While there are certainly colder nights and more snow in New England than in the Park, winter still reigns, even as more light returns each day.  Year-round staff busily work at setting up all the details for the summer.  Simon and Jenna flew in to the lodges to see that all was well. Interviews for new staff are nearly wrapped up, and now the tough decisions begin about who to hire.  Emails fly back and forth between returning staff expressing enthusiasm in contemplation of another season of work.  In the office, reservations flood in, and cabins and rooms fill up for the season to come.
 
Each year as the summer season approaches, year-round staff compare numbers of guests in the previous season to those booked for the season to come.  Last year?  Two thousand, four hundred twenty-one guests.  That makes for a lot of people ferried from the Park entrance to the end of the road, a lot of world-class meals served, and a lot of questions asked.  How do you do this?  Do you stock supplies over the winter?  How does the food get here?
 
The simple answers?  A knowing smile, no, and the same way the people get here.  Truck, Cessna, or, as shown in the 2013 photo from early May, late snowmelt necessitated flights from Talkeetna, over the Alaska Range, and then snow machine to cover the four miles from Kantishna.  With supplies.  Enough to last until the road opened to traffic.
 
In another part of the office, Jenna reviews the previous season’s inventory as she ponders prospective orders for the season.  Inventory lists show what a successful season looks like, and the revelation is mind-boggling.  In 2014, we soaked through 12,000 tea bags.  $3,960.  As I sit here with my single cup of Earl Grey, I can’t quite get my arms around that number.  Marginally easier to visualize are the 1,170 pounds of coffee beans, brewed into my addiction of choice at a whopping cost of $11,466.  Then there are those 5,000 (five thousand) pounds of flour for daily bread and yummy cookies.  That’s one hundred 50-pound bags of flour hefted in and out of the Warehouse.  Hmmm.  No wonder our bakers are so fit.  And the eggs:  5,400 eggs.  Per month.  Twenty-eight thousand (28,000!) total eggs consumed.
 
But the statistic that amuses the most and prompts hoots of laughter is toilet paper.  TP.  Outhouses and bathrooms require lots of paper, apparently 1,680 rolls of it.  The details continue:  each of those 1,680 rolls contains 2,000 inches of paper which divides out to 280,000 feet.  Taking that another step, you end up with fifty-three miles of toilet paper.  Picture a TP trail going eight times up and down the Wickersham Wall.  Or covering the trail out and back to McGonagall Pass with enough length left over to make up for the amount that washes down the McKinley River.
 
Now that is a statistic.
 
Exuberantly everyone prepares to pitch in with the work, the lugging and hauling, stowing and shelving, dusting and scrubbing.  Thoughts spring forward to the guests’ smiles at the first whiff of morning coffee, their joy at finding a basket of Focaccia on the table, and the satisfaction of seeing that little white roll hanging on the wall.