Caribou at eleven -- ish
Monday, July2 |
| Our day in Denali Park got off to a dreary start, with an intermittent rain, but very low clouds. Fortunately, it got better steadily, until by the end of our 6 1/2 hour ride we were in bright sunlight. Alas, no site of McKinley, which envelops itself two days out of three in its own eco-system, even when the rest of the sky might be cloudless and blue. Denali Park is, as I said, larger than Massachusetts, and really larger than that because it is surrounded on its sides by state parks and national forests. In that whole expanse there is only one road, paved for twenty miles and extending for another sixty miles beyond that as a gravel road, coming to a dead end deep inside the park.
Denali (formerly McKinley Park) was the first to limit private cars. The typical tourist can only cover the first paved section and has to turn around. Backpackers staying three or more days can drive to their campsite, and photographers with professional credentials can apply for special permits to drive in with their gear. The last week of the season, any tourists left in late September can apply for passes through a lottery which lets individual drivers onto the road. For the rest of us, from family day hikers to the blue haired ladies on the Princess Tours, there is no choice but to take the school buses (painted either green a light tan) into the park. Lacking restrooms, air-conditioning and legroom is only part of the problem: from my perspective there is only one viable seat from a viewing perspective -- those right across from the driver in the front row. With this fact in mind, Chris and I headed out to the boarding station 45 minutes early. I figured that was not too long to wait considering the difference in view it would make to be able to look out the front and not just the little side windows, that a school bus provides. Luckily for us, others with the same idea only allowed 1/2 hour for queuing up, so we got the desired seats and the added benefit of being able to ask questions of the driver, a teacher from Arizona, who has driven these park routes for the last 17 summers. |
| The theme for most park visitors here, as it was in Kruger Park last summer, is to see the wildlife. Everyone is to keep a sharp lookout and call out their findings. Using the bus drivers as a reference point for twelve o'clock, and the back of the bus as six, calling out "caribou at 11" means that a caribou is sited just off the driver's left shoulder. Of course, if the bus is moving, by the time you get your camera up and focused, the caribou may be back at 7:00, but all credit to the bus drivers, they will stop the bus for extended animal-gazing and in the course of the day we managed to see several groups of dall sheep (with long horns), many caribou, and two bears. This was not as good as the previous days' report, when one group saw two bears mating, but much better than the morning tours, which came back reporting that they had seen nothing. After all, as the guides keep telling us, the animals do not punch timecards! |
| While it is always interesting to see animals in the wild, what impressed me about this park were the mountain vistas and changing eco-climates as we moved from boreal forests to tundra and alternating bright clear mountain streams and chalky beclouded glacial streams. |
| Most mysterious was trying to imagine the invisible 20,000 foot mountain that was more or less in front of us. The mountains we could see looked like mountains, certainly by an east-coast standard, extending a minimum of 4,000 feet. Many had snow caps which made them look like Swiss mountain tops, but to imagine there was something SO much bigger lurking in the clouds behind was hard to fathom. As the afternoon got brighter and brighter, our hopes got higher and higher, but in the end we had to leave the park without the main catch of the day, hoping that at least we would have another opportunity to see it from the south side on our way down to Anchorage on the dome train. |
our take on Dall sheep from the Denali tour bus,
below, the commercial version.
