Page 12 of 15
Denali National Park, Alaska
Don't let the forest grow over the path you came here by
I have been to more than one National Park in more than one country, and everyone everywhere always has the same rule: stay on the trail. Or, more simply, trails good. It's an easy rule to follow (as long as the trail is reasonably marked), a rule that prevents additional damage that you could inadvertently cause when your big dumb feet start trampling all of the little tiny plants that have grown used to their off trail life. When you go to Denali things are a bit different in many regards but incomprehensibly different regarding their idea and their overriding philosophy of trails. Or, more simply, (in Denali) trails bad. With the exception of a few front country hikes, everything else in the grizzly infested park is yours to enjoy and/or trample at will. Feel like stepping on some wildflowers and crushing some low bushes on the way for good measure? Go right ahead. It's your park to destroy.
Back in the back country, Denali's free range hikers are free to go just about anywhere they want to, something which initially made me a bit uncomfortable considering all the lurking danger that could attack someone who was wandering alone without a cell phone signal in a park the size of Massachusetts. Luckily the park sponsors daily "discovery hikes" where groups of 10-12 people are led by a park ranger just about anywhere the park ranger wants to go that day, a halfway point that let me trample some bushes but gave me the quiet assurance that at least a medic might be called if I fell of a cliff or woke a sleeping grizzly bear. The hike started at mile 61 of the Park Road (three hours by bus from the front country) and followed a ridge and a river before it went up and over Stony Hill, a quick thousand foot high bump with nice views of the valleys on all imaginable sides.
We were given a few instructions before we started on our discovery hike. The first was to make a lot of noise, especially when walking through the brush (grizzlies prefer not to be startled). We were to make sure we could see the group at all times and we were to take special care not to follow in the footsteps of our other hikers and inadvertently create a trail. Serpentine, serpentine.
And while the ground conditions ranged from impossibly spongy to scary, slippery gravel, the path was always anywhere you wanted it to be. In the beginning there was a bit of a route to be had- that initial ridge and river were easy enough to follow- but when it came time to scale the mountain it was every man, woman and child for themselves. A truly strange experience to find yourself instinctively following ridges, lines, animal trails and the mountain in order to reach the top, just in time to realize where you were and to begin to try and figure out the safest way down.
The last picture of the Denali Discover Hike looks back towards Fish Creek from one of the summits of Stony Hill (for extra fun, see if you can find some fellow discovery hikers on one of Stony Hill's other summits). After a taste of the freedom of (literally) going wherever you want, I think I would much less hesitant on a future trip to risk that unexpected bear encounter, that unexpected broken ankle, that unexpected chance of getting lost forever, all for the chance to just spend a few perfect days, a few perfect moments in a scaleless back country, alone in a place without end.
These are two relatively self explanatory pictures taken from the Stony Hill area of the park on that one of a kind discovery hike I was able to join. One of the policies of the discovery hikes is that they're never the same (although our guide said that's not completely true and that most good hiking routes get an encore tour each season). Every day every summer a park ranger is taking a small group somewhere where none of them have (probably) ever been before, each ranger leading one or two completely different hikes per week, each heading out in whatever (general) direction they feel like at the time. Possibly the best low paying job ever in North America.
In the front country there are a few marked trails, although only one has any actual bite to it. The Mount Healy Overlook Trail rises close to 2,000 vertical feet from the visitor center to the overlook, and claims (on clear days) to offer clear (though distant) views of Denali. On my last day in the park I thought it was a reasonable hope to give the mountain one last chance to show itself, that it just might reward me for all my hard work. And while those efforts remained almost comically futile, I was still able to enjoy the trail and its views, although possibly not quite as much as that one ground squirrel.
A little more than two hours north of Denali, Fairbanks is the largest city in interior Alaska but, well, that's not saying all that much (for New Jersey locals, it's population is about twice as big as Denville, for non locals that's pretty damn small). And while it's downtown may have been quiet and its strip mall(s) uneventful, there was some fun to be had. The Alaska Museum of the North easily qualifies as the state's most interesting building, partly through its own merits and possibly by default. Located on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it offers a mix of natural history exhibits, local contemporary art and a light shifting, site specific art installation that seems a lot cooler until you actually see it. Still the museum is clearly the highlight of the city, a place where most parking lots contain electric outlets at each space (for starting your car in the winter) and where an overwhelming feeling of utter isolation is surprisingly appropriate.
I was going to write a long, drawn out explanation all about this but I think I'll just go for the easy, cheap comment.
Please, please, please, how many times do I have to tell you kids, for the love of god, please don't climb on the pipeline.
A slightly better picture of the pipeline (including some supports) from the small, public visitors center (really just a shop) about 20 minutes north of Fairbanks on the permafrost ravaged Steese Highway. And since (according to the posted warning) there was no visible presence of crude oil, or a black spray coming out of the pipeline, or a hissing/roaring sound, or a strong pungent odor, or a white cloud of steam, or a patch of dead vegetation or flames, then all was well with the pipeline and all was well with the world.
The end of an era.
If you've been reading the slideshows since 2001 you've heard me babble on endlessly all about my trusted Lowa boots. These are the boots that climbed the temples at Angkor Wat, and climbed to the very edge of Yosemite Point, and the Skyline Trail at Cape Breton Highlands, and the Cross Country course at Soldier Hollow, and the trails past Alberta Falls in Colorado, and the unmarked lands through the saguaros in Arizona, and countless trails in Maine, and the unforgettable Milford Track in New Zealand. The boots made it all the way to Alaska but showed their weakness while fording the river to get to Exit Glacier- a large hole had ripped apart a piece at the back of my left boot, making all that Gore-Tex protection fairly pointless. Faced with the prospect of having to cross additional rivers in Denali, I decided to stop at the REI in Anchorage and find a replacement, as if any boots could ever replace ones so blindly trusted. The new ones are ok, maybe over time they'll earn their keep but right now they're a pale (though waterproof) substitute for a pair of boots they will never be able to live up to.
And though they deserved to be launched on a small wooden raft and set ablaze on a quiet, solemn lake, the boots met a much less heroic end in Denali where I shamefully abandoned them for dead. Unable to fit two pairs of hiking boots in my suitcase I took the coward's way out and left them in the hotel room in Alaska, on their own, as if they were just some boots and not something that had once been just days before so trusted.
