Denali's Too Big!

On Wednesday, June 15, 2016, the four of us -- Kathy, David, Eileen and Tom -- moved the rig from Anchorage to Denali National Park.  Denali (the park as well as the mountain) is too big to do it justice in just one blog, but we'll try to give you an overview.  Kathy and David will be coming back for another visit in July, and that will be our opportunity to put our boots on the ground and get you a better idea what some areas of the park are all about.

But back to our overview.

As soon as we got the trailer parked in the campground, we scouted around and were treated to this view of the Nenana River, outside the park:

Moving the RV is hard work, so we needed some sustenance.  Kathy suggested we head to 49th State Brewing Co. in nearby Healy, Alaska.  Besides its tasty beer (David and Kathy preferred "The Great One" barleywine), the brewpub boasts the bus that was used to film the movie, "Into the Wild," which was based on a book by the same title written by Jon Krakauer about a young man who bushwhacks into the Alaska wilderness, only to die there.  He was trapped in the wilderness by snowmelt that swelled rivers so much that he couldn't ford back across to get to civilization.  He eventually took shelter in an abandoned school that was used by hunters.  The original bus is still at the same site back in the wild that it was when he lived in it the weeks before he died, but the movie bus did nicely to help us visualize it:

On our way back from dinner we stopped at a picturesque overlook to get another view of the Nenana River:

Up bright and early the next day, we headed into the park, and Kathy caught this photo of Eileen and Tom at the park entrance:

We made two forays into the park.  Our first was a drive as far as visitors' vehicles can go, about 15 miles into the park at the Savage River Campground.  Our second was a 12 hour bus trip past Wonder Lake to Kantishna, at the end of a 90-mile road that is accessible, mostly, only to park buses and other specially permitted vehicles.

We had wonderfully clear, warm weather for both trips.  As we began the Kantishna Tour, we had a chance to jump out of the bus and take this selfy with the Alaska Range:

The entire 90 miles of the bus ride is picturesque, and it's hard to know which turn of the road introduced us to the most beautiful sights:

One favorite spot was Toklat, which has a campground and a rest area with a gift shop.  The facility sits on the awesome Toklat River, which braids across a huge gravel plain with dramatic red-and-green hills on all sides:

The entire trip, we followed one river or another - the Savage, the Teklanika, the Toklat and the McKinley - often high above the valley floor, through boreal forest, through taiga forest, and over arctic tundra by turns:

At the Toklat stop, Tom got a little frisky with some caribou antlers left on display for visitors to handle:

We finally got our first view of Mount Denali on the bus tour, and it was striking - all the more dramatic for the clear day:

The trip was also not without lots of wildlife spotting.  Our bus driver gave us license to yell, "Stop!" in which event he would stop the bus, and then whoever had spotted the wildlife would shout out the type of wildlife and what position of the clock it could be found at.  Here was a moose at 4:00:

We also saw this photogenic caribou on the tundra:

Two young bears decided to run across the road right in front of our bus, which gave the quickest of our photographers an opportunity to snap its photo.  As with most wildlife photos, you had to be quick and the animal did not oblige you with its best pose:

Our ride was almost finished, when this moose cow obliged us with a close-up:

Driving in, we reached Kantishna.  Founded as a gold mining camp in 1905, it endured longer than similar communities in the area, having been constructed nearest to the source of the gold. It lies in the Kantishna Hills at the junction of Eureka Creek and Moose Creek, 3 miles northwest of Wonder Lake, and near the mouth of the Kantishna River. There are several remote lodges in Kantishna, where guests can stay for a small fee. Because private vehicles are not permitted to enter the interior of Denali National Park, tourists desiring to stay at these backcountry lodges must ride in on lodge shuttles or the park bus.  Kantishna Air Taxi service also provides chartered flights to Kantishna Airport (it's barely more than an airstrip), and we were lucky enough to see one small plane taking off as we arrived:

Kantishna is truly the end of the Park Road, as witnessed by this sign.  If you look closely on the left end of the sign, you'll see the dirty paw print of what appears to have been a young grizzly bear who was  probably trying to learn to read:

We finished the tour around 7:30 pm and, as we drove out of the park and back to our RV, we thought back to the many sights we saw - but most especially gave thanks to The Great One for gracing us with a sparkling clear view of her:

The memory of this view calls us back - and will make our second visit all the sweeter as we have the pleasure of deciding where to romp and play in this gigantic natural playground.

If you want to see all our photos from this visit to Denali, click this link to the Denali album on our Flickr website.