20030730

July 30 2003
Wednesday


Start:   Talkeetna Camper Park, Talkeetna AK
End:     Denali Rainbow RV Park, Denali AK
Miles:   151
Hi Temp: 59.2 (brrr)
Lo Temp: 46.8


We arose and ate in the little house.  It was cloudy and had been raining, but it wasn't raining as we unhooked the utilities and headed on.

It took us 45 minutes to get the 13.8 miles to the junction with the Parks Highway (AK-3) due to all the construction going on. Some Alaskans say there are only two seasons - winter and construction. Some of the road was very rough but about a mile had been paved and they were paving more.  I suppose in a month it will be nice.

We stopped at Trapper Creek to fuel up and went on.  Sometime after this, we saw a black blob on the left side of the pavement. On getting closer, we saw it had ears. When we got too close for it, the bear wandered into the willows at the side of the pavement and disappeared.

The sky got darker and it rained now and then. Most of the time it was misty, just enough to keep the pavement wet. Twice we went through work zones where the highway crews were repairing the road. In one case, they were dropping massive boulders into the creek upstream of the bridge; I suppose this was to prevent the river from washing out the bridge pilings. We saw a place that had been on the news the other night with water rushing around both sides of it.  That water has gone down now.

We got to the Denali region around noon. We checked in at the campground (more later), then backed the trailer into our site and hooked up the utilities. We walked down to the gas station/store/deli/whatever and bought a couple of deli sandwiches to take back to the little house for lunch.

Afterward, we went to the McKinley Chalet Resort and picked up our tickets for our tour on the first of August.  This hotel has taken over the handling of the park's tour busses while the park's facilities are undergoing major reconstruction. The lobby was a complete zoo as tour bus passengers and Holland-America tour participants all waited for their respective rides.

Then we went to the Denali National Park and drove out the twelve miles private automobiles are allowed. At the turn-around point, Dolores spotted three Dall sheep high up the hill across from us. We went slowly back to the visitor's center, now in rain again. We looked through the center, attended a slide show on the park, and left.

We returned to the little house in the wierd campground. Actually, along the highway there are little strip-mall-like things, but these are little log cabins set in next to each other and linked by a common boardwalk front.  The campground takes up the space between the cabins and the mountain behind them. It's a big gravel parking lot with all the utility fixtures needed (water, sewer, electric) at each space.  The spaces are crowded together, but the builder left enough room to navigate in and out without striking another rig.

The whole stretch of road, starting a mile north of the Denali Park entrance and running north for two or three more miles is a string of these strips, alternating with good hotels (Denali Princess Hotel, etc.), gas stations, and services of all types.  The highway through this area is also under construction, so it's mainly dirt. The place is sort of like a backwoods Wisconsin Dells resort area, for those who know that place.

Our string of cabins has the campground office, several gift shops, a Subway that hasn't opened yet, a Harley Davidson wearables shop, a white-water rafting office, an espresso shop, and an art gallery.  We'd intended to make our way up and down the boardwalk, but the rain pattering on the roof of the little house convinced us that we should stay in and warm.  So we pulled out the books.

When we woke up, we decided it was time for dinner.  There's something about the noise of rain that makes sleep come on.

We fixed up the pork chops and noodles with salad, ate, and went back to staying warm. In addition to the rain, it's become very cool, but the wind has decreased.

I hope tomorrow gives us better weather.

..................
Oh, by the way, typing the word "pattering" above reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw on a car in Talkeetna that said, "If I want to hear the patter of little feet, I'll put shoes on the dog."   Spoken like a true curmudgeon.

 

20030731                      Open new window with today’s pictures.

July 31, 2003
Thursday


Start:   Denali Rainbow RV Park, Denali AK
End:     Denali Rainbow RV Park, Denali AK
Miles:   0
Hi Temp: 52.2
Lo Temp: 42.6


Let me call your attention to the high temperature for the day (above).

The rain last night and this morning was the product of a cold front moving in from Siberia, which is not a long ways off. The day started with a brisk wind out of the north and cloudy, but the wind gradually calmed to about 10mph and the clouds broke up to about half-and-half.

