Jun 2007

Today we have shuttle tickets to take the bus to Wonder Lake and back. The bus picks us up at 6:40am and we won’t return til around 4:30pm.

We made reservations on the first bus of the day with hopes of seeing more wildlife earlier in the day. The bus driver is great. She tells us a lot of information about the park and stops whenever we see an animal and then gives us lots of info about the animal. Even though the ride is 10 hours, it doesn’t seem that long since we stop often

and the bus driver is telling us interesting things about what we’re seeing.

It’s cloudy, so we don’t see any of Mt. McKinley

But we see 7 grizzlies, including a mom and her two cubs who are very playful:

We also see lots of caribou, including a large herd on top of a hill

We see lots of Dall sheep up on the rocky ledges, 1 moose, and several other smaller animals and birds.

We had originally planned to get off the bus at Wonder Lake and take a hike for an hour or two, but when we get to Wonder Lake we find that the mosquitoes are everywhere – the worst that we’ve ever seen. The campers getting on the bus at Wonder Lake all have mosquito nets on their heads.

We can barely stand being outside for 10 minutes. We put DEET on our neck and hands so no bites, but the swarms of mosquitoes flying around us is more than we can stand. We quickly get back on the bus and decide to just stay on the bus for the remainder of the day – we really like our driver. We’ll hike tomorrow.

We spend the evening relaxing and going to a ranger talk about the first people to hike Mt McKinley, the elusive mountain that we hope to see before we leave the park.

It rained again overnight but has pretty much stopped by the time we’re up and ready to pack. After we pack up, we drive over to the dump station to dump our tanks and fill our water tank. We are moving to a different Denali NP campground today -- Teklanika. Teklanika is 30 miles inside the park and there is no water or electric there. Also for this campground we are not allowed to use our truck once we arrive at the campground. Campers can either walk, bike, or take a shuttle bus if they want to go somewhere in the park. It’s nice because it’s so far inside the park, but it takes some planning to make sure we have everything before we go there. We stocked up on groceries earlier and then bought bread & milk last night. No camper store at Teklanika.

Before we leave for Teklanika, we stop at the Visitor Center for a ranger talk on ‘Hiking Mt. McKinley’. The theatre is full and the talk/slides/video are interesting. Then we take off for the campground. The drive out to Teklanika is uneventful and the dirt road is in pretty good shape. We pick out a campsite by the river and spend the rest of the day relaxing by the river and taking a short hike along the riverbed and up the small hill beside the creek.

While Jere and I sit by the creek and read, Joe builds yet another dam. I'm starting to wonder if he's destined to be a civil engineer :-)

The campground and area around the campground is filled with wildflowers….very pretty. Teklanika is sometimes visited by wolves, bear, moose, and caribou; but we don’t see any sign of any animals today.

This campground has no water, but it does have a small amphitheatre and ranger programs are given each night at 7:30. So after dinner we go to hear a ranger talk about wolves. There’s apparently a pack of wolves that are active a few miles from the campground, but are seldom seen. The number of wolves in the park is declining, with less than 100 presently living in the park’s boundaries. Jere is hoping to see a wolf here, but it doesn't sound like it's going to happen.

Very dreary day out today and it looks like it might rain again this morning, so we head for the movie at the Denali Wilderness Access Center. The movie is about the building of the road through the park. Interesting movie, but not as good as the 'Heartbeats of Denali' that they show at the visitor’s center.

We grab some lunch and then catch a bus to the dogsled kennels where we get to pet the Alaskan Huskies that the park uses to patrol the park in the winter and see them give a demo with 5 dogs pulling a sled across stones.

We take the bus back to the Visitor Center and take a short hike, before returning to the train station to see the Alaska train pull in with busloads full of cruise line passengers aboard.

The skies are starting to clear up so we decide to drive 9 miles inside the park (visitors are only permitted to drive 15 miles inside the park in their own vehicles) to see if we can catch a glimpse of Mt. McKinley. No signs of McKinley, but we then decide to drive a few more miles to the Savage River trail and walk the 2 mile loop trail. The wildflowers are again incredibly pretty and it’s nice to be outside in the nice weather.

The highlight of the walk is a pair of adult ptarmigans with about 8 of their chicks that are on the trail taking dust baths. We stop and watch them for about 10 minutes.

We return for a quick dinner and then go outside of the park to fill up on propane and diesel. We also check out the motel we stayed at 13 years ago when we visited Denali for two days – The White Moose Motel. It’s still there and looks exactly as we remember it. The rest of the area near the entrance of the park is much more built up than we remember, especially the Princess Resort area for the cruise passengers. Then, before heading back to the campground, we decide to check out a few gift shops.

After staying up til after the sunrise at 3:00am this morning, it’s kindof hard to drag myself out of bed at 9:00, but I do it. I hop into the shower, eat some breakfast and pack up again. We’ve really enjoyed the Chena Marina RV Park – friendly hosts and great little float planes and airplanes to watch.

