One of the most luxurious hotels in Alaska has just opened – in Denali National Park
It’s been 50 years and two generations in the making
One of the most luxurious lodges in Alaska, and one of the most remote anywhere, has just opened on a rocky glacier outcropping, or nunatak, smack in the middle of Denali National Park. From its wraparound windows, the resort’s guests – a maximum of 10 at any given time – can watch the aurora borealis dance around the sky or survey an endless horizon of jagged peaks blanketed in untouched snow. The only thing between them and the nearest summit is a sheer vertical rock wall that is twice the height of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper.
It took more than a decade to secure the final permits to build Sheldon Chalet. Construction took three additional years. In the time it takes to get there from Los Angeles, you could almost fly to Tokyo: Arrival includes a six-hour flight to Anchorage, a two-hour drive to the tiny but charming town of Talkeetna, and an hour-long helicopter ride to Don Sheldon Amphitheatre, a 35-square-mile (90 sq km) valley carved by glacial ice in the shadow of North America’s tallest mountain.
All that is a drop in the bucket compared to the 50 years of family history that make Sheldon Chalet so special for Alaska.
True Alaskan pioneers
Robert Sheldon, who built Sheldon Chalet with the help of his wife Marne and sister Kate, lost his father Don – a trailblazing Alaskan pilot – when he was just four years old. “I only have a couple of memories with my father, and the earliest one was taking off from the village strip in Talkeetna on a very small aeroplane, zooming through the puffy white clouds.”
Bob Reeve, Robert’s maternal grandfather, was also a pilot; like Don Sheldon, he made his name as an Alaskan pioneer.
Reeve landed in Valdez in 1932, 27 years before Alaska was declared the 49th US state. He used his experience charting routes for Pan Am throughout South America to create Reeve Aleutian Airlines, a leading-edge Alaska carrier that connected tiny towns across the territory with their counterparts across the Bering Sea. He also built a series of remote mountain huts – some of the state’s first tourism infrastructure.