My clothing for the day was tee shirt, sweat shirt, and raincoat with jeans. The flagger people on the highway were in full winter gear due to the wind chill.

We started late, not eager to get moving, and went out the Denali road into the park as far as we could go (Savage River). It was rainy, so it was hard to see through the windshield.  We saw no animals, going in or out.

Then we decided we'd take a look at Cantwell and part of the Denali Highway. Cantwell is a small (pop 166) town just west of the Parks Highway about 30 miles south of Denali. It didn't show us much.  It looks like it might be home to some railroad workers (section gangs?). So we came back out, fueled up at the corner Tesoro station and headed east from that same intersection, now on Alaska 8, the Denali Highway.

The Parks Highway connecting Anchorage to Denali to Fairbanks was finished in 1972.  Before that, you got to Denali park by train or the Denali Highway coming west from the Richardson Highway 137 miles away. Now, the Denali Highway isn't a major connector of anything to anything.  There aren’t many services along it.  It just sort of connects the Parks and the Richardson, but there is drop-dead-gorgeous scenery and great fishing along it. 

We wondered if the road's condition would allow us to drag the trailer from one end to the other. Short answer - no. We drove in some 15 miles to test it.  The first four miles were paved.  The condition of the rest varied. Where the road was flat, it was severely potholed.  Going up or downgrade it was washboarded, but not too bad.  In a couple of places the river next to it had washed over it; there, it was terrible, as rocks had been put down to form the base of the road but no grading with gravel had yet taken place.

Maximum safe speed was about 35mph, around potholes maybe 20mph, and around the washouts maybe 2mph.

We considered it and decided that there was no doubt we could make it in about six hours end-to-end, but why beat up the equipment and us?  We aren't fishing and there is good scenery yet to come anyway. We'd like to do it, but we'll put it off till some other time.  At least we can say we've been on the Denali Highway.

On the way back to the Parks Highway we rounded a corner and saw dead ahead of us and way in the distance a mountain we believe was Denali itself. The broken cloud layer was open almost all the way to the mountain, then there was a cloud set midway up the mountain and the peak was showing above the cloud. It was beautiful.  There was no way it would come out successfully in a picture, so we just sat and watched it.  A minute or so later it was gone from sight, obscured by the clouds.

We continued back to the Parks and up to Denali Park, then out the drive to Savage River to see if we could see it from that side.  Nope. There was still some rain from the clouds there, and it isn't easy to see it from Savage River anyway because you're looking along the range from there; all the other, smaller, hills get in the way.  Dolores found a sheep to look at way up the hill at Savage River.

So we came back out, stopping at the Visitors Center for tomorrow's weather forecast - about like today.

Then we went to Alpenglow, a restaurant built way up the east side of the canyon through which flows the Nenana River.  All the businesses line the road that goes through the canyon here. The park is on the west side of the river and goes out for miles and miles.

The view from the restaurant is quite nice once you get to it. The dirt driveway goes up at 12% and has several switchbacks to cling to the hill and gain altitude. The view from our table was nice, and the food was nice, too.

Then we returned to the little house in the wierd campground and walked up and down the boardwalk looking in the stores. We didn't see anything we wanted, so we came back home to take it easy again.

Tomorrow, we take a tour 53 miles into the park to see what we can see.

20030801                      Open new window with today’s pictures.

August 01, 2003
Friday


Start:   Denali Rainbow RV Park, Denali AK
End:     Denali Rainbow RV Park, Denali AK
Miles:   0
Hi Temp: 51.6
Lo Temp: 40.6


The morning started cold and rainy again.  We ate breakfast and dawdled around the little house, knowing we didn't have to go out because our major trip was to be in the afternoon. So we read and organized.  At noon, we had a light lunch.

Then we drove to the McKinley Chalet Resort to get our tour bus. Other busses for the same tour were leaving on about a 15-minute cycle and our turn came along. We all boarded and sat. We were missing 19 people. Radio communications started up to try to find these missing souls.

Four were located at a hotel where they'd been unable to arrange a timely transfer to this bus (Japanese and language problems).  So our nice bus driver took off to get those four at the Grande Denali, next to the restaurant we ate in last night way up the side of the mountain.  We picked them up and found more than 15 waiting to transfer down to catch a later bus for the same tour. So we took 15 of them in lieu of the missing 15 and headed into the park.

