Seeing Denali, or, 12 Hours On The Bus Is Too Darned Much!

Denali National Park and Wildlife Preserve is magnificent, awesome, breath-taking, and astounding. All of those adjectives are accurate and yet none of them is grand enough. Taken all together they are not enough. Denali covers more than 6 million acres. It’s larger than the state of Maryland or the state of New Hampshire. We got a look at a good bit of it yesterday.
We got up at something after 4 AM to drive the 10 or 12 miles from the little hamlet of Healy—that was because there are only two seasons in Alaska: Winter and construction. We’re enjoying construction, now. Most of the road between here and the park is seriously torn up, reduced to dirt and gravel and restricted to one-lane travel. It’s reminiscent of the one-way train tunnel near Whittier, only this time, instead of traffic one way and then the other and then a train, the drill is traffic one way and then the other and then road-work crews pushing dirt around. When we drove from the park to our quarters on Sunday evening, the short distance took us about an hour. Since our bus tour departed the visitors’ center in the park at 6:30 AM, we started that way at 5:15 AM. We got to the park about 6 AM.

We boarded the bus, a 50 passenger Bluebird school bus painted park ranger green, about, at 6:30, and the adventure began. Our mission was to drive the 92.5-mile Park Road, some 80 miles of it unpaved and often one-lane, which takes you to Kantishna, the site of a gold mining camp a century ago, roughly in the center of the park. We’re told it is the only road in the park. Here’s a sampling of what we saw in the next 12 hours, and trust me, the photos just can’t capture anything like the vistas.

Waylon with provisions

Bus Interior

Bus Passing Us By Inches w/ sheer cliff on Other Side

Brown Bear

Caribou

Ranger Andy (that's the way he introduced himself)

Ranger Andy's Blueberries

Our Dirty Bus

That's a fox, really!

They died with their horns locked!

The Lone Bear

We saw bears, fox, caribou, moose, ptarmigan, Ranger Andy and blueberries. Kate loved the animals; I was more impressed with the landscapes. Something for everyone, I guess.

Ranger Andy was a hoot. He’d come to Alaska in the 70’s, from Pennsylvania, and never left. I suspect he was not the brightest bulb in the bin…makes me wonder whether the park service had its own version of Project 100,000, a seriously misguided social engineering effort forced on the US military services in the 70’s. The idea was that even if the individual wasn’t smart enough to pour rainwater from a boot, he or she could make a good military member. It didn’t work out well for the military, but maybe it worked better for the park service……..Ranger Andy did a fine job of explaining gold mining camp life in terms any six-grader could understand, including having everyone sample some of the blueberries growing in the area. “Can you say subsistence level? Do you know what that means?” …Yup, that was Ranger Andy, and he was proud.

I didn’t think much of former President Jimmy Carter, but he has to some degree redeemed himself in my eyes. He was the man who signed into law the legislation that established over 100 million acres of new national parks, preserves, and wildlife refuges. Mount McKinley National Park, enlarged from two million acres to six, became Denali National Park and Preserve, with new boundaries to encompass entire watersheds and the home ranges of wildlife populations.

See here:Park

Anyway, we drove to the end of the road, and then we turned around and drove back. We got off the bus at 6:45, and spend about an hour getting back to our garage-apartment room. It was a long, long day.

Kate says staying in this little one-room apartment with limited internet and one TV channel filled with snow is what it would be like to live up here, and confirms she would never have been a pioneer, and doesn’t much like living this way even for a couple of days.