Unfortunately soon after we hit the road the rain arrives again. So no nice scenery pictures during today’s drive, but I do take a picture of this really pretty grass growing beside the road:

As we get close to Denali the sky looks awfully gray and we assume it’s fog, but as we get closer to the park we realize that it’s smoke.

We’re getting a little concerned. A few years ago when we visited Glacier National Park, half of the park was evacuated due to a wildfire – we’ve really been looking forward to visiting Denali and start wondering if our trip may be cut short. We stop in the Wilderness Access Center to register for our campground and find out that the fire is 100 miles away near Wasilla. We breathe a sigh of relief and check into our campground. The building where we check in for our campground is really, really nice. I feel like I’m checking into a nice hotel – I like that feeling :-) We go and pick out a nice campsite and set up.

The wildflowers are very pretty in the campground. Here's a spot where there is wild rose, bluebells and lupine all together:

The restrooms are a short walk away from our site and they are also very nice. We then drive to the visitor center and that is also very nice. This national park appears to be well funded, unlike some of the others that we’ve visited. This park is obviously getting money from somewhere other than the federal government.

We watch a wonderful movie in the visitor center in their large (very nice) theatre and spend about an hour looking around the museum – the museum is also very nice. We also spend some time looking at the bookstore there before returning to our RV for dinner.

After dinner we go over to the ranger led campfire program, “How Cold is Cold” and we learn about how cold it gets in Alaska in the winter and what happens when it’s 20 degrees below zero, 40 below, and 50 below. The ranger also gives the usual safety talk on bears and moose, and has a grizzly fur for all of us to examine.

He also warns us that about the ‘aggressive moose’ that is currently causing problems in our campground. She has two calves and is not to be tangled with. He said the moose even charged a motorhome last week that was trying to vacate a camping site (to get away from the moose). A few people at the program said they saw it this morning.

We walk back to the RV after the program, actively watching for moose. We had bought our bearbells earlier today at the bookstore, but apparently what we really need to be concerned about are moose, not grizzles :-)

Last night I couldn't sleep and was still awake at 2:15am this morning. It was still light outside!!! The sun sets around 1am and rises around 3am, but it never actually gets dark.

So we slept late again today. We spent much of the day getting ready for the next few weeks. We'll be in Denali National Park the next week, which means no electric, no water, no internet. However, four of the days we're in Denali, we're staying at the Teklanika Campground. The 'Tek' campground is 30 miles inside the park. Once we're there we're not allowed to use our car til we leave the park 4 days later. So today we go the grocery store and stock up, and get caught up on our laundry, make sure we have our propane tanks full and our gasoline for the generator, etc. Plus we have some follow-up phonecalls on getting reservations for the week of July 4. We find places to stay for every day that week except July 6, but we figure we can 'wing it' for one night somewhere.

By the middle of the afternoon we have most of our chores done and take off for downtown Fairbank's Midnight Sun Festival. It's a street fair for the summer solstice, with probably 100 booths and some live entertainment. Longest day of the year here: 22 hours of sunlight.

Then after dinner we head over to the Fairbanks' Goldpanners Midnight Sun Baseball Game, the reason that we're in Fairbanks on June 21. It's a baseball game that starts at 10:30pm and is played without lights. As soon as we decided that we were going to travel to Alaska this summer, Jere said we need to be in Fairbanks on June 21st to see the Midnight Sun game.

We get there two hours before the game starts and the grandstands are already half-full.
We get good seats and we're glad we get there early. By 9:30, the place is packed. They have no aisles in their grandstands, so as soon as we find our seats I go get some food to munch on later in the game when we're trapped in our seats.

The concession stand is smaller than the concession stand that our hometown has for their Little League teams. I should have brought more snacks. Jere goes to baseball games to watch baseball -- I go to watch people and eat tasty snacks. No tasty snacks tonight :-(

It's very late (3:20am) while I'm writing this, so I'm not going to write a lot of details about the game BUT it wasn't quite what I expected....yes, there was a large crowd there and yes, it was light til 1:30 when the game was over, and yes they did sing the Alaska state song at midnight. But we couldn't hear the announcers where we were sitting just past the third base and there were no pre-game ceremonies that I expected to see at this game that ESPN lists as one of the top 10 sporting events that everyone should see once in their life. This game has had many baseball players that later became famous (Barry Bonds is the only one I can remember -- I'm getting very tired) and lots of baseball fans dream about coming to see this game at some point in their lives. But again this is Alaska. Even the person singing the national anthem forgot the words and stopped singing for a short time. And we're still not sure what song they were trying to sing at the 7th inning stretch - it sounded like "Roll Out the Barrels" beer-drinking song. Oh well, the Goldpanners lost 6-1. They played terrible. But the weather was good and we enjoyed the game.

Here's picture of the game at 1am:

We got back to the trailer around 2am. Here's a picture. This is as dark as it will get today:

And here's a picture of the sunrise at 3:30am -- yes, I'm still awake: