25 July 2018. Denali Highway

25 July 2018. Denali Highway.

Crossing the Nenana River to leave the Denali Park area. The sign said, “just yesterday this water was glacier!”

Chuck getting ready to tackle the Denali highway: making sure the windshield is clean for great animal spotting and picture taking! He also took air out of the tires for a softer ride, and filled the fuel tanks.

Last look at Denali Mountain. Today it was covered in clouds, like it is 70% of the time.

The Denali Highway is 135 miles long, about 100 miles unpaved. We started in Cantwell (whole town consists of two gas stations and a gas station store!) and headed for Paxson (commercial building there closed in 2013). We read up on the road and decided to take it slow – try and avoid the rock chips and pot holes and enjoy the beauty, so we scheduled three days.

It really is a beautiful area – in many ways prettier than Denali National Park. But, I guess Denali National Park is where it’s at to protect the Dall Sheep, and I haven’t seen any Dall sheep over here… just a moose so far (and I was too slow with the new camera to capture a pic!). You start off with the Alaska Range mountains north of you (probably 10-15 miles) and drive among Spruce trees, ponds, streams, and Glacier Rivers for the first 40 miles (that’s as far as we went the first day). You can pull over almost anywhere once you hit the BLM land (20 miles in) (we picked a place a little further from the road to avoid any road dust). Then we had a very pleasant afternoon and evening. No gift shops, no tourists, no buses.

Lots of small lakes along the Denali Highway

I’m getting better with this camera – here is a close up of a Willow Ptarmigan (State bird of Alaska)

The goal of our finding our camping spot was to get a little more out of the way than the other drivers on the highway could reach. So, we drove down some rough embankments, and camped with a wonderful view of several Glaciers and the bottom half of mountains (many of the top halves were obscured by clouds).