North to Alaska: Day 11

Alaska Day 11

Denali National Park

9/3/11

One of the reasons that we picked the tour that we did is that it offered “Double Denali.” That was the precise term that is used by Holland America to denote trips with two nights in Denali as opposed to one. Not knowing at the time what we wanted to do in Alaska, we astutely recognized that two nights in Denali would be far better than one, perhaps even twice as good, so we excluded any trip that didn’t involve “Double Denali.” The rest of our trip planning involved finding trips with minimum cruise time and maximum land time fitting into the window of time we had allotted. We had decided to go late in the season on the recommendation of our son, Nathan, who had been there the year before and not been devoured by mosquitos. We encountered no mosquitos on this trip and we got to see the fall colors in Denali which lasts about 2 weeks there.

Denali, is an amazing park. There is one road into it that goes west 90 miles and private cars are not allowed past the 15 mile mark, although park busses are. As I mentioned yesterday, the park is huge and it seems that most of it is inaccessible to the average visitor. You can hike into it, but except for a few trails near the visitor center and at mile 15, there are no trails that traverse the park. This is done to minimize human impact. Even when you are at an area where there are no trails you are asked to walk side by side so as to not create a trail. It was very inspiring to see the efforts being made to keep this place unspoiled, essentially the way that it’s been for thousands of years. In the center of the park is Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet, or about 1000 feet higher than Nathan and I had been on Mt. Kilimanjaro. They say that only about 30% of the park visitors are able to see it due to likelihood of cloud cover. Today we’d be fortunate enough to be in that 30% group.

We spent the morning hiking up to the top of the Mt. Healy overlook. This was a vigorous hike and took 1 ½ hours. Kris made it up most of the way but chose not to go further when it started to get steep. On top I was treated to great views of the Eastern and Southern valleys and its wonderful tapestry of fall colors.

The afternoon would be the highlight of our stay there. It was a narrated bus tour into the park. We started at 1:30 and got back 8 hours later driving around 55 miles into the park before turning around. In addition to the spectacular scenery we saw caribou, moose, Dall Rams, and grizzly bears. It was all very exciting. We also got to see the magnificent sight of Denali, aka Mt. McKinley. What a lucky day for the two of us.

We celebrated our adventure with a late dinner in the lodge and went to sleep with amazing memories of the day.