Denali National Park and Preserve: Resisting Permafrost Thaw Impacts on the Denali Park Road

By Kaylin Thomas, NPS Climate Change Response Program, 2025

The Denali Park Road parallels the Alaska Range and travels through 92 miles of stunning, wild landscapes. It is the only road in the park. NPS Photo/Kent Miller

Denali National Park and Preserve (DENA), one of Alaska’s many iconic wild landscapes, faces an escalating challenge due to climate change: the historically slow but steadily accelerating collapse of the Denali Park Road down a hillside. This 92-mile scenic route is the only road across six million acres of Denali National Park and Preserve (DENA) wilderness, and it is an important transportation route for park staff and visitors. It runs parallel to the Alaska Range, a 600-mile-long mountain range, connecting visitor centers, campgrounds, staff facilities, and businesses across deep valleys and breathtaking mountain passes. It is built on top of permafrost—permanently frozen ground that is now thawing due to rising temperatures. In response, the park has turned to the resist-accept-direct (RAD) framework to help guide its management decisions.

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Click here to learn more about the RAD framework

Park managers today face growing challenges. As climate change interacts with other stressors such as land use change, increases in visitation, pollution, and nonnative species, ecosystems and park infrastructure are changing beyond the bounds of historical variability. These changes are increasingly difficult to resist. Thus, managers are thinking more broadly about how to effectively conserve resources in this rapidly changing world. In this context, the **resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework **helps decision makers make informed, purposeful, and strategic choices. This tool is simple and flexible, complements other important climate change adaptation approaches, and applies to a wide range of decisions that managers must make as they steward transforming environments.

Understanding the RAD Framework

The RAD framework consists of three strategies:

• Resist: Working to maintain existing conditions or slow the rate of change based upon historical or acceptable current ecosystem conditions. This often involves direct interventions to counteract environmental changes.
• Accept: Allowing the system to change without intervention.
• Direct: Actively steering changes toward desired outcomes, which may involve redesigning or repurposing systems to function under new conditions.

Where this belongs

• Denali National Park & Preserve

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