23-24 July. Denali National Park.
We spent two days in Denali National Park. 6 million acres (about 100 square miles) but you can only drive in 15 miles on a single road. You can walk the whole thing if you want (not us) or you can take a bus ride in for up to 80 miles.
We opted for the bus ride, and because we didn’t know any better, bought the ticket to go the full 80 miles into the park.
Now the cool thing about this bus ride is, that you can get on or off wherever you want. You just yell stop, and then you can get off and go for a hike. Then, when you are ready to continue on the bus, you just find the road, and try and wave a bus down. If he has room, he will pick you back up, and off you go. The bad thing about the bus ride is, that it takes 12 hours to go from the bus terminal to the end of the road and back. After about 4 hours, we knew that we did not want to do another 8, so we got off the bus and caught another bus going 4 hours back. Still, a very long day to be riding in the bus, and we did not get a hike in!
We did see some cool animals, however. Factoid: According to our bus driver there are 39 species of mammals in the park, nearly 200 bird species, and NO reptiles: NO lizards, NO Snakes.
Whenever someone sees an animal – they yell STOP and the bus driver stops the bus so we can take photos.
The highlight of today were all the Grizzly Bear we saw. We actually caught a glimpse of 4 sets of moms with cubs, I got decent photos of two sets.
We did turn around at a nice viewpoint.
The next day, we did get a few hikes in. And on one of those hikes we found some moose!
Can you tell that my camera is acting up? At the end of the day we stopped at a camera shop – they said they couldn’t fix it and sold us a new one… Good thing there was a camera store or this blog would be very verbose for the next five weeks!
Two fun photos:
