June 25, 2018

Northern Wilderness

Today is one of those days with a circle around it on our itinerary.  We are taking an 8-hour bus ride into the interior of Denali National Park, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in Alaska.  We hemmed and hawed about the five hour vs. the eight hour before we made the reservations (the twelve hour never made the conversation) and decided that you do the most you can do after traveling this far.  Eight hours it is.

It is a semi-pretty morning with a hint of sunshine and high clouds that aren’t threatening.  Our B&B continues to unimpress with pre-made breakfast items, but the coffee and juice are good and get us moving for the day.  We have time to kill.  Our tour starts at 1:40 this afternoon and will end eight hours later.  We spend some time on the computer and with our books, all while looking out at the mountains.  No moose this morning.

Our first stop is the local grocery store in Healy.  We are encouraged to bring food on the tour.  They will provide a snack box but if that doesn’t get you through all 8 hours you better bring something else. What is really interesting at the little local Healy grocery store is that about 20% of the items are Kirkland.  They also have large containers of many products and full cuts of boxed beef (rib roasts, full strips, etc.).  We conclude that they are the local supplier of many of the local restaurants and resorts and supplement their inventory with weekly truck trips to Costco.  Something about necessity and invention here.

Our next investigation is the huge prison like building right off the main highway through town.

There are a lot of young people wandering about and when we spy the “Employee Shuttle” bus parked in front of the entry we think we have solved the mystery of all the eastern European young workers in the area. There are probably a lot of American kids on a summer adventure as well, but you do what you have to do to find enough help in a seasonal business.  The park provides a lot of lodging for its employees as well as those of their contractors, but everyone else who makes a living off the park needs employee housing where a lot of people don’t normally live. The grocery store is one block away and there is a brew pub two blocks the other way so no car required.  Bubbly Dawn at the B&B said the brew pub gets raucous late at night and now we know why.

We kill the rest of our time poking around the public areas of the park and along the park road. The public is allowed to drive the first fifteen miles of the 100-mile long park road.  That was a compromise reached back in the 70’s when the park service intended to close all road access, and the locals wanted full access.  Now the only way to access the interior of the park is with a special pass (with stringent requirements) or through one of the park shuttle buses or a contracted tour bus.  The number of buses allowed in, while significant, is tightly managed.  Our contract tour bus

will be the 35^th of the day and there are a few more scheduled after us, so at 52 people per bus there are a couple thousand folks doing what we’re doing.  Double that number with the park shuttles and it is easy to do the arithmetic to conclude that there would be thousands of cars going through the park with open access.  Those who have experienced traffic jams at Yosemite or Yellowstone will appreciate the difference.  80 buses evenly spaced throughout the day is very low impact.

The big deal of course is that limited access with trained operators is the ultimate protection for the wildlife while still allowing people to get inside.  Our driver, Mike, gets us loaded up at 1:45 for our long afternoon adventure.  He is an amiable fellow from Washington DC who has been doing this for seven summers.  He is a historian by trade and is deep into explaining the history of the park and the road.  This is the only National Park that was created to protect wildlife, specifically the Dall sheep. There are a number of mammals who make the park home, notably moose, bears, Dall sheep, caribou, wolves, wolverines, lynx and a bunch of little critters that serve as prey for the bigger ones.  Because of the sub-arctic climate and tundra terrain, a lot of land is required to support each large animal which makes them harder to find.  We are instructed to shout “Stop!” if we see a beast of interest and Mike will pull over to film and discuss what we’re seeing.  When the bus is moving Mike keeps up a fairly constant chatter which portends a future in talk radio.

The road is unpaved for the last 85 miles and rises to an elevation of 3980 feet.  There are a lot of

switchbacks and drop offs as we hug cliffs that provide great views of valleys and rivers below and mountains and glaciers beyond.  The glacial melt forms the rivers and silt from the glaciers is constantly filling river beds and changing river paths hourly.  These are referred to as braided rivers as you see strands separate, go off in their own direction and then rejoin again downriver.  Then do it all over again.

This blog would be many pages long if we went into detail about the whole day so here are a few highlights: we saw a lot of caribou including one that joined us moving down the road for a period of time; we had a close encounter with the elusive Dall sheep that is normally spotted as white dots on the mountainside.  In our case they crossed the road in front of the bus so we could almost touch them out the window; at the end of our road (62 mile marker) we finally got a look at the bottom half of the monster 20,000+ foot Mount Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley).  Very few people actually see the whole thing as the top is almost always shrouded in clouds; on our return trip we finally get our Grizzly, a big boy wandering through the brush a couple hundred yards away who entertains us for ten minutes. No Moose!  Mike is a little miffed because the moose have been hanging around the visitor center (as we saw yesterday) rather than out here where only the tour operators can show them off.  He is going to speak to the Head Moose about their behavior.  Here are a few pcitures from our crappy phone camera of our adventure today.

We arrive back at the parking area right at 9:35 so on schedule.  We didn’t know if this would be a fun day or torture and we both decided that it was moving and entertaining and well worth doing.  Our plan was to stop for a beer and burger at the brew pub in Healy, but we opt instead to go back to the B&B, fix ourselves a beverage and finish up the lunch parts that we didn’t eat on the trip.  We enjoy the sun on the mountain view until 11:30 and wrap up a long day.

Todays conclusion: National Parks are one of the things our government actually does really well.

Todays Fact: Many of the caribou we saw were laying or standing in snow patches because a.) they’re hot, and b.) the mosquitoes stay away from the snow.  A caribou will lose a pint of blood a day to mosquitoes.  Ouch!