The driver (his 20th year doing this work) gave us an outline of what we were going to do and hopefully see. The big four things people want to see are grizzlies, moose, caribou, and Dall sheep of the 40 kinds of mammals in the park.

This tour goes out the park's only road some 60 miles and returns. We were on the left side of the bus, which has the best views going out and lesser views returning.  We went out the almost the whole 12 miles we've been going out with the truck. Then someone yelled that he saw antlers.  The bus driver backed up to the point where he yelled and sure enough, there were three large caribou racks of antlers; finally one of them shifted position and we could see the caribou the antlers were attached to.  They just happened to be lying down in a low place.

We went on to the 12-mile control point, beyond which private cars can't go. The ranger boarded the bus, gave a few precautions and then we went on (now on a potholed gravel road). We saw some nice scenery (still raining intermittently, as it did all afternoon).  We stopped to take pictures twice.

We went onward, with everyone still looking around intently. We came to a rest stop and stopped. Everyone wandered around for a few minutes and we went on.

Shortly after that, the lady ahead of us screamed something about an animal. The bus driver backed up a little bit and then we saw it was a grizzly bear. The lady screamed again. Then another grizzly came out from behind a bush, then another.  The first bear stood on its hind legs at least twice, once looking at us, to see what was going on. I was snapping pictures all through this period. The distance to the bears was about 75 yards; close enough for us to see fairly well, but not close enough for a 3x zoom digital camera to pick up all the details.

Finally, mommy led one offspring up the hill to get farther away from all the diesel engines (two other busses had stopped near us by then).  The other cub dashed across the face of the hill to join them (he'd sort of wandered off to one side). Gosh, he moved fast.  Then they returned to eating and became very hard to see in the bushes and we went on.

The chatter in the bus lasted for quite a while.

The driver gave a bunch of information on grizzlies throughout the rest of the tour. I'll only give a few notes on them here.  Denali grizzlies are much lighter than those on Kodiak Island or in the lower 48.  They're almost light tan. Those that we saw were mommy and cubs, but the cubs were at least in their second year, maybe third.  The cubs stay with mom until she runs them off, usually in the third year after birth, when they're almost fullgrown and able to tend for themselves.  Grizzlies weigh less than a pound at birth in the den in the middle of winter.  The biggest grizzly ever recorded weighed 1,700 pounds - a Kodiak Island bear. Denali bears are smaller since they don't get the salmon that coastal bears get - coastal bears go to 1000 pounds, Denali bears may get to be 800 pounds.  Mommy today probably weighed 400 pounds and the cubs were almost her size.  Still, when that thing stood up, I thought it stood 10 feet tall.

The driver noted that there are only 350 bears in Denali, so we had had what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime viewing event.

We went on, spotting more caribou in several places. I think we wound up with 15 or so caribou. We also saw the Dall sheep on hillsides in several places, including the tour turnaround spot that included another rest stop. It was next to a braided river - one that has several channels through the gravel and rocks. Other rivers had been very silty from the glacier melting carrying down the dirt the glacier has carved from the rocks.  This one was clear, indicating that it was spring-fed and/or snow melting.

On the way back, we stopped several times for scenery shots - the sun would come out and illuminate a valley and the feet of the mountains beyond, for instance.  The place is just plain awesome.  One question asked of the driver brought the response that the park was the size of Massachusetts and the one road was equivalent of running a single road from Springfield to the Boston Commons. That did give a better sense of scale than 6,000,000 acres or 9,000 square miles.

Finally, we returned to the hotel from which we started, having seen three of the big four (still no moose).  We went into the hotel and Dolores bought a pin which she refused to buy until she saw wildlife there.  Then we came back to the little house.  I parked carefully, since we had acquired neighbors on each side and these sites are closely packed.  Then we made reservations for tomorrow in Fairbanks. 

Since we'd had our box lunch (including a croissant with Alaska Reindeer Sausage) on the bus, we weren't hungry.  So we sipped wine and talked about the day while we did the pictures and these notes.

It was a great day in the Great Land.