Denali I

The previous post was the Dalton Highway and the Yukon.

June 9

We ate breakfast — a buffet — at the hotel in Fairbanks. After the somewhat limited dining choices over the past couple of days (I think the Yukon restaurant waiter thanked us for dining with them and joked that “we know you have so many options”), we still stayed near the hotel because we still had to checkout and meet with our tour group for the bus ride to the train station, but mainly because we wanted to sleep in: this was the first night since flying up to Prudhoe Bay that we slept in a regular bed, instead of the cot-like singles found in the ATCO-unit hotels. There were a few places a few blocks from our hotel, but not worth the walk.

There was Internet access in the lobby, and I continued to abuse their upstream link to backup photos until our number was called. The laptop was perched up on one of those tall cocktail bar tables off around the corner from the front desk, and the lobby was full of people. Holland America had a number of groups going to Denali National Park that day, and all these groups assembled there, waiting for their specific motor coach. All the groups would reach Denali by the McKinley Explorer, a set of special double-decker train cars owned by the cruise line. Passengers would ride on the top level, underneath bubble windows like the Alaska Railways train from Seward, but there’d be restaurant-style dining on the lower level: each car had its own dining room and kitchen. There were also open-air vestibules in each car, ostensively as the smoking section, but used more by photographers who didn’t want to deal with shooting through the bubble windows.

Note that luggage was an issue. The train had limited space for luggage, and we’d have at most the smaller bags, like the ones that go into the overhead bins on airplanes. A few days ago in Anchorage, we had left a bag full of various souveniers and formal wear in the hotel for our return a week later. Now, our other large bag, which we had taken to Prudhoe Bay and along the Dalton Highway, would be sent off to the same hotel in Anchorage for our arrival there after Denali. We were to pack only our overnight essentials, and rain gear (our luck continued to hold, and we didn’t need the Wal-Mart ponchos).

The four-hour train ride itself wasn’t that interesting. The landscape was similar to what we saw coming down to Fairbanks: taiga forests, with glimpses of far-away mountains through gaps in the treeline. We didn’t see any wildlife on the way, though we did see the skeletal steel of a radar array on a Cold War-era Air Force base. This radar had once been used to watch for ICBMs streaking over the North Pole, presumably a part of the DEW line or similar system. Those giant metal frames are the late 20th Century’s equivalent of the castle keeps near rivers and stone batteries overlooking harbors, obsolete shields against attacks by a distant enemy.

Because of a tunnel collapse and repair operation near Denali (someone didn’t lower a crane carried by a train as it entered a tunnel, or something similar), we’d actually de-train at the stop before our scheduled one, and take buses the rest of the way to McKinley Village, our hotel a few miles away from downtown Denali. The downtown area contained a large hotel (apparently owned by Holland America, also), as well as departure points for river rafting and hiking adventures. There was also a long strip mall occupied almost entirely by tourist shops. This was also a town that depended on tourism, though this was tourism of the active outdoor adventure variety, not the cruise ship kind. But a t-shirt and mug shop is still a t-shirt and mug shop. Our own hotel was connected to downtown by shuttle — we’d actually have to take one of these shuttles to the main hotel in downtown to take another shuttle to the train station for our departure the next day — but it was more or less by itself, except for a kayaking outfit across the street. The hotel was also broken out into “lodges” in an arc around the main building. Each lodge had a dozen or two rooms and overlooked a nearby river. The main building had the inevitable gift shop and coffee bar, as well as a nice restaurant. We got lucky here: our room was ready for check-in by the time our group got there, but most of our other tour-mates had to check their luggage in with the bell staff until we got back from the bus ride through Denali.

Denali

The main event for the day was an eight-hour bus ride through Denali, travelling the main road to the Mile 55 marker before turning back. We would see wildlife if the wildlife cooperated; we would see Mt. McKinley if the weather cooperated. But we were guaranteed to see a little of the splendor of a natural park bigger than the state of Massachusetts. The park road extends much further than Mile 55, with regular — hourly — bus service for hikers (you can only bring private vehicles so far into the park), but that’s what’s reasonable in our time frame.

The sightseeing bus was an old schoolbus, and there were lunch boxes in the overhead bins for us: bread, cheese, reindeer salami and a Nutragrain bar. We sat in the back, and there were a few empty seats around us; we eventually helped ourselvs to a couple of the extra boxes. The roads in Denali are gravel, and we had to keep the windows closed when we were moving, or else the dust clouds would be overwhelming. We’d drop the windows to try to get clear shots, but this wasn’t always possible; some of the photos will have reflection artifacts in them.

