Denali National Park
It was starting to rain as we went to bed last night, and continued to rain lightly throughout most of the night. When I woke up at 2:00 am to do what we older folks do, I listened to the rain on the roof of the motorhome and wondered what the morning would bring. We had signed up for an 8:30 shuttle bus that would take us up to the Eielson Visitor Center, a 66-mile drive up into the park on the park’s only road. It would take four hours each way – a full day’s drive on a bus similar to a school bus. But that’s the only way to get around in the park. Private automobiles are allowed only 15 miles up the road, except for the few that have made arrangements in one of two campgrounds farther into the park. One can, of course, get off the shuttle bus and hike out onto the tundra, then catch another bus either farther up or back down. We elected to stay with the one bus for the entire trip.
I keep mentioning the tundra because that’s what it is. The timberline in the park is at about 3000 feet, and you reach that very quickly after leaving the Wilderness Activity Center. From then on for the rest of your journey, you are literally above timberline, just like driving the upper reaches of Mt Evans or Pikes Peak in Colorado, except that the road goes on and on through a series of wide meadows and drainages, all the while surrounded by jagged 5000 and 6000 peaks and ridges. The road does go over three or four low passes, the highest of which is around 3700 or 3800 feet. The peaks and ridges are the foothills of the mighty Alaska Range, home to Mt McKinley, the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet. Since McKinley sits back another 40 miles or so from the end of the road, the line-of-sight viewing angle to observe the peak is limited to only a few brief glimpses because of this wall of foothills. Because of the low cloud ceiling, we never saw it today. In fact, they say only about 30 percent of the park visitors ever see Mt McKinley because cloudy conditions are the norm.
The main attraction of the bus trip is the opportunity to view and photograph wildlife. The big five in the park are grizzly bears, wolves, Dall sheep, moose, and caribou. We were fortunate to see all five, plus a lone coyote, although only a couple of bears and three or four moose were really close enough to get halfway decent photos. The sheep, in particular, were merely tiny white dots high on the mountainside. It was only with binoculars that we could really see them.
I was expecting to see more caribou, but I guess we saw less than a dozen altogether, including one really nice bull with a tremendous rack. But even he was at least a half mile away. Speaking of caribou, though, the wolves we saw were hanging around a caribou carcass that they had brought down a few days ago. It was located down along a creek, about 400 yards off the road. Only the antlers and a few bones remained, and the rack looked to be even larger than the live bull that we saw. The coyote I mentioned earlier was up a bluff overlooking the kill site, yapping his distinctive coyote howl, no doubt lamenting that the wolves were keeping him away from a free meal. The ravens and magpies meanwhile were swooping down at will, picking at the bones.
While you can take a more expensive, narrated tour which furnishes box lunches, the simple shuttle does not provide food. We packed our own sandwiches and ate lunch at the Eielson Visitor Center. However, the bus driver does provide some narration using the on-board P.A. system, mainly pointing out landscape features and talking about the wildlife we see or hope to see. There are longer rides and shorter rides; the longer rides go another twenty miles or so and take another three or four hours. But I’m glad we chose this one because eight hours on a school bus, no matter how spectacular the scenery, is about all these old bones can bear. The weather could have been better – it stayed in the high 40’s or maybe the low 50’s most of the day, and was cloudy, which spoiled any chance of see Mt McKinley. At least it didn’t actually rain on us today. But we still have two days, so maybe our luck will change before we head south toward Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula on Saturday.
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