We Have Seen the Mountain

Buses

In Denali National Park and Preserve there is a single main road that is roughly 92 miles long going from the entrance of the park on Highway 3 to Kantishna. The first 15 miles is paved and goes out to Savage River which is as far into the park as private vehicles are allowed to go (without some sort of special permit). To travel past that and onto the gravel road one needs to either sign up for some sort of program (and ride on yellow buses) or buy a ticket for the “no particular purpose” green buses. Yesterday Arlene and I bought tickets for the green buses with a departure time of 8am local time. (A bit of confusion had us arriving an hour early but we don’t need to go into that.)

Once on a green bus and past the end of the pavement one can disembark absolutely anywhere and proceed to walk anywhere, either along the road or off into the park. There are no trails; after a lifetime of reading the signs that say “please stay on the trail,” in this park one is free to just go anywhere. Much of the terrain would be crazy difficult. Some of it would just be really challenging. Then after walking one can just flag down another green bus and get on, either farther out the road toward Wonder Lake, or back into the bus depot near the entrance of the park. Currently the road is entirely closed past mile 43 at the intersection with the East Fork of the Toklat River.

Arlene and I rode the bus all the way out to mile 43 which took about 2 hours. We walked a little way down the river and then returned to catch a green bus. We asked to be let off at mile 39 and started walking back in. We’d like to try some off-trail hiking but today we stayed on the road and looked for nice views of Denali. We walked about 7 miles before flagging down a green bus and returning to the bus depot.

And Some Other Things

Cariboo

Willow Ptarmigan (family, including chicks)

Just in case it was too hard to see the chick

Thunder And Rain

Every afternoon/evening since we’ve been in the Denali area we’ve had thunder storms and rain. Happily we’ve tended to be active earlier in the day and are in the cabin for the rain and thunder. Today while we were walking on the road we started hearing thunder and felt a few (enormous) raindrops at the same time that we were getting attacked by some of Alaska’s 17 trillion mosquitos. We started looking to flag down a green bus before we got both wet and sucked dry. (Actually, I was the only one at risk of getting sucked dry as I am Arlene’s personal mosquito repellant.)