My future plans include investing in cinder blocks and barbed wire. I am aware of a presidential candidate that plans on increasing the value of said items through shrewd economics and international affairs. How do I gain favor with them? I will name a recognizable location after them! They will never visit the place, and it already has a long standing different name everyone recognizes, but screw it. I wouldn't be the first.
The place we speak of is the tallest mountain in North America and instead of wall materials, they were seeking gold. Hence the name ambiguity. This happened in 1896. Last year it was officially changed back to its proper native name of Denali but for the record, the only place we saw the M word was on random old park documentation here and there. Nobody really called it McKinley up here.
The parks in AK are very large and most of them are only accessible via bush plane. There are very few established trails and you must bushwhack most of your own route. Denali is the popular park because it actually has a road to the main gate accessible from major cities AND, wouldn't you know it, the road actually continues into the park. The 90 mile dirt road bisects the 6.1 million acres. You must take a park bus past the 15 mile marker and the round trip to the end is 11 hours. We didn't venture all the way in, but did spend a day riding the bus and hiking the backcountry.
The first day was spent getting acquainted with our campsite and the visitors center and attending ranger talks.
The following day we decided to view the sled dog demo (or rather Stacy decided that visiting the dogs was a must). Since a large chunk of the park is designated a "wilderness area", which is the highest level of federal land protection, no motorized vehicles are permitted. The NPS maintains several teams of sled dogs for winter maintenance and patrolling.
The dogs, being working dogs, need to keep working in the summer, so there are 3 demos daily (and lots of puppy loving with the visitors). FYI: they have a litter once a year at the dog sled kennels, and pick a theme to name all the pups. This year being the NPS Centennial, the newest additions were the "Birthday" litter: Cupcake, Pinata, Party, Happy, and Hundo.
We then ventured off to hike around Savage River, and more importantly, play in the rocks.
I climbed around and as some of you know, Stacy made friends with her patronus, a Pika.
The next day was predicted to be good weather, so we had signed up for a ranger led hike. We managed to see the mountain on the drive out which is apparently rare enough to begin with (random information said that only 30% of visitors actually get to see Denali the mountain while visiting Denali the park).
The hike was off-path, and above the tree line in field of scree. I loved it. More playing in the rocks.
Ranger Peter was very knowledgeable with belly/butt botany (as he called it) and we learned a lot about the local plant life and I picked a bunch of fresh blueberries.
After the hike, we split from the ranger group and decided to take the bus further into the park, where there were plenty of wildlife visible from the bus to make Stacy happy.
After Denali we headed back down to the small town of Talkeetna, where we chilled in the hostel and filled up on beer and brats and listened to wolves howl in the night. It was a pretty cool town. The mayor is a cat. Our host speculates that it died 2 years ago and they won't tell anyone because then they would have to elect a person to replace it.
Despite it being the middle of August, it is 60 and rainy every day. Even though we are already thinking about when we can come visit Alaska again in the future we were ready to head back down to the lower 48 to catch the last heat of summer, more standard hours of daylight, and non-AK prices for everything. On that long drive back down we spotted 9 black bears along the side of the road in one day but the most exciting moment was an unique sighting of adorable canadian mountain lynx kits trying to cross the highway.
-K
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