There is no National Park Service (NPS)-operated lodging within Denali National Park and Preserve, but there are remote wilderness lodges near the Kantishna area, located on privately-owned land within the park (“inholdings”), and not directly affiliated with the NPS.
A view of the landscape from Camp Denali's main building, Denali National Park and Preserve / Rebecca Latson
These inholdings include Denali Backcountry Lodge, Kantishna Roadhouse, Skyline Lodge, and Camp Denali, about which the Traveler wrote a short article back in 2015.
Prices range from $599 per person per night (plus tax) to $1,450 per person per night (plus tax) or perhaps more (one site requires you to call to find out their rates). Most offer stay packages ranging from 3 nights to 7 nights.
Rates are all-inclusive (meals, room and board, various daily tours), excepting alcohol and gratuities, and they also do not include the roundtrip helicopter or bush plane flights accessing the lodges, since Denali’s one and only park road is closed at Mile 43 due to the Pretty Rocks Landslide.
These lodgings are bucket-list, once-in-a-lifetime stays, but are not cheap. As such, most people prefer staying somewhere outside the park.
According to park staff:
The nearest communities are Healy, located about 11 miles (17.7 km) north of the park entrance, and Cantwell, located about 30 miles (48.3 km) south of the park entrance. Many hotels, motels, B&Bs, etc., exist in those communities and along the highway between them. The highway is interchangeably called Highway 3 or the George Parks Highway (or sometimes just "the Parks Highway". This can get confusing, since the road within Denali National Park is called the Denali Park Road, or sometimes just "the Park Road").
Many businesses list their address as a specific milepost along the highway. To help make sense of that, the park entrance is milepost 237. Mileposts higher in number are north (i.e., towards Healy), and mileposts lower in number are south (i.e., towards Cantwell). So, if a hotel lists their address as milepost 239, they are two miles north of the park entrance.
When choosing your lodging, be sure to consider whether you will have your own vehicle or whether you need lodging that offers a shuttle for their guests. Aside from private shuttles operated by a few lodges, public transportation outside of the park is extremely limited.
To begin your search, a valuable resource for finding a place to stay is the Denali Chamber of Commerce.
