denali Park Road is finished. The National Park Service and the Federal Highway Administration cut a ribbon Wednesday on the Pretty Rocks Bridge, a 475-foot steel truss span near mile 45. The 2021 closure also cut off the park's own residential and maintenance facilities, along with private property owners and tourism businesses at Kantishna, at the far end of the road.

The Park Service puts the project at about $230 million, drawn from federal transportation, disaster and infrastructure money. Granite Construction built the bridge under a contract worth roughly $214.9 million, most of that already paid, with smaller contracts to Jacobs Engineering Group and PROHNS running into November 2026.

Hikers and cyclists have been allowed past East Fork at mile 43 and across the bridge since Aug. 27. Buses will go no farther than East Fork for the rest of this season while crews repair the road and facilities to the west.

The closure goes back to August 2021, when the Pretty Rocks landslide started moving faster than the park could keep a safe surface on top of it. The bridge came in about two months behind a projected July 2026 finish, and roughly four years after the two-year construction estimate the Park Service published in March 2022. That estimate came with the environmental decision, signed that March, which concluded the project did not need a full environmental impact statement. Construction was supposed to start that summer. Granite's contract ran from January 2023 to Aug. 20, 2026, two weeks before the ribbon.

The Interior Department said in January 2022 that $25 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law would let the agencies finish a permanent fix a year earlier than planned. That was seed money rather than a budget; no total project estimate appears anywhere in the records from that period.

Superintendent Brooke Merrell, who was acting superintendent when the plan was approved, said the work took five years and that building "a bridge across an active landslide" in country this remote demanded unusual collaboration.

The span stands about 50 feet tall and 24 feet wide. Crews assembled it on the east side of the slide, launched it across the moving ground in 2025, then lowered it into place. Twenty-three thermosiphons keep the permafrost under the eastern abutment frozen.

The park's own geologists and engineers call the bridge and those thermosiphons a necessary but uncertain solution, because continuing permafrost thaw could still reach the landslide and the foundations. Park Service staff wrote in January that the slide's acceleration "is a consequence of climate change-driven permafrost thaw." The Federal Highway Administration had flown airborne lidar over the site in 2017 and paid for geotechnical work in 2018 and 2019, before the road ever closed.

Separately, the Park Service proposed a rule in May capping the restricted stretch from mile 15 to mile 90 at 160 motor vehicles in any 24-hour period during the visitor season. It would replace a ceiling of 10,512 permits a season and would count every vehicle rather than only permitted ones. The 160 figure comes from a vehicle management plan the park adopted in 2012 and says it has followed since, so the rule matches the regulation to what the park already does. Comments closed July 17 and no final rule has been published.

Kantishna Roadhouse, a Doyon Tourism lodge at the end of the road, has spent the closure flying guests, staff and supplies 90 miles. It tells prospective guests that 2026 is its last fly-in season, ending "when the Denali Park Road reopens in 2027."