Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA - A new playground going up in Talkeetna this summer will feature the usual playground fare - swings and slides and monkey bars. It will also feature items symbolic of the town itself: a grizzly bear tunnel, a bush plane, a climbing wall, even a Volkswagen bus.

"It's just part of Talkeetna's hippie culture, I guess - a lot of granola crunchers around here," said playground project volunteer Karey Larson.

The children of those granola crunchers and their fellow Talkeetna townsfolk led the design of the playground, under the direction of John Dean, a designer with Leathers and Associates, a company out of Ithaca, N.Y., that specializes in community-built playgrounds.

"He went class by class (in Talkeetna Elementary School in September), asking them what they wanted in a playground," Larson said. "Then, miraculously, he went into a room for six hours and came out with a design that had those things in it."

Leathers and Associates has led several other community-built playground projects in Alaska, including Wonderland Park in Wasilla and Amoosement Park in Palmer.

While the children lead the design, the community determines the scope of the playground projects, Dean said Thursday from his Ithaca office. Since volunteers build the playgrounds, there are no labor costs, he said.

In fact, most communities typically draw hundreds of volunteers during the five-day building phase of the projects, he said.

"It's almost like a New England barn raising ... They come out with their own tools and sometimes their own materials," he said.

But the playgrounds are still pricey, ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 or more.

Those prices, Dean said, depend on local costs for materials and the amount of fundraising a community is willing to do.

A Leathers playground in Juneau, one of the largest projects the company has completed to date, he said, ran about $500,000.

The Talkeetna project will cost about $150,000, including community-built landscaping that will be led by Planet Earth Playscapes, also out of New York, Larson said.

The playground committee has raised about $45,000 so far, she said.

Some of that has come in the way of sponsorships. Matanuska Telephone Association, for example, paid for a play telephone system that will allow children to talk to one another over phones that will be set up at various locations in the park.

The Talkeetna Bachelor Society has paid for the VW bus, which Dean says will be built of recycled plastic wood; the Talkeetna PTA has paid for wood tiles to be painted by children and used to adorn various structural elements within the playground, Larson said.

The playground committee is also selling plastic pickets for a fence that will line the playground perimeter.

The pickets run $50 each and, like the larger items such as the phone system and bus, will feature plaques engraved with the name of the individual or corporate donors.

Larson said she's hopeful that other fundraisers, like a wine and dessert tasting and silent auction planned for next month, will help the group raise the remaining balance in time for the building days in June.

As the only playground in Talkeetna, aside from a small one at the elementary school, it will be an important addition to the town, she said.

"For such a touristy community, there's not really a lot of places to get out there and play," she said.

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