Denali National Park, Alaska

Sitting on a bus, for twelve hours…

It doesn’t sound appealing, but it turns out to be quite an engaging day.

There is one road in the park, it’s 93 miles long. We drive the whole thing, (actually we are driven), both ways. Private vehicles are not allowed past a certain point, so we spend our day in a glorified school bus with seat belts. (Bill Clinton decreed that seat belts must be worn in national parks.)

Our driver, Kate, has been driving this route for 20 years. We are glad of her expertise as both a naturalist and a skilled navigator on this skinny gravel and dirt road with steep drop offs (still no guard rails). We sometimes experience “the kissing of the buses” when two buses need to maneuver past each other on a road that seems wide enough for only one.

This road will never be paved because wildlife uses it as a trail, especially in the winter. The park is patrolled by dogsled in the wintertime.

Denali is an intact ecosystem.

At the park’s lowest elevation it’s populated with alder, spruce and cottonwood trees, as we go higher the spruce dominate, and at the highest elevations it’s tundra. The tundra is spongy lichen; green tussocks of vegetation. There are 400 different species in Denali. Kate tells us the bears use it as a mattress and lay spread eagle. The caribou consume it as their main staple.

Treed alleyways open up into big wide glacially formed valleys girded by the foothills of the Alaska Range with Mt McKinley/Denali reigning as their crown jewel. The treed mountains become rocky fingers and toes poking into the sky. Where trees try to get a foothold in the permafrost they appear drunken as they tilt unsteadily. This park covers 6 million acres and equals the size of the state of Massachusetts. We’ve got a lot of exploring to do. No wonder we need 12 hours, although with that we get only a cursory look.

Here’s a sampling:

A yearling moose with antlers just starting to bud

Soaring Northern Harriers, (marsh hawks)

Mew gulls nesting among the rocks in a river bed

Snowshoe hares turning from winter white to dark

Empty beaver lodges, (not enough winter snow meant not enough insulation for them to survive here last winter)

A grizzly sow with her two tumbling, wrestling cubs

Dall sheep with their lambs

And what our Ranger Andy calls the sighting of a life time, a wolverine loping down the road in front of the bus. We follow him at a respectful distance for more than two miles. He probably isn’t the brightest wolverine on the planet as he could detour into the brush at any time. We mark his progress by the ptarmigan flushing on either side of him. This is one of the most aggressive animals in the wild and is rarely seen. At first glance he looks like a bear but then his blonde skunky stripes become visible and we know him for what he is.

The park is coming into bloom with Arctic bluebells, yellow daisies of arnica, tiny white rock cress, mountain avens, (a white flower with a yellow center), deep pink clumps of moss campion, Alaska’s state flower forget-me-not, small clustered cups of rosy rhododendron, bright white Canada dogwood, Labrador tea, arctic lupine, wind flower in white with a green center, the enthusiastic wild sweet pea in purple and blowsy, feathery tufts of cotton grass. Beautiful gifts of nature.

With all of these incredible sights the only thing missing is the mountain. It remains discreetly behind cloud cover. We see just a corner. Only 25% of park visitors see it. She’s obviously elusive. The word Denali means the high one, the great one in Athabascan. Great enough to do as she pleases.

Ranger Andy climbs aboard the bus to talk about the mining history in the park. He takes us on short hikes, one at Wonder Lake and one near the cabin where Fanny Quigley lived and died. She lived here before it was a park with her miner husband. She worked hard every day and when her husband broke his leg and moved to Seattle she decided to stay on alone in this place that she loved.  She died here at the age of 73 when the average female life span was 55.

At the visitor’s center there are antler displays to handle and hoist. The caribou horns are extremely ungainly. I wonder how they step so gracefully in narrow places. The moose antlers are unexpectedly heavy. They can weigh more than 70 pounds, apiece.

Lunch on the bus today is our first meal not prepared in the trailer kitchen.

We skip the shuttle bus to walk the two miles back to the village. We’ve been sitting most of the day and the exercise feels good. We have an additional reward when along the trail we pass, (warily), a mama moose and her twin calves.

Have you ever seen those couples, usually older people, who dress alike? We’ve always sort of made fun of the whole idea. But yesterday, there was a two for one sale on Alaska jackets and today we wore them at the same time and place. Concerning

Wildlife count: 2 golden eagles, 15 caribou, 6 moose, and two calves, 3 Northern Harriers, 18 Dall sheep and 2 lambs, 3 snowshoe hares, 3 grizzly bears and 2 cubs, picas, 3 willow ptarmigan up close, plus many more, 1 wolverine, 1 red throated loon, 1 wigeon.

Airstreams: 0

Miles: 184 on a bus

Gratitudes: PKB: intact ecosystems JMB: Kate, our bus driver

Gin Score: No gin game tonight

Antler Chic

Mosquito Nets

Twins