Denali Park

I'm not going to post any photos today - the Wi Fi at Denali is really slow, but hopefully tonight at Anchorage it will be better. Yesterday, Friday, we took the bus into Denali, the only way to get past the first few miles of road into the park. No private vehicles allowed. It had rained all night on Friday night so the air had cleared of smoke. There was some residual clouds and fog which stayed with us most of the 90 miles to the end of the road. But we saw some wildlife - little white specks in the distance that were Dall sheep, a couple of moose along the highway, a bear down along a river gravel bar, another grizzly sow and cub up on a hillside. We had lunch at the lodge at the end of the road and tried our hand at panning for gold. The clouds were clearing and the sun coming out.

The trip back was spectacular, although the clouds didn't rise enough to ever see Mt. Denali. But the lower mountains were visible and the sunlight and clouds made the lighting absolutely beautiful. For animals, I'll start with the least exciting and work up: We saw a little frog on the road that our driver, Peter, said was a very rare wood frog. It was pretty nondescript. We saw another little white speck at the far side of a pond that Peter said was a trumpeter swan. That would have ranked higher if we had seen it clearly, since trumpeters are so very rare. We saw two beavers in a roadside pond and watched as they cut a branch into two pieces and tow the pieces across the pond. They had built a really impressive dam but I never saw their lodge. We saw lots of caribou. The first were herds of mostly cows and calves grazing half mile or more away, but later we saw three large bulls, one at a time, spaced over a mile or two along the road. The first two were off a hundred yards or so from the road, but the third, a really massive fellow (as caribou go) was right alongside the road and as we watched, he came up onto the road and proceeded to walk along it, pausing to pose for us every now and then. Wouldn't you know, my camera batteries had died. Peter didn't want to stress him out, so we followed slowly until we were able to edge up beside him and coax him back off the road.

These last two were both so great I don't know which to rank highest - dead tie I'd have to say. The first was a grey wolf. Peter said he'd only seen wolves three or four times in the 80 or so trips he made into the park this summer, so it was a pretty rare sighting. We had driven down a short road into a rest area and gotten out of the bus. Looking back up at the road we had come down, where it ran parallel to the edge of the parking lot and a little up hill, we spotted the wolf, just walking along the road and pausing every now and then to look at us with those eerie yellow wolf eyes. It was no more than 50 or 100 feet away and we followed along in the parking lot until it reached the upper end of the visible road and disappeared over the far edge. Peter said the pack it belonged to had a den a mile or so away.

The other was way cool, like a Disney nature movie, except without the feeling that it was somehow staged. We had stopped to watch a grizzly eating berries on a hillside just above the road. Then a sudden movement drew our eyes to a fox that was trotting up the hill towards the bear. It was a beautiful red and black fox with a very bushy black tail with a white tip on it that made it very visible. The bear apparently heard it before he saw it, because he started to run up the hill. But he soon stopped and turned to look at the fox. The fox ran right at it, the bear charged but the fox darted out of his reach, circled around, and laid down. The bear just wanted to eat berries, but the fox repeatly ran at him, evaded his charges, circled around, and laid down. Peter said that he had seen fox kits in the area and thought the fox had a den nearby and was trying to lure the bear away from it. We watched for maybe 15 minutes as the fox worked the bear to the top of the ridge and the two finally disappeared. I think a person could go a lifetime hoping to see something like that and never see it. Almost as an anticlimax, a short while later we saw a sow and cub come down a hill, cross the road in front of us and go down into a ravine where she spent some time eating berries. Yawn!

Finally, we saw a really beautiful rainbow. What a day. It was a 13 hour roundtrip and we were tired but happy when we got back to our cabin.

Today we drive to Anchorage.