Page 10 of 15
Denali National Park, Alaska
All they got inside is vacancy
One of the legendary national parks in Alaska, the country and the world, Denali is one of those places that is unimaginable in person and almost futile to write about or even photograph, although it takes much more than just that kind of a realization to stop a slideshow. The park itself is huge in both abstract terms (its bigger than Massachusetts they say) and in real life experience- the low brush of the tundra and the distant mountains maybe ten or twenty or fifty miles away create these immense scaleless valleys that feel lost in time and truly without end.
The only way into the park is through a public transportation bus system, something that has some advantages along with the expected disadvantages. The buses travel along the Denali Park Road, a two lane paved road which quickly changes to a two lane gravel road which quickly changes to a one lane gravel road which quickly changes to a one way, dangerous one lane gravel road complete with hairpin turns, steep drop offs, no guard rails and two way bus traffic. The road starts on the George Parks Highway, the main (and by main I really mean only) road between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and extends 91 miles west all the way to the town of Kantishna, an old gold rush town now filled with overpriced lodges. Along there way, along the ridges constant otherworldly views await you at every turn in a vain attempt to distract you from all of those wildlife sightings you've already come to expect from such a place.
This first picture starts to show some of the vastness in those scaleless valleys as the clear edge of distant rain showers is easier to read than any weatherman's radar could ever be.
The thing that is unexpected about the national park buses isn't how crowded they are (and they are) or how uncomfortable they can be (and the can be) or how slow they travel (you don't go to Denali to go fast), but instead the regimented nature of the entire system. All of the buses (whether they are tourist buses or camper buses or hiker buses) all leave from the same place and then take the exact same breaks at a series of rest stops intentionally spaced every hour or hour and a half apart. On the long road out to Kantishna that means a 10 minute stop at the Teklanika River pullout (with restrooms and an overlook), a 20 minute stop at Polychrome Pass inbound (or Tolkat River outbound), another 10 minute stop just past the Eielson Visitor Center (which is closed for construction) and then another 10 minute stop at Wonder Lake before the road unceremoniously ends in Kantishna. Of all those stops, the best (until they reopen the Eielson Visitor Center) is Polychrome Pass, the first real mountain pass on the trip and the first time that the valley really opens up to something utterly spectacular.
The awful truth about visiting Denali is that in the summer it's pretty hard to actually see Denali itself. The books say that the mountain is shrouded behind clouds at least two out of every three days (they've had whole summers where it has rained almost every day), plus it is only visible from certain points in the park and along the road. You would think that a 20,000 foot high mountain wouldn't be all that hard to miss, but then you (just like I) would be thinking wrong. During my five days in the park I was able to get only one confirmed partial sighting of Denali's South Peak. In a way it kind of makes the whole mountain even more special, more important, more mysterious, but mostly it just kind of sucked that I just never got that one chance, that one confirmed glimpse I had always imagined and always thought I would never forget.
I don’t blame you for not believing me about Denali's South Peak. So this is the same photo as above, blown up, over filtered and somewhat pixelated to show you just that small, small glimpse of the mountain that I somehow consider myself lucky to have seen.
All of the buses regardless of their cost or purpose (and both do vary wildly) all have the same policy when it comes to animal sightings: stop. Whether or not it's a tiny speck of a distant grizzly bear or a tiny speck of a distant dall sheep, everyone stops and attempts to lower the standard school bus windows to see just how good their zoom lens is working. Occasionally an animal will drift close enough to look like something more than just that speck, an example being the bull moose below who took out just enough time from his busy willow eating schedule to pose for a nice side profile shot.
In addition to ground squirrels, snow hares, caribou, dall sheep, moose, black bears, young grizzly bears and Tim Treadwell and his girlfriend (see Page 6), apparently grizzly bears also eat signs. The park rangers got so annoyed by the sign eating bears that they stuck nails on the edges of the signs to deter the bears, deciding to go with the rather fuzzy logic that the only thing better than a sign eating grizzly bear is an angry sign eating grizzly bear who not only can't eat a sign but also now has nails stuck in his (or her) mouth.
Flowers!
Summer might be the worst time to the mountain but it's the best time to see wildflowers. On every trail, on every ridge there was another stand of flowers, another unexpected burst of color, another chance to test out the macro function on my camera lens.
