Monday, July 5, 1999

Today was an early rising day.  We needed to be down at the Visitor Center by 8:00 a.m.  We took a park shuttle bus on an eight hour tour out into the park to the Eielson Visitor Center.  It was 66 miles into the park.  Cars can drive on the paved roads but there is a check point where the gravel starts.  To drive beyond that requires a permit.  You can get off and on the green buses at any point and catch another later but we just stayed with the one driver (as did all the folks on our bus).  We figured eight hours today would be enough.  A twelve hour trip was an option.  We did pick up four people and filled the last of the seats later in the day.  

 

The trip had four rest or lunch spots along the way.  It was breathtaking scenery again.  However, smoke from the fires north of here affected the distance and clarity of the view.  We never really got to see Mt. McKinley.  We were reading in the visitor center that it was only clearly visible three days last year.  It's so tall and massive it creates it's own weather system and is usually masked in it's own clouds while the surrounding sky can be clear.

The spruce tree in the middle here is an example of how the pinecones cluster at the top.  It also shows how skinny they are all the way up the tree.  Very old trees may only be about 5 or 6 inches around.  Most trees don't live over 200 years up here.  Things grow slowly and die slowly.

 

Denali, the "High One," is the name Athabascan native people gave the massive peak that crowns the 600-mile-long Alaska Range.  At one time this park was officially named Mount McKinley National Park.  In 1980 the park was enlarged by 4 million acres and redesignated as Denali National Park and Preserve.  

Glacial and clear rivers (very small and narrow and constantly changing paths) flow through the valleys in very wide gravel beds.  The road we were on is the only through the park.  It's into and out of the park.  There are no real trails but you can hike anywhere unless it is marked as a restricted area.  They preserve some areas for the animals only.  You can see below how some of the road is just carved out of the mountain.  It was a little scary looking down on the outside edge coming home in those spots!

We were incredibly lucky with our wildlife spotting today.  The driver asked the group today what they wanted to see and the answer in unison was Grizzly bears!!  I had a whole string in my head but just sat quietly.  The top right picture was Gyrfalcons nesting on the tip of this peak.  They are much smaller but ran off the Golden Eagle that had nested here before.  What was so surprising was to see the Marmot right down from them sharing the peak.  They both posed beautifully.  That was an unexpected gift.

We saw seven or eight caribou over the day in different locations.  They are usually solitary and hunting for a cool place to be.  They are still shedding their winter fur.  All of them we saw today were bulls with big sets of antlers.  

Our day had started with a spotting of a red fox.  These critters aren't threatened by the big moving vehicles.  They seem to just treat them like "white noise" and continue right on with their typical activities.  This fox was busy hunting.   

Ground squirrels and snowshoe hares were a common sight and really didn't mind sharing the road with the buses.  We had not been able to really catch a hare on film before but we had one pose nicely today.

Our driver told us how very fortunate we were today.  He was quite skilled at finding the wildlife in the environment ... some of which was quite well camouflaged.  We weren't able to spot too much before he did.  We saw one dall sheep on a green grassy slope.  Several times we spotted ptarmigans - one time three baby chicks on the side of the road.

Today was a little cloudy and very hazy with the smoke.  This evening we've had some rain and it's cooled off.  I think rain is predicted tomorrow.  

The treasure of the day for us all were the bears that we saw.  We saw two brown lone bears.  One was napping on a ice patch on the side of a hill.  The thrill was see a mother with her two new cubs following along.  She came closer and closer to the bus and we were just mesmerized.  The driver told us in all his years here, he'd never seen cubs so close that he didn't need binoculars.  In the same valley a little farther down we saw a mother with a two or three year old cub.  The adults are very blond bears up here but the cubs are brown.  We felt so privileged to get to watch them for such a long time.  On our return we saw them again on the other side of the road and further up the hill.  That's probably a once in a lifetime experience and made this whole trip for me!!!!

Our schedule for tomorrow morning is our own but I think a hike will be in order and then we're scheduled for river rafting.  We may be wet one way or the other with rain or river.