Tuesday, July 2nd-Denali NP Up Close and Personal

First, I’m no expert on Denali NP but we learned a lot more about the park today. Let me explain that today was our first day to go deep into the park. You havta get how Denali works to understand it. First, there is ONE road that goes into the park. That one road goes 92 miles into the park. Private vehicles are only allowed to drive 15 miles in the park. The only way to see other parts of the park is on buses. You pick which places in the park you want to visit and then you ride the bus there? No, it’s not at all that simple!

Okay, you pick where you want to go and ride the bus there. The big difference is that the buses are driving on gravel roads past the 15 mile mark. 40-50 passenger buses driving on mainly one-lane gravel roads through very wild country is extremely slow. Let me give you an example-We left the Eielson Visitor Center (which is at Mile 66!) at 5:00 PM and reached the Bus Depot around 8:30 PM. Chris Martin, you could help me with the Math here but we went 66 miles in 3.5 hours. What is that? <20 mph?

The views were jaw dropping and we saw all sorts of animals-bears, moose, caribou, ptarmigan, a porcupine, and a lot of arctic ground squirrels. While we were at the Eielson VC, we went on a ranger-led hike up the Eielson Alpine Trail. It is rated strenuous because it has a vertical rise of a little over 1,000 feet in 1.1 miles. It was very steep but we managed to reach the top of the trail. It was misty in the morning but mostly sunny in the afternoon. Diana got around 15,000 steps today but I wimped out with only 12,000.

Here’s a pic of us up there and some of the animals we saw today:
This pic is the view we had from the top of the trail. You can see the visitor center at the bottom of the pic.


Comments

  1. KarenJuly 3, 2019 at 5:55 AM

    God's creation is amazing! The mountains are awesome as well as the animals and of course mankind!!! BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Debra GouldJuly 11, 2019 at 7:00 PM

    Ditto what Karen said!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chelsea HeathJuly 17, 2019 at 10:54 AM

    Sounds and looks amazing!

    ReplyDelete

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