MOUNT DENALI, WHERE ART THOU?

We finally made it to Denali National Park, home of North America’s tallest peak, Mount Denali. Denali is named from the Athabascan Indian word meaning “high one”.

The park attracted nearly 600,000 visitors last year during their four months of summer. Due to the weather conditions up high on the mountain, you may or may not see Denali. More than half of all visitors never see her. We were okay taking the risk because we had already seen her during our jet boat trip. You can read more about that here along with photos.

Cars are only allowed for the first fifteen miles into the park. After that, you must pay for a bus to take you deeper into the park on a dirt road. There are several options to choose from that vary in distance and length of time. We went with the 12 hour Kantishna trip to the end of the road and back. It was 184 miles round trip. We thought that surely we would see lots of exciting stuff!

Chavez narrated the trip and told us about the history of the park, some geology information, facts about different species of wildlife, and threw in some stories about his last five summers working as a bus driver in the park. He kept it interesting even though it was a very long day.

I am including some of the photos we took, but none of them come close to the pure beauty we saw there. Around every turn there was something to amaze us.

Chavez would stop at different observation points and rustic bathrooms along the way.  We never had to wait over 90 minutes between rest areas, which helped break up the trip and we got to stretch our legs.

After six hours or so, we finally made it to the end. The day started with sun, then clouds, and we got some rainy drizzle in the afternoon.

Not far from the end of the road was an old house and remnants of an old mining village. We picked up a park ranger at Wonder Lake, mile 85, and she rode with us to show us the house and talk about the lives of miners back in the early 1900’s.

After a couple brief hikes with the ranger, we boarded the bus to head back. We had only seen some caribou from far away, ptarmigan on the road, arctic squirrels, Dall sheep up high on some mountains, and several different birds during the 92 mile drive in.  We were hoping for a lot more animal sightings on the way back. Like a bear, maybe.

Just as we were told by Chavez, the wildlife comes out later in the day when the temperature starts to go down. We saw more caribou and finally some bears!

The grizzly bears that we saw here had a light brown colored fur. They were quite far away from us and never noticed a single bus. We sat in our seats looking through binoculars for at least fifteen minutes at each encounter.

We loved seeing the cubs frolic around and watched for quite a while. When momma got too far away, they would follow her and then run and play a little more. How often do you get to see this in the wild? We felt so lucky!

We saw another bear climbing the side of a mountain, but I didn’t take a picture of it. It was in front of the bus and we were on a curve in the road with a long cliff below. Yikes!

I think everyone was pleased with our adventurous day and ready to get out of the bus. The more popular tour was the Tundra Wilderness Tour, which was shorter and about $50 cheaper. If I were going to come again, I think I would take that one. Our large animal sightings were around the same mile markers as the shorter trip. If you get a sunny day, that is an added bonus!