We did see a lot of wildlife. We were lucky to have more than the average number of sharp-eyed people with binoculars on the bus, spotting tiny dots moving across the landscape. We first encountered Dall Sheep moving across the peaks above us (starting at this photo). We saw our first bear a short time later, another dot against the ridgeline. There would be a mother bear with a cub, later, again seen as two tiny bright dots moving between two lines of bushes. I have no idea how people spotted these animals, as they were dots barely visible to the naked eye, and still somewhat indistinct against the approximately 8x zoom I had with the camera lens. The bus driver (acting as guide for this trip) would later tell a story about how he once had these two kids who were spotting Dall Sheep like crazy. They told him that they worked summers shagging golf balls, so they were really good at picking out tiny white dots.

The closest we got to a bear was when we came across one looking at a pair of grazing caribou. They were about a hundred yards from each other, and the bear would sit up every once in a while and look around. I’m sure people on the bus thought that perhaps there would be a scene out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, where the grizzly would attack the caribou. Our guide disabused us of that notion: a fully grown, health caribou won’t be taken down by a bear, as it can fight it off and outrun it. Those animals were well aware of each other’s presence and didn’t care.

One rare sight was Dall Sheep below us on the river plain. The road runs along a cut in the slope and we look down into a valley with various rivers running through it, melt water from the glaciers. At one point, there were a trio of sheep below us. Unlike caribou, Dall Sheep can’t fight off or run away from predators such as wolves; their only defense is to occupy the steep heights where their predators can’t follow. Every once in a while, the sheep would go to low ground, but mainly to quickly cross over to another mountain. These three sheep were idly grazing on a river bank, with not a care in the world. Perhaps they were simply being stupid. Another possible Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom moment? We couldn’t wait very long and drove on.

We had some luck with the weather in that it didn’t rain, and our ponchos sat unused. We didn’t have any luck with the weather around Mt. McKinley itself: the entire, gigantic mountain was shrouded by clouds, invisible to us. The bus driver kept a constant lookout for it, at various points on the road when Denali (the Native American name for the mountain) would be visible, but the clouds never broke.

We eventually got to Mile 55 after seeing more caribou and a big pile of bear scat in the middle of the road. The turn around was a rest area next to a river. We saw another caribou across the river (if eagles are like pigeons, caribou are like rats), and someone on the tour came across parts of a caribou skull with the antlers still attached. The bus driver served some hot chocolate (the water came from a dispenser at the back of the bus) while everyone who hadn’t gotten to the lunch boxes yet dug in. Someone yelled “bear!” and people rushed in that direction. The bus driver shook his head and went to make sure the bear was actually far away, and that people were moving in the right direction. It was a bear we had seen on a ridge on the way to Mile 55; you could only see it with binoculars. No danger there.

At various times during Tour 21, I acquired a number of names. At first (and last) we were the Newlyweds from Ohio. Then I, individually, became the Computer Guy (after transfering the pictures on the train ride from Seward), Grace’s Husband, Nantucket Guy (because I was wearing a Nantucket sweatshirt; why people would assume that someone is from Nantucket after wearing a Nantucket sweatshirt — less than 10,000 permanent residents versus tens of thousands of visitors during the summer — is a mystery) and then the Camera Guy (because I was toting around the most obvious big lens with the 80-200mm, and changing lenses frequently). In my role as Camera Guy, someone asked me to take a look up at the ridge behind the outhouses to see if those dots there were sheep. He believed my zoom would magnify better than his binoculars. I didn’t have the biggest lens at that stop, though, as someone on a different bus there at that time had a Bigma or something similar on his Canon.

On the way back, we stopped at one of those panoramic vistas overlooking the river plain. We almost lost Grace at that point. She went to the rest room, and I was looking for her as the bus was getting ready to leave. Then the bus driver closed the door and we started to move. I yelled out, hey, my wife isn’t back yet! The bus stopped. Someone yelled out, Now’s your chance! Then Grace came from around the corner of the restrooms and quickly got back on the bus. She took a moment to take pictures of the valley below, and, when coming out of the restroom, saw a squirrel sitting in the bushes right across from the door. Note that Judith was not with us: she did a head count everytime we went on and off the bus and would have noticed someone was missing. The bus driver, in this case, didn’t know how many of us there were.

Our luck with wildlife continued even to the end of the bus ride. Before we left the park, we came across a rabbit sitting calmly in the middle of the road. He stayed in place while we took a few pictures, then scampered off the other side. Closer to town, there was a moose dining on some shrubs near the side of the road: it was right outside our windows. The sight of the moose was causing cars to backup. The moose had a collar around her neck, presumably a tracking device. There was a woman who got about twenty feet from the moose to take pictures, when someone tapped her on the shoulder and told her to move about fifty yards away: it’s a wild animal after all, and may charge for no reason.

The next entry is Denali Part II.

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