newsminer.com

Every year since she moved to Alaska in 1975, Colleen Cloutier has purchased tickets for the Nenana Ice Classic. The number of tickets she bought varied over the years, she said, “depending on my bank account.”

Cloutier should be able to splurge on a few extra tickets next year after her bank account grew by about $218,000 on Thursday.

That’s the amount that Cloutier, a single, 54-year-old disabled woman from Anchorage, will receive — after taxes — as the sole winner of Alaska’s richest guessing game. The jackpot was actually $303,895, but 28 percent of that goes to the federal government in taxes.

Cloutier wasn’t complaining about sharing her winnings with Uncle Sam.

“Being the only winner is pretty awesome,” she said by phone from Anchorage.

Ice Classic officials finally announced that Cloutier was the only winner on Thursday, nine days after the Tanana River ice went out at 10:53 p.m. Alaska Standard Time on May 6. Cloutier’s was the only one of the 243,776 guesses entered that had the correct time and date a tripod set up on the ice would move down river and trip a clock on shore.

She is the richest winner in the 92-year history of the Ice Classic, which started in 1917 as a betting game between Alaska Railroad workers trying to pass the time in the winter. It marked the 10th time there has been only one winning ticket holder, according to Ice Classic records.

A computer glitch prevented officials from confirming what Cloutier knew the day after the ice went out — that she was one of the winners — but it wasn’t until Thursday that officials confirmed she was the only winner.

“I knew I had that ticket,” said Cloutier, who called Ice Classic officials the day after the ice went out. “My worry was how many more people were going to win this. I didn’t know if there was going to be 10 of us or just one.

“The waiting process has been pretty hard,” she said. “The only winner thing was driving me nuts.”

Cloutier, who said she came within three minutes of the winning time in 1998, bought only four of the $2.50 tickets this year and guessed the date and time of breakup based on her birthday, Oct. 5, 1953, with a slight adjustment.

“Something just told me to go with p.m. between 10 and 11 o’clock,” she said. “My birthday is 10/5/53 but I thought (May 5) was too early so I put the 6th.”

The last time one person took the whole jackpot home was 1992. Mary Lou Burke, a single mother of four who moved to Nenana a couple months before breakup, won the $165,000 jackpot when the ice went out at 6:26 a.m. on May 14. Burke’s guess of 6:28 a.m. was the closest to the actual time of breakup. Burke left Nenana within 30 days after winning, Forness said.

As for the money, Cloutier said she wasn’t sure what she will do with it. She wants to take a vacation but hasn’t decided where.

“It really hasn’t hit me yet,” she said.