Originally Posted by
stevemack
We've been emailed to say we're a winner for the road lottery this year but I've just hit a problem now with car rental... Now I know that some places have been discussed that are gravel roads but does anyone know of specific car hire companies that will allow rental cars down the Denali road? I was hoping to use enterprise as hertz/avis/budget all say no gravel roads at all, i'm sure I read on here though that enterprise allow it?
We can't use our own insurance either as we're from the Uk and not USA, we are over 30 though if that helps at all! Needs to be from anchorage aswell as that's where we fly into!
Any help is greatly appreciated
The only times that verbiage in the rental agreements means anything is in one of two situations:
-an accident
-a mechanical issue necessitating a tow
An accident is pretty unlikely on the park road. Traffic is obviously very limited, and you're not going very fast, so it should be pretty easy to avoid an accident. The worst you might do is accidentally hit an animal, and even then, you're not going fast enough to render the car undriveable, so just drive the car back to Anchorage and don't specifically tell the rental company where the accident occurred (how would they ever find out?). If they make you fill out an incident report, just write "Denali National Park" for the location and they really truly won't know any better.
In the event of a mechanical issue, the rental company (any decent one, anyway) normally takes responsibility and dispatches a tow truck. They won't pay for a tow truck to go out onto the wild, unpaved highways of Alaska (and will cite this verbiage to back that up). So, in the worst case, you'll need to pay for a tow back to paved highway and then they'll pick it up from there (of course, it's a different story if the mechanical issue is the direct fault of you driving off of paved highway, such as impaling your oil pan on a huge rock or something).
The above said, I personally would not hesitate to drive a rental car on the park road in your situation.