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Photo by Johnny Wagner

Photo by Johnny Wagner

A 20-foot plastic tarp spread across the floor of a civic center can signal only one thing: time for the banana-eating contest.

It was 1 p.m., and the morning hours of the Nenana Ice Classic preparatory Tripod Weekend celebration had been slow. The first announcement for the parent-child look-alike contest had drawn slim interest and had to be announced again.

But attendance at the James A. Coghill Community Civic Center in Nenana had since picked up. Hula-hoop and jump-rope contests attracted dozens of kids, and the line for the mid-afternoon limbo contest would snake almost to the center’s back door.

Nancy Frye was working her booth next to the popcorn machine at the building’s northeast corner. She said she’s been selling crafts at Tripod Weekend for more than three decades. Change at the annual event is slow, she said, though more people from outside Nenana have been showing up in recent years.

“I think we have new dancers here today, and yesterday we had a couple of gentlemen here from Fairbanks,” Frye said. “I don’t know what organization they were with but they were wearing kilts and played the bagpipes.”

Frye was one of two dozen craftspeople with booths at this year’s weekend get-together. The event precedes the start of the Nenana Ice Classic, the lottery-style contest in which organizers erect a 26-foot-tall marker — a four-legged tripod, if you will — on the Tanana River a few hundred yards north of town. People then bet on what time — down to the minute — the tripod will move far enough to trigger a clock, signaling the time of breakup and a jackpot for the winning ticket-holder.

The Ice Classic is a Nenana tradition that, according to organizers, started in 1917 when a group of railroad engineers placed bets on when the warming spring air would cause ice on the river to melt and break into pieces. So they built a tripod from spruce logs, placed it on the frozen river, placed their bets and waited.

The first Ice Classic generated a jackpot equivalent to about $13,000 in today’s dollars. Last year’s led to a pot worth more than $300,000.

So as contestants inside the civic center were scarfing bananas, volunteer Dennis Argall was on the river, nailing a red wind sock onto the peak of the tripod, which would be raised in a couple of hours.

The uniqueness of the Ice Classic has drawn occasional interest from out-of-state media outlets. Argall remembered an incident about 15 years ago when a reporter from a national newspaper traveled to Nenana and, while walking out to see the tripod, fell into a hidden hole at the edge of the otherwise frozen water.

“Oh, they just pulled him out,” Argall said. “But he got wet.”

The activities and booths at the civic center Sunday ran the gamut. Pamella Coghill sold her beadwork from a table next to the main stage. The mother-daughter team of Coralee Thomas and Connie Tyler sold “Navajo Tacos” to raise money so Tyler’s daughter, Haley, can attend basketball camp.

Organizers say the celebration serves a few functions. It’s a flagship weekend to toast the coming of spring. The event also brings the various generations in the 600-person town, an hour’s drive west of Fairbanks, together under one roof for fun and games every spring.

“You can talk to all the big kids over there,” said R.J. Nelson, an artist who won Sunday’s Prettiest Carhartt Contest and lost an arm-wrestling match in between her duties as face-painter. “They’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I once ate all the doughnuts and almost puked.’ Or, ‘I ate all the bananas and almost puked.’”

The snack bar offered a long list of treats. Next to it, two coolers offered a choice of free drinks. One was filled with water, the other with Tang.

This year’s Tripod Weekend was the second straight year Angela Bitter had to settle for a runner-up position in the Grungiest Carhartt Contest. She’d borrowed her overalls from her husband, a mechanic, and lost despite last-minute efforts at gaining an edge.

“I kind of added some (dirt) to them because he hadn’t worn them in a while,” Bitter said after the event from her booth, where she was selling jewelry made by herself and a friend.

Bitter said she’ll definitely try again next year. “Only, I made the mistake of washing them for him once this winter. I won’t wash them for another year.”