denali national park

 

We spent the day yesterday making the deceptively long drive from Anchorage to Healy, our base for the end of vacation and our visit to Denali National Park. I say "deceptively" long because Google Maps says it should only take about 4 hours to make the drive, but it took us all freaking day. We packed up our rental house in Anchorage and were on the road by about 10 a.m., then we made a few stops at some pretty lakes recommended by the people of the internet. They were lovely, but probably we should have just stuck to the main road because these detours really added a lot of time.

We also stopped in Palmer, where there is a working musk ox farm. We took a very brief tour and saw a baby musk ox with her mom. It was interesting and pretty informative! Musk oxen are raised for their hair, which makes a very soft yarn, and I had this idea that maybe I would buy some as a souvenir, but it turns out that even the tiniest twist of it is like $65 so that idea went out the window fairly quickly.

We stopped for lunch in Talkeetna, which is where a lot of the flightseeing tours of Denali are based. While we were eating our burgers (bison for me!), I briefly looked up just how much that would cost, and yeah, there's a reason why we didn't plan it in advance. ($1,000 ... per person. gulp.)

Anyway, Denali. The park has one road (named Park Road) that is 90-ish miles long. Only the first 15 miles of that road are paved, so that's all you can see of this massive park if you're in a regular car. The rest of the road is gravel, and only park-designated buses are allowed on it. HOWEVER, as of this year, the road is closed at mile 42 because of what they're calling a landslide. And by "landslide," what they mean is that it turns out that it's not such a great idea to build a precarious gravel road on top of a glacier if there's a chance that glacier might eventually melt from underneath the road. Whoops. So now the road is closed past mile 42 for the foreseeable future, and it seems like it might be a while because they're having trouble even getting contractors to bid on the project since it's so remote. 

this is what happens when you
hand your camera off to a bozo

"What do you mean they built a road
on top of a GLACIER?"

There are different tours of the park, narrated and not narrated, but we chose the transit bus, which is the cheapest option at about $30 per person. Our tour wasn't officially "narrated," but the driver did have a microphone and spent most of the four-hour round trip talking about the history of the park and explaining points of interest. We did see a lot of interesting landscape, although not Denali itself, because wildfires in other parts of the state made the sky hazy enough to obscure our view. We also saw two caribou (I got the caribou points on the first one!) and a mama moose with calf. Supposedly another bus saw a bear, but it was too far away and none of the people on our bus could see it.

caribou

mama moose

and baby

arctic ground squirrel

there's a bear out there ... sure

ok but there actually is a caribou here

this type of waterway is called a braided river. neat!

Friends, I'm not going to lie: this park was a little bit of a letdown for me. Maybe it was that I felt like the sheer effort involved in getting there should have had a bigger payoff. Maybe I just don't like sitting in a school bus for hours on end now that I'm well past school age. Maybe we were just tired after a very long week. Whatever the reason, the whole day felt a little anticlimactic.

Back at the hotel, Mike and Max did a little research and decided to take a hike on their own. They did a loop around a lake and saw a beaver dam and lodge, and they were sweaty and happy when they rejoined us at the hotel for dinner.

Tomorrow we head back to Anchorage for our flight out. It's going to be a VERY long day. We drive to Anchorage, then our flight leaves at 10:20 p.m. and we land in Chicago Saturday morning. I'm already anticipating the need for about three days straight in bed once we finally get home.

It's been pretty awesome, Alaska. Thanks for having us!