Meng's Travels: Denali National Park

Instead of taking the ferry back to Homer, I flew from Dutch Harbor to Anchorage. Instead of 4 days on the ferry, the flight took only 3 hours. The flights are expensive. I hear locals complaining about it but that's the choice you make when you live in a remote place. My flight would have been about $500 one-way but I was lucky to be able to use my American Airlines frequent-flyer miles.

I stayed in another Airbnb place in Anchorage. This one is more convenient. I walked to downtown Anchorage in about 10 minutes and the bus that goes to the airport passes by about 2 blocks away. The young couple who lives here rent out one of their spare bedrooms for about $100 a night. It was nice, clean and comfortable. They even made me a nice breakfast in the morning - scrambled eggs and coffee. The only place I went to was the Anchorage Native Heritage Museum, which was all about the Native Alaskans - their history, culture, way of life, etc. These are not the Native Indians that those of us in the lower 48 states are familiar with. These are the Athabaskan, Yup'ik & Cup'ik, Iñupiaq & St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Unangax & Alutiiq, and Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian tribes. Their history go back many thousands of years ago before the Russians came and colonize Alaska. The Americans purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2 million. Everyone laughed at the then Secretary of State William H. Seward for the purchase and called it Seward's Folly. No one is laughing anymore.

I took the Alaska Railroad train again from Anchorage to Denali. It's about a 6-hour ride in a dome car. The hotels around Denali are expensive because the tourist season is so short. Basically, they have a 2 1/2 month peak season although the entire tourist season may be around 4 months. It's hard for those of us who live in Phoenix to imagine this: by the middle of August it starts to get cold in Alaska and things start to shut down. By the beginning of September many of the businesses are already shut down. I am staying at a hostel called Denali Mountain Morning Hostel. It provides hostel-like lodging but it also has private rooms or cabins.

One of the cabins at the hostel

The hostel is about 30 minutes south of Denali National Park

Much of Alaska's boom in tourism started in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). The Act set aside 106 million acres and double the size of the National Parks System and tripled the National Wilderness System in Alaska. It increased the size of Denali National Park (DNP) from 2 million to 6 million acres, and included North America's tallest peak, Mount McKinley.

Although not easy to get to, visitors come from all over the world come to enjoy DNP. Most come to see the wild animals. The main animals here are moose, caribou, wolf, dall sheep, bears and foxes. Many also come here to hike, camp, fish or climb the mountains. I joined two guided tours so that I can see the park and hope to see the animals too. The first is called the Tundra Wilderness Tour, which goes 53 miles into the park to view the park's scenery and wildlife. It is an 8-hour narrated tour. The second is really a shuttle along the one road in the park, going further than the first tour, about 92 miles into the park. It is advertised as just a shuttle and no narration but our driver was very knowledgeable and he did as good a job as the first driver. The difference is that the second tour took 12 hours and costs half as much as the first tour. If I had known better, I'd not have signed up for the first tour.

That's the issue I have with DNP. As much as I admire the National Park Service (NPS), they screwed up on the management of DNP. First, it is very difficult to get good information before you arrive here. Second, they have two Visitor Centers (VC). One is the official NPS Visitor Center, and the other is called the Wildlife Access Center (WAC), which is managed by the concessionaire, Aramark. The latter is where most of the bus tour starts. Which VC has what information is a guessing game. Where you book tours or hikes or whatever, is also a guessing game. To compound this, the two VCs' are about 20 minutes walk from each other. There is a shuttle bus that goes around every 30 minutes so if you miss one, you may have to wait much longer. Most people come to DNP for 1-5 days so you don't actually have time to figure out all this and optimize your stay. Another thing is they have different operating hours. The NPS VC only opens from 8 am to 6 pm but some of the tour start as early as 5 am and end as late as 11 pm. Enough of my venting.

I was lucky that on both days we saw all the big animals in the park. So, here are the pictures. Some of them are not very clear because they were taken at a distance. Naturally, these are wild animals and they are not waiting for us by the side of the road posing for us. We saw a wolf but he was too far away for me to take pictures.

A brown bear walking away from us

A red fox walking nonchalantly along the side of the road

Lots of moose in the park

A cow moose hanging out near the entrance to the park. They will charge at you if you get too close.

Dall Sheep high up in the mountain to stay away from their predators. DNP was originally set up to protect Dall Sheep

Caribou

A caribou showing off its rear-end

Arctic Ground Squirrel - at the bottom of the food chain

Ptarmigan - Alaska's State Bird

I'd not say that the scenery here is the most beautiful I've seen. Sure, there are a lot of mountains around us but this is the arctic desert. They don't get a lot of rain here and there is permafrost underneath. It is very cold nine months out of the year. So only the very hardy vegetation and wildlife can survive in this environment. I was hoping to be able to see Mount McKinley but it was cloudy and rained slightly the past two days. I am planning to go on a ranger-guided day hike tomorrow and hopefully, the sun is out and I can see Mount McKinley.

A View of the Tundra

One of the popular things to do around the park entrance is seeing a demonstration of the sled dogs. When the park was created sled dogs were used extensively to carry freight and patrol the park because the first park superintendent was a mail and freight carrier during the gold rush days about 100 years ago. Although I am not a dog person, I still admire these dogs. Anyone can come right up to them and pat them and they would not even flinch or bark. They were all excited to be part of the demonstration showing how they pull a sled. These huskies are bigger than the ones that are used for races like the Iditarod because they are used to pull freight. They play a very important role in DNP because the area is covered with so much snow in the winter that this is almost the only way to travel. Snowmobiles were used at one time but they break down often in the cold and make too much noise for this wilderness area.