23 December 2024

Denali National Park and Preserve

The legendary mountain of Denali is located between Anchorage and Fairbanks in Alaska. At 20,310 feet, it’s the highest peak in North America – but it’s not even in the top 100 highest peaks worldwide! It dominates the landscape, and we’d repeatedly exclaim when it came into view during our travels in the state.

Apparently just 30% of visitors get to see it, as it is notoriously covered by clouds. We saw it thanks to completely clear skies for three days in a row, several times with the sun highlighting the peak like a spotlight had been put on it (such as in the cover photo, where you can also see the clouds threatening to move in!).

Doug took this great shot of Denali from our plane ride!
Look at this beautiful caribou!

We did our best to experience it, visiting the National Park’s visitors center, driving 30 miles on the lone road (as far as was open), and doing a few short hikes.

We arrived just a bit too late in the year to ride the park’s official bus tour or to see any bears. We did see a caribou and a moose, along with a few birds, which is more than other people we talked to had seen.

Our big adventure was a plane ride around the mountain, with a glacier landing!  It was also our most expensive two hours to date in our nomadic adventures, costing more than $1,100 (for both of us). However, it’s the only way we could get a close-up view, and it was impressive/terrifying. I can’t imagine wanting to try to summit that beast!

The glacier landing was also pretty neat, but anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to learn that in spite of precautionary measures taken by me, the little plane made me sick, so I spent a good portion of the experience with my eyes closed before finally losing my lunch with just minutes to go. I can only laugh about it now.

We landed on a glacier! The pictured plane is another plane that had landed at the same time. I was emphatically not feeling well by this point, and when I watched the bumpy take off of the other plane, I knew it was all over for me. I got the barf bag ready as soon as we got back on the plane.
Mountain range from the plane. Anything about this look inviting for a hike?!

The nearly 9,500 square-mile park is purposely kept undeveloped, with just a few trails in place. Visitors are encouraged to make their own way. There is a campground and a few administrative buildings, but even these are well blended into the park. Though the area was designated a park in 1917, a road to the park was not even established until 1957!  Visitors increased significantly after that.

The first verifiable summit of the peak was in 1913. At least 35,000 people have attempted to summit the mountain, with roughly 60% successful in any given year. It takes two to three weeks to summit from the base camp (at 7,200 feet), depending on the route and conditions.  No thank you!

The park keeps sled dogs, and we saw them training!
Horseshoe Lake.
Nenana River along the Oxbow Trail.
I was super excited to find a spruce grouse hiding under a tree one day, only for one to practically walk into us the next day on the trail.
Before take off (AKA the last time I didn’t feel nauseous for a few hours). We each had our own tiny window, but the plane did lots of turning so we could all get a look at things.
Coming in a for a glacier landing.
Doug hiking in the park, amongst the lovely tall skinny firs. Why yes, that trail is super flat.
We saw this big moose and I was so excited I forgot to adjust my camera setting, so he’s a little blurry (he was also pretty far away). Big areas were closed to hiking because of moose rutting (mating) season. This moose was looking for love.
We met someone who said the sum total of wildlife he saw in Denali was “four squirrels,” so we were actually lucky with our sightings. I liked the tail coloring on the squirrels we saw.
Yes, it’s the same caribou, but doesn’t his nose look soft and pet-able?! Come here, big guy!
Don’t let the smile fool you, I’m in imminent danger of tossing my cookies at this point (on the glacier).

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