26 May 2008 -- Denali NP

Denali National Park and Preserve has only one road (George Parks Highway) and it goes only 91 miles into the park. Private vehicles are only allowed to go 15 miles up that road. Beyond that the only way to see the park is on foot (it's a big park), by bicycle or on special buses operated by the National Park Service. The park is primarily a wilderness. Of course it's main feature is Denali Mountain (Mt. McKinley). Access for climbers is primarily through the town of Talkeetna where aircraft take the climbers and their gear to the first staging area on the mountain. The bottom line is that there are not a lot of people in the park. There are, however, a lot of animals.

Our ride into the park (about 50 miles up the road) left the Princess Denali lodge at about 7:20 AM while the temperature was in the 20s. The bus driver was very good about providing information and spotting wildlife. Since there is little to no traffic on the road, she was able to stop whenever wildlife was spotted. She encouraged the passengers to call out if they saw anything. Very soon we saw snowshoe hares and willow ptarmigan (the state bird). The driver had previously scoped out the location of a great horned owl nest just off the road, and she stopped for that. I got some great pictures of the mother owl keeping an eye on things while the little white owlet peeked over the edge of the nest.

We saw a good sized herd of caribou that was fairly close to the road. The caribou were already growing their antlers. The caribou is the only member of the deer family that has antlers on the females, so all the adults had antlers. Mary spotted something white in a bush a little way from the road. The driver said it was hare parts. She said the hares jump up into the tops of the bushes in order to catch a passing predator. :)

We saw dall sheep mostly in the distance. Dall sheep are like mountain goats and are seen mostly in the high, rocky areas of the mountains. The dall sheep is really the reason for the existence of the park. Before the park was created, the sheep were hunted extensively. Conservationist George Parks came to the area and, fearing for the fate of the species, lobbied for the creation of the park and game preserve. It took many years, but the park was finally chartered by congress in 1916.

The scenery was fabulous along the road. In some areas the road was narrow and winding and cut into the side of steep hills. I was glad I wasn't driving and was able to enjoy the view and take pictures. How many pictures of mountains can a person take? With a big enough memory card, a lot!

We spotted a few grizzlies far off from the road. One was walking along a river flat in the bottom of a valley far below us. We stopped to watch as we could see two hikers in the area walking toward the bear. The bear and hikers were far enough apart that neither could see the other for quite some time. Eventually, the hikers did see the bear and veered off their course to stay away from it. The bear just kept going as it had been. At the turn around, we stopped at a rest area that had some moose and caribou antlers. It is amazing how heavy the moose antlers are. We were able to see a couple of grizzlies digging up roots on the side of a ridge in the distance. It also snowed on us there. It was fine light snow that did not accumulate at all. The temperature was in the 40s.

On the way back down to the lodge, we saw another grizzly fairly close to the road. This one seemed to be prowling around in the underbrush. The really interesting thing was we also saw a red fox that was following the bear around. Maybe the fox was just waiting for the bear to uncover something tasty.

We got back down to the entrance to the park around 2:30 PM and spent some time at the visitors center. Following that, we hiked about 2.5 miles back to the lodge. We ate dinner in the King Salmon restaurant in the evening. I had (you guessed it) salmon. It was my first introduction to potato chip crusted salmon. That is a fairly common way of preparing it in the restaurants, and it was very good.

One of the side effects of long day light hours that we started noticing is that we would check the time and realize it was already 10:00 PM or some other such late hour when we thought it was only about 6 or 7. It just seemed hard to go to bed while it was so light out.