Denali

DENALI

Denali – Days 27 to 33 – June 22 to June 28, 2015

As much as human ingenuity can imagine and engineer … “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Albert Einstein.

Our week in Fairbanks offered so many man made marvels fashioned from man’s scientific genius, along with all the fast food restaurants (which we avoided) and big box stores (Fred Meyer’s – part of Kroger) and gas stations (where we saved 50 cents a gallon with City Market card!).

     

One marvel we loved was the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum … a staggering collection of pre-WWII automobiles. Here is a 1908 Roadster we traded in for our Coyote … and Vicki’s favorite 1913 Argo.

 Denali

     However as we headed south towards Denali, we breathed deeply again and began to relax. There is so much tension within all that modernity. Wildfires around this part of Alaska sent a smoky haze into Denali and the sun at 8:00 p.m. welcomed us as we settled into our campsite. This moose cow spotted us with a lack of concern and an easy consent.

  

Immersed in Denali … we hiked every day in different parts of the Park. Getting off the road and the touristy parts of the Park allowed us to see, hear, smell, touch and taste the natural world of Denali … unchanged for over 1,000 years. (Yes taste … bluebells taste like grass.)

A wild animal is a critter in a picture; a distinction is made when present … it becomes cherished in the heart. These are new places in our heart … A Grizzly and a Caribou in a standoff, two Dall Sheep in impossible places and a strange new breed of Caribou. Also sighted other moose, more bear, willow ptarmigans, arctic ground squirrels, red squirrels and more caribou. (That’s 13 bears this trip.)

Behind Vicki on the hiking picture, you cannot see Mt. McKinley/Denali. The fires are not close, but their smoke is everywhere. And far and wide is a vast and remote and mysterious landscape.

All of our world can be captured in photographs … but the sense of isolation, the expansiveness … pictures cannot grasp. There are thousands of people in Denali, yet the size of the place lends to the impression of seclusion.

Various Photos of our seven days in Denali

There are countless variations of terrain! With 6.2 million square miles of Denali National Park, there is only one road. It runs only 92 miles from the visitor center straight into the park northward, running parallel to the Alaska Range within the park. Cars are not allowed after the first 15 miles … unless you have a camping reservation … then only to Teklanika Campground at mile 29 (which we did). So to see more of the Park, you take one of the buses running deeper along that one road. We took it on two different days.

Notes on pictures:

Denali has sled dogs owned by Nat’l Park. They use them in the winter to patrol in the 80 inches of snow. The Black Spruce trees in the Horsetail Fern picture are not dead. They grow so close together that they stop nourishing the bottom branches so the top ones can reach to the sun. The last picture is the Grand Mountain.