Columnist Susan Snyder: Alaskans betting cold cash

Friday, May 17, 2002 | 9:30 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

So there we were, standing on a bridge over the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska -- me and half a dozen native Alaskans, enthralled by huge chunks of ice floating downriver.

Similar to robins and daylight, these massive gray chunks are among the first signs of spring.

An older woman wearing a Seattle Mariners cap and a puffy down parka sidled up and leaned on the railing next to me.

"It's something, isn't it? My husband says I should just just get on one of these and float home," she said.

A slab of ice the size of a garage door swept out from under the bridge.

"You see it on the other side?" she said. "There's a logjam, and they're getting stuck."

We were watching downriver. I already had spent the better part of an hour upriver watching ice jam against a couple of large logs wedged against the structure.

They looked like great shards of glass fused into odd-shaped plates until the roiling waters churned them into vertical positions, exposing the muddy cake-like layers created by months of freezing and thawing and freezing again.

The woman said she lives where the Tenana and Nenana rivers converge just west of Fairbanks. The ice was just breaking up there, she said. Public safety officials had warned residents to move to higher ground.

"You can hear it at night," the woman said of the annual break's creaking, wheezing and popping noises. "It's loud. Very loud. It can come down and crush your whole house. This -- this is nothing. This is small stuff."

In betting circles it's big stuff. To the knot of Alaskan natives gathered on the bank below, the passing ice floes seemed more than passing fancy. I'm not sure whether they were simply interested in which chunks were going to jam first or actually wagering on such questions.

But people do bet plenty on breaking ice. Six Alaskans split a $304,000 pot in the annual Nenana River Ice Classic, a pool in which people pay $2 to guess the day and time that river will thaw in spring.

A tripod driven into the frozen river tips and stops a clock when the ice breaks. It happened this year at 9:27 p.m. on May 7. Guesses are jotted on forms and dropped in red cans in businesses with such names as Moochers Bar & Grill and Rippie Paradise.

Sort of a Las Vegas sports book meets Nanuk. What's a little ice floe action worth?

Not a whole lot in Las Vegas, said Jay Kornegay, who manages the Imper- ial Palace sports book.

"I don't know how anybody could place odds on a thing like that," he said. "I suppose they would have to look at past figures, if they could understand them. But I'm no Eskimo. I figure those guys would have a pretty good idea of when it would break."

Kornegay says Imperial Palace does calculate information-only odds for grins, such as those for the television show "Survivor." And they come up with some odd odds for Super Bowl weekend.

"We do intermingle a lot of sports with the Super Bowl. We try to include anything that's happening that day or that weekend," Kornegay said."That's why people say the Imperial Palace willdo anything."

Well, almost anything.

"Not ice breaking," Kornegay said.