Denali Day 2

The first 15 miles of the park are paved and are accessible in private vehicles. After that you need to get a bus ticket to get further into the park. There is only one road into a park about the size of the state of Massachusetts. There are two types of buses going into the park and they each have various stopping and turn around points. We elected to take the non-narrated bus to the Eielson Visitor center at mile 66 on the park road, which is about a four hour trip each way. Even though it wasn't actually a tour bus, our driver, Anna, was super informative and talked a bit about the different animals and answered questions people had throughout the trip. 

 

You can choose to get on and off the bus whenever you want if you want to hike around for a bit in the middle of the wilderness. In order to get back on, you just need to flag down any other bus going in the right direction. We didn’t end up doing that this time but we want to come back sometime and do a multi-day back country backpacking trip. We’ll just need to come back without the kids. The scenery was absolutely stunning the whole time. 

 

 

The buses are a great way to see wildlife. Everyone on the bus is supposed to call out if you see anything worth stopping for and the driver will stop. And boy did we see wildlife! 

We saw two groups of moose: 

  

Moose are the biggest animal in Denali, with an adult bull moose weighing up to 1,600 pounds. Moose eat mostly willow and survive the winter by slowing down their metabolism to a crawl. Willow are much shorter here and quite easily accessible to the moose. 

We saw 15 different bears! Several alone, but several mothers with their cubs: 

The coolest bear encounter we had was the last one. As we were leaving one of the rest stops there was a mother bear and her cub hanging out right next to the bridge that we were driving over. They were incredibly close to the bus so we got a really great view. 

Grizzly bears are pretty amazing because they will just about anything from berries and roots to moose. The key to meeting a grizzly bear in the park is not to run! Running will kick in their predator instincts for a chase. Instead, hold your ground. Most of the time that a wild bear charges, it is bluffing to size you up, and if you run, it will run you down.

We saw quite a few caribou on our trip. Including several with some really big racks. 

   

Both male and female caribou have antlers and they loose them every winter. The males generally loose them after they finish fighting for the females in the fall, but the pregnant female will keep them all winter until her calves are born. She will use her antlers to fend off the males who might try to take the her food from them. Caribou eat a lichen almost exclusively and they are big enough that they need about two garbage backs worth of the that lichen every day in the spring, summer, and fall. 

When the new antlers are coming in they are covered in a furry skin called velvet while they harden. We were lucky enough to be here in the season that they shed their velvet and got to see one caribou as the velvet was shedding. 

We also saw a few packs of Dall Sheep. These guys were always far away, up on a hillside, so it was hard to get a great picture. 

 

Dall sheep are actually the reason Denali National Park exists. The sheep are a nice white color and stand out amazingly well against the rocks in the summer. Overhunting of these sheep lead people to petition Washington D.C. to protect the wildlife of the area, which led to the initial declaration of the park as a protected area. 

Possibly our most exciting animal sighting was a lynx. On our way back she ran across the road right in front of the bus. Usually lynx and skittish and stay away from the road but this one was curious and stood in the bushes next to the road checking us out for quite a while. We didn’t get very good pictures of her, just enough to prove we saw her. 

 

Kathleen also saw two foxes but was two slow calling them out for the driver to stop. He was already driving on for a bear spotting ahead so we’re not sure that he would have stopped anyway. The two foxes were in a stream bed and only about 40 feet away from the bus but there were only visible for about 5 seconds because of the way the banks hid them in either direction. 

Eielson is know for its great views of the mountain itself, however the weather around the mountain is really hard to predict. Unfortunately we didn’t get a great view, but the landscape was amazing none the less. 

 

Including the time we spent at the Eielson visitor center we were gone for about 10 hours and were exhausted from all of the excitement. But it was a very very successful day. Well worth the cost of the bus. Needless to say, Aiden was super excited to have us back after a long day alone with Declan.