Traveling the USA

I wake up and BLUE SKIES!!! I’m pleasantly surprised since it was still raining when we went to bed last night. We pack up and head for the bus with hopes of getting a ride to Wonder Lake. Our “Tek Pass” is for seats IF AVAILABLE on any bus west of the campground. The bus to Wonder Lake is full so we grab 3 seats on the Fish Creek bus, which will get us to within 3 miles of Eielson.

This is the view from our first stop on the bus at Teklanika rest stop:

We pass a sign that warns hikers that the area is closed due to wildlife (grizzly bears) -- the sign has been gnawled by bears :-)

And then drive through Polychrome pass area:

Our bus driver is very, very talkative and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, by the time we get to where we can see Mt. McKinley it has clouded up in front of the mountain :-( We’re still hoping to see the mountain today, so we get off the bus at Fish Creek and walk a couple miles to Eielson Visitor Center, which is still under construction. On the way we take a break for lunch and enjoy a wonderful view:

We then hike the trail up to the north of the Eielson visitor center.

The wildflowers are again wonderful! There are many dainty Forget-Me-Nots in this area:


If there were no clouds in the skies, we would have a wonderful view of Mt McKinley. We are seeing some breaks in the cloud. As we’re hiking up the trail, we see parts of the mountain, including a glimpse at the peak.

We didn't get the view of Mt. McKinley that we were hoping for, but it was a great view even without seeing all of McKinley.

We hike down the mountain and catch a bus to Wonder Lake. We see more and more of Mt McKinley as we travel to Wonder Lake, but never a completely unobstructed view. BUT at least we get to see most of the mountain.

Apparently it was out this morning – we talked to people who were on the bus that we wanted to take (but was full) and they said they had a great view. I really wish they hadn’t told us that.

Here's another great view of the area from the bus:

On the way back to the campground we see a moose very close to the road,

And then see a mama grizzly and 2 newborn cubs playing – very cute! And then we see something NOT so cute – a fox raiding a ptarmigan nest beside the road and snatching a couple of the baby ptarmigans. Mama and papa ptarmigan are very upset with the fox. The fox has several baby ptarmigans in his mouth and runs across the field with them. We're assuming that he is taking them back to his den, possibly to feed to his/her offspring.

We make several stops on the busride back to the campground, including one at the Toklat River, where Jere & Joe play around with the telescopes while looking at the Dall sheep on the hillside above the area.

One last picture of the view from the bus near Polychrome pass:

Here is a picture of the narrow one-lane road that the bus drives on, sometimes on the edge of the mountain:

We are tired by the time we get back to the campground around 6pm (we left around 7am), so we have dinner and then relax by the creek behind our campsite. Joe works on the dam he's been building and I take a picture of the snowshoe hare near the campsite:

A long day, but very enjoyable. We were hoping to get a good view of Mt. McKinley....didn't really get a great view of Mt McKinley, but we did see a lot of other beautiful scenery and wildlife.

We were hoping for blue skies and an early bus trip out to see Mt. McKinley, but it had started raining last evening and continued to rain off and on til 3am at which time I got up and re-set my alarm for 7am. Cloudy skies again this morning, so we have a big breakfast and try to figure out what we want to do today. We ride bikes for about an hour and then try to get a bus to the Eielson Visitor Center to hike the trail north of the construction. We are not successful in getting a bus that goes that far and instead take a bus to Fish Creek. The bus driver again today is wonderful with her information about the park and wildlife, plus this one is also a comedian (“I appreciate everyone being helpful in finding the wildlife, but it’s not really helpful to others in finding a bear by saying ‘the bear is right there’ ”). After seeing lots more Dall sheep

and several grizzlies,

caribou and moose, we get off the bus at Fish Creek to do some hiking through the alpine tundra in the area. This is the height of the tundra wildflower season and there are flowers everywhere!

We walk around the area for about 2 hours with sunshine about half the time (yea!) and enjoy the area.

I really, really enjoy the wildflowers – so many different kinds and they are everywhere! Joe is not as thrilled about the wildflowers as I am and decides he's going to hike to the summit of the stone covered moutain. Jere and I say 'go ahead' and we wait at the bottom of the stones. Joe makes it to the top, but getting down on the loose stones presents a bit of a challenge, but he makes it without injury and loves the hike. Joe is the tiny dot on top of the hill in the picture below:

Unfortunately, no sighting of Mt. McKinley today. We wave down a bus to take us back to the campground. Soon after hopping on the bus it begins to hail! It eventually turns to rain, but some of the hills that were brown on the top earlier today are now covered with a coating of white. What weather! Hopefully Mt. McKinley will come out tomorrow, but the weather forecast is again partly cloudy with showers. We’re in a rut here with weather – partly cloudy, occasional showers, high in the 60s.

The road that we take to drive through Denali is a one lane dirt road that hugs the side of the mountain at several places. I look over the edge and it is pretty much straight down, several hundred feet. I try to take a picture, but not sure it will show how steep and how far down it is. In the photo below, the braided river bed going across the picture is wider than the width of a football field. The drop is big:

I'm not bothered by heights, but when we pass another bus on one of the turns where there is an 800 feet drop-off at the edge of the road, I close my eyes :-)